Translated by Rebecca Nannery
Andreas Schedler has written a must-read book to clear the air about the war that engulfs our country. In the Fog of War: Citizens and Organized Criminal Violence in Mexico (CIDE, 2015), provides a conceptual framework to better understand the phenomenon through an acute and in-depth analysis of the National Survey on Organized Violence and present the reactions of that massive and contradictory universe we call citizens.
The starting point of the book could not be more relevant. It says,
“In the last two decades of the 20th Century, Mexico moved slowly and peacefully towards democracy. In the first decade of the 21st Century, it rapidly slid into civil war.”
When I heard the use of the term ‘civil war’ for the first time to describe what was going on in Mexico, I had my reservations. In my eyes, a civil war was when the conflicting sides embodied opposing political ideologies and projects, with the ultimate goal of taking over the country.
However, Schedler convincingly offers four arguments to support why he calls it a civil war:
a) conceptually, “it coincides with the use of concept in the studies of civil wars in international political sciences… (It is) a confrontation between armed groups within a State or between one armed group and the actual State itself, which causes a minimum of 1,000 deaths per year,”
b) empirically, the ideological motives “are not an essential part of the definition… there can be wars with or without ideology. The so called ‘new’ civil wars, such as the one in Mexico, do not have a political agenda,”
c) theoretically, “there are many things that we can learn from the literature written about civil wars… because the armed factions face similar challenges of organized violence, have to mobilize resources, get weapons, recruit, train, establish a division of labour and impose hierarchies… They exert violence in an opaque context and under uncertainty as to the identity of the actors. Who is who? Who is on which side?”
d) politically, “the war is not external, but internal,” “it is our war.”
However, regardless of the conceptualization, what worried Schedler most, and is confirmed by his findings, is a deficit of intervention by what we like to call “the public opinion”. He notes that wherever you can exercise political rights and civil freedom, wherever you can vote between different options, wherever you can “be a member of political parties or civil associations and take to the streets and raise your voice,” citizens have, in theory, three ways to have an influence, a) in the discussion of policies, b) on organized crime itself, as it needs “personnel and silence” and finally, c) in civil society through protest movements or victims associations.
Nonetheless, this “string of beautiful possibilities,” except for virtuous and colourful examples, is more of a possibility than a reality. We are witnessing “the normalization of violence and citizen’s passivity to it.”
Perhaps one of the biggest obstacles to the active involvement of civil society is precisely the “fog” in which the war itself takes place. Schedler tells us that, ideally, the alliance against crime would place the State, the victims and civil society on common ground: confronting, of course, these violent actors. Most unfortunately however, in reality the actors are mixed “and the lines between the world of violent crimes and spheres of State and civil society have become blurred.”
Perhaps one of the biggest obstacles to the active involvement of civil society is precisely the “fog” in which the war itself takes place. Schedler tells us that, ideally, the alliance against crime would place the State, the victims and civil society on common ground: confronting, of course, these violent actors. Most unfortunately however, in reality the actors are mixed “and the lines between the world of violent crimes and spheres of State and civil society have become blurred.”
This puts in place two mechanisms: a) the violent crime organizations need external allies both in the State and civil society, so they try to infiltrate public agencies, local communities and civil associations” and b) “it is almost inevitable that members of government agencies and civil society are becoming victims, but also perpetrators of violent crime.”
This dichotomy notoriously stems from at least four failures of the State: institutional weakness, collusion of officials with crime, abuse of power and “indifference towards victims.” Consequently the mist thickens. We then find ourselves in
This dichotomy notoriously stems from at least four failures of the State: institutional weakness, collusion of officials with crime, abuse of power and “indifference towards victims.” Consequently the mist thickens. We then find ourselves in
“a democracy in civil war,” in “a political system whose regime meets the minimum levels of democracy, while the State is not capable of… containing the organization and exercise of private violence.”
But… why don’t you read the book instead?
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*José Woldenberg holds an undergraduate degree in Sociology and a masters in Latin American Studies from UNAM, where he is a professor in the Faculty of Political and Social Science. He was the first president of the Federal Electoral Institute. His most recent books are "Disenchantment", "Noblesse oblige", "Politics, Crime and Delirium" (Cal y Arena), "A Minimum History of the Mexican Democratic Transition" (El Colegio de Mexico) and "Mexico: the Difficult Democracy" (Taurus).