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Often translated as \"revolt,\" apronunciamientowas a formal, written protest, typically drafted as a list of grievances or demands, that could result in an armed rebellion. This common nineteenth-century Hispano-Mexican extraconstitutional practice was used by soldiers and civilians to forcefully lobby, negotiate, or petition for political change. Although the majority of these petitions failed to achieve their aims, many leading political changes in nineteenth-century Mexico were caused or provoked by one of the more than fifteen hundred pronunciamientos filed between 1821 and 1876. The first of three volumes on the phenomenon of the pronunciamiento, this collection brings together leading scholars to investigate the origins of these forceful petitions. From both a regional and a national perspective, the essays examine specific pronunciamientos, such as the Plan of Iguala, and explore the contexts that gave rise to the use of the pronunciamiento as a catalyst for change.Forceful Negotiationsoffers a better understanding of the civil conflicts that erupted with remarkable and tragic consistency following the achievement of independence, as well as of the ways in which Mexican political culture legitimized the threat of armed rebellion as a means of effecting political change during this turbulent period.

Thepronunciamiento, a formal list of grievances designed to spark political change in nineteenth-century Mexico, was a problematic yet necessary practice. Although pronunciamientos rarely achieved the goals for which they were undertaken and sometimes resulted in armed rebellion, they were nonetheless both celebrated and commemorated, and the perceptions and representations of pronunciamientos themselves reflected the Mexican people's response to these \"revolutions.\" The third in a series of books examining the pronunciamiento, this collection addresses the complicated legacy of pronunciamientos and their place in Mexican political culture. The essays explore the sacralization and legitimization of these revolts and of their leaders in the nation's history and consider why these celebrations proved ultimately ineffective in consecrating the pronunciamiento as a force for good, rather than one motivated by desires for power, promotion, and plunder.Celebrating Insurrectionoffers readers interpretations of acts of celebration and commemoration that explain the uneasy adoption of pronunciamientos as Mexico's preferred means of effecting political change during this turbulent period in the nation's history.

The rapid growth of organized crime in Mexico and the government’s response to it have driven an unprecedented rise in violence and impelled major structural economic changes, including the recent passage of energy reform. Los Zetas Inc. asserts that these phenomena are a direct and intended result of the emergence of the brutal Zetas criminal organization in the Mexican border state of Tamaulipas. Going beyond previous studies of the group as a drug trafficking organization, Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera builds a convincing case that the Zetas and similar organizations effectively constitute transnational corporations with business practices that include the trafficking of crude oil, natural gas, and gasoline; migrant and weapons smuggling; kidnapping for ransom; and video and music piracy. Combining vivid interview commentary with in-depth analysis of organized crime as a transnational and corporate phenomenon, Los Zetas Inc. proposes a new theoretical framework for understanding the emerging face, new structure, and economic implications of organized crime in Mexico. Correa-Cabrera delineates the Zetas establishment, structure, and forms of operation, along with the reactions to this new model of criminality by the state and other lawbreaking, foreign, and corporate actors. Since the Zetas share some characteristics with legal transnational businesses that operate in the energy and private security industries, she also compares this criminal corporation with ExxonMobil, Halliburton, and Blackwater (renamed “Academi\" and now a Constellis company). Asserting that the elevated level of violence between the Zetas and the Mexican state resembles a civil war, Correa-Cabrera identifies the beneficiaries of this war, including arms-producing companies, the international banking system, the US border economy, the US border security/military-industrial complex, and corporate capital, especially international oil and gas companies.

Behind everypronunciamiento, a formal list of grievances designed to spark political change in nineteenth-century Mexico, was a disgruntled individual, rebel, orpronunciado. Initially a role undertaken by soldiers, a pronunciado rallied military communities to petition for local, regional, and even national interests. As the popularity of these petitions grew, however, they evolved from a military-led practice to one endorsed and engaged by civilians, priests, indigenous communities, and politicians. The second in a series of books exploring the phenomenon of the pronunciamiento, this volume examines case studies of individual and collective pronunciados in regions across Mexico. Top scholars examine the motivations of individual pronunciados and the reasons they succeeded or failed; why garrisons, town councils, and communities adopted the pronunciamiento as a political tool and form of representation and used it to address local and national grievances; and whether institutions upheld corporate aims in endorsing, supporting, or launching pronunciamientos. The essays provide a better understanding of the rebel leaders behind these public acts of defiance and reveal how an insurrectionary repertoire became part of a national political culture.

Mexico is currently undergoing a crisis of violence and insecurity that poses serious threats to democratic transition and rule of law. This is the first book to put these developments in the context of post-revolutionary state-making in Mexico and to show that violence in Mexico is not the result of state failure, but of state-making. While most accounts of politics and the state in recent decades have emphasized processes of transition, institutional conflict resolution, and neo-liberal reform, this volume lays out the increasingly important role of violence and coercion by a range of state and non-state armed actors. Moreover, by going beyond the immediate concerns of contemporary Mexico, this volume pushes us to rethink longterm processes of state-making and recast influential interpretations of the so-called golden years of PRI rule.Violence, Coercion, and State-Making in Twentieth-Century Mexico demonstrates that received wisdom has long prevented the concerted and systematic study of violence and coercion in state-making, not only during the last decades, but throughout the post-revolutionary period. The Mexican state was built much more on violence and coercion than has been acknowledged-until now.

In 1993, a group of women shocked Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, with the news that dozens of girls and women had been murdered and dumped, like garbage, around the city during the year. As the numbers of murders grew over the years, and as the police forces proved unwilling and unable to find the perpetrators, the protestors became activists. They called the violence and its surrounding impunity “femicide,” and they demanded that the Mexican government, at the local, state, and federal levels, stop the violence and capture the perpetrators. Nearly two decades later, the city’s infamy as a place of femicide is giving way to another terrible reputation as a place of unprecedented drug violence. Since 2006, more than six thousand people have died in the city, as have more than twenty-eight thousand across the country, in relation to the violence associated with the restructuring of the cartels that control the production and distribution of illegal drugs. In response to the public outcry against the violence, the Mexican government has deployed thousands of troops to Ciudad Juárez as part of a military strategy to secure the state against the cartels. In this essay, I argue that the politics over the meaning of the drug-related murders and femicide must be understood in relation to gendered violence and its use as a tool for securing the state. To that end, I examine the wars over the interpretation of death in northern Mexico through a feminist application of the concept of necropolitics as elaborated by the postcolonial scholar Achille Mbembe. I examine how the wars over the political meaning of death in relation both to femicide and to the events called “drug violence” unfold through a gendering of space, of violence, and of subjectivity. My objective is twofold: first, to demonstrate how the antifemicide movement illustrates the stakes for a democratic Mexican state and its citizens in a context where governing elites argue that the violence devastating Ciudad Juárez is a positive outcome of the government’s war against organized crime; and second, to show how a politics of gender is central to this kind of necropolitics.

To what extent, and under what conditions, does access to arms fuel violent crime? To answer this question, we exploit a unique natural experiment: the 2004 expiration of the U.S. Federal Assault Weapons Ban exerted a spillover on gun supply in Mexican municipios near Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico, but not near California, which retained a pre-existing state-level ban. We find first that Mexican municipios located closer to the non-California border states experienced differential increases in homicides, gun-related homicides, and crime gun seizures after 2004. Second, the magnitude of this effect is contingent on political factors related to Mexico's democratic transition. Killings increased disproportionately in municipios where local elections had become more competitive prior to 2004, with the largest differentials emerging in high narco-trafficking areas. Our findings suggest that competition undermined informal agreements between drug cartels and entrenched local governments, highlighting the role of political conditions in mediating the gun-crime relationship.

How do a few Third World political movements become global causes célèbres, while most remain isolated? This book rejects dominant views that needy groups readily gain help from selfless nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Instead, they face a Darwinian struggle for scarce resources where support goes to the savviest, not the neediest. Examining Mexico's Zapatista rebels and Nigeria's Ogoni ethnic group, the book draws critical conclusions about social movements, NGOs, and 'global civil society'.

In the Vortex of Violence examines the uncharted history of lynching in post-revolutionary Mexico. Based on a collection of previously untapped sources, the book examines why lynching became a persistent practice during a period otherwise characterized by political stability and decreasing levels of violence. It explores how state formation processes, as well as religion, perceptions of crime, and mythical beliefs, contributed to shaping people's understanding of lynching as a legitimate form of justice. Extending the history of lynching beyond the United States, this book offers key insights into the cultural, historical, and political reasons behind the violent phenomenon and its continued practice in Latin America today.