Justice, Collective Action and Normalized

Violence
An approach to The Mexican War on Drugs
Emilio A. Toussaint
Civil society, the government, drug traffickers and academia are 4 groups that are interwoven in
the phenomenon of the war on drugs. Each group seeks and perceives justice differently; thus,
generating responses and actions in the other groups. Civil society seeks peace and justice from
demonstrations, demands to the state and in extreme cases armed movements that end in territorial
self-determination. The government generates public policies of militarization where the authority
seeks to punish and prosecute organized crime. The "narcos" instead, function as a business where
violence is normalized and used to send messages and take justice into their own hands; this in a
context of toxic masculinity in which the majority of its members come from neighborhoods in
poverty. Finally, the academy, specifically Karina García, suggests structural measures to
reconfigure power and justice and to establish cooperation policies for peace instead of continuing
this endless competition for power and territory.
Interweaving the concept of justice in a corrupt state and at war is complicated; especially when
violence has been normalized by the population. As a Mexican citizen, I can say that phrases like
"take care of yourself and let me know when you arrive" have become common, not with a
connotation of wishing a good path; but as an insistence to communicate a safely arrival. A
recognition that out there "anything can happen." The well-known War Against Drugs has been
stalking our reality since December 2006, when our former president Felipe Calderón decided to
retract armed forces to combat illegal drug trafficking. From this moment on, various actors have
joined this conflict through various actions: civil society calling for peace, security and in extreme
measures arming themselves, the government seeking security through public policies that
empower the army and academic approaches that seek to raise a more contextual look towards
the aggressor group: the drug dealers, often called “Narcos”. In this essay the perception of
injustice of these four groups (civil society, government, narcos and academia) will be discussed
as well as their strategies to re-establish a just state.
The responses of civil society to this context of insecurity caused by the war on drugs have been
diverse and from various actors. This essay will be limited to describing two organized groups:
The Movement for Peace and Justice and Dignity and the case of Cherán, an indigenous town
that generated a system of self-defense to get organized crime out of their region.
The Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity (MPJD) named itself as "a response of Mexican
civil society to the violence experienced in the country as a result of the war on drug trafficking."
(MPJD, 2011) This movement arose on April 26, 2011 when Juan Francisco, son of the Mexican
poet Javier Sicilia, was killed by organized crime-related people. After the event, Sicilia called on
Mexicans to stand against violence in the country, which is produced by both organized crime
groups and Mexican security forces.
This movement has six demands towards the Mexican State, these are: “to clarify murders and
disappearances and to name the victims, to end the war strategy and to assume a citizen security
approach, to fight corruption and impunity, to combat the economic root and the profits of the
crime, emergency attention to the youth and effective actions in recovery of the social fabric, as
well as a real construction of a participatory democracy. ” (MPJD, 2011) Specifically, the actions
of the movement are limited to the organization of marches, pronouncements and reports on
various situations of insecurity in the country. Their last action was a walk on January 26, 2020 in
which they sought to meet President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the meeting did not take
place and the members of the movement chose not to meet with some members of the Security
Cabinet who were receiving them. (Lara, 2020)
According to the Relative Deprivation Theory “people will experience moral outrage and engage
in collective action aimed at changing an unjust status quo if and only if they perceive themselves
to be relatively deprived” (Tyler & Smith, 1998). The MPJD was created 5 years after the War on
Drugs started; this is important to point out because the first victims of the war weren´t really
middle class civilians like a Mexican poet; but member of lower classes whose lives often remain
invisible and where collective action is not as important as survival. And it was until this group
felt that his status quo was changing and felt deprived in matters of security when they decided
to organize and started striving for justice.
The type of deprivation also influences in how this group organized towards justice and especially
what actions they carry out to reach it. According to the moral foundation theory by Haidt and
colleagues, there are five foundations to our moral psychology. One of these foundations is
respect for those higher in the hierarchy (authority/respect). Respect “emphasizes the moral
obligations of subordinates toward superiors, our hierarchy motive also focuses on the obligations
of superiors to direct, lead, guide, and protect subordinates and predicts that people will use the
authority/respect foundation when they are employing an Authority Ranking model to navigate
their social relationships.” (Jost & Kay, 2010)
Authority Ranking (Fiske, 1992) relationships are based on a hierarchal model among people, a
person is above, and another person is below. The people above in this ranking have their
privileges like prestige, power, decision making positions, etc.; the people below are entitled to
protection and care from the people above. The actions made by the MPJD followed certain
respect for the authorities; they organize peaceful marches, write pronouncement and reports
about the situation and address all their demands to the corresponding authority. The MPJD
hasn’t made an invitation to organized in an armed way or implemented collective action based
on communitarian procedures like neighborhood patrolling, peacebuilding workshops, etc. Even
though, for years the authorities haven´t responded or followed the MPJD´s proposal they still
relate to justice in an Authority Ranking model.
Cherán, on the other hand, is a completely different case in matters of civil organization. In
Mexico, the cartels are mainly dedicated to illegal drug trafficking; however, they have also
acquired interest in various other illegal activities. In Cherán, organized crime was participating
in illegal logging for timber production. By 2011, illegal logging was already affecting one of the
important water sources for Cherán. “"We were worried." recalls Margarita Elvira Romero, one
of the organizers of the uprising. "If they cut the trees, there is less water. Our husbands have
cattle, where would they drink if the water eye ended?"” (Pressly, 2016)
Because of this, a group of women tried to negotiate with the armed men who were cutting down
the forest. The response they received was limited to insults and rejection. Given this situation,
in the dawn of April 15 of 2011 the uprising begun. The women decided to block the road, they
took the trucks and some of the loggers as hostages and rang the town bells to invite the
community to join the actions. The population came out armed with machetes and firecrackers
and confronted both the police, who were trying to help the loggers, as well as the organized
crime. The people managed to get the government, the police and the loggers out of their town
and for months organized fire pits to guard the entrances of the community.
Currently, political parties are banned as they are considered as the cause of various divisions in
the community, as well as related to organized crime. The town is organized into four districts
that elect a representative who is part of the Town Council. They also have their own justice
system for minor offences, generally related to an abusive consumption of alcoholic beverages.
Sanctions include fines and/or community work such as collecting garbage or working on a
project that benefits the community. Most of the land of Cherán is an “ejido”, this means that it
belongs to the community; everyone can work it, but it does not belong to anyone. “Cherán is
not completely independent, because it still receives state and federal funds. However, its
autonomy as a purepecha indigenous community is recognized and guaranteed by the Mexican
government. The ban on political parties, on the other hand, has been confirmed by the courts,
which have proved their right not to participate in local, state or federal elections.” (Pressly, 2016)
Cherán, along with other indigenous communities in Mexico, has been an example of how civil
society can take justice into their own hands and decide upon their security in their own territory.
Despite the uncertainty over the coming years and the new cartel logics, youth has approached
the elderly and has integrated into the community organization. In the words of Melissa, a young
woman from the community: "As long as there is at least one person who wants to continue with
this, we will all be behind that person. We are all proud because we put an end to something and
did something that none of the other communities had dared to do. " (Pressly, 2016)
Cherán can also relate to the Relate Deprivation Theory in terms of being deprived from their
natural resources like wood and specially water. The community, specifically the women, decided
to take collective action after the loggers started affecting the regions where water was being
affected. But, unlike the MPJD, Cheran´s actions towards justice followed a totally different
approach; they took justice into their own hands and did what it took to keep their community
safe. The motive that puts the community first relates to the Communal Sharing (CS) relationship
model, here “relationships are based on a conception of some bounded group of people as
equivalent and undifferentiated. In this kind of relationship, the members of a group or dyad treat
each other as all the same, focusing on commonalities and disregarding distinct individual
identities. People in a CS relationship often think of themselves as sharing some common
substance (e.g., "blood"), and hence think that it is natural to be relatively kind and altruistic to
people of their own kind.” (Fiske, 1992).
Considering that Cherán is a recognize indigenous community and that their following solutions
were building up a Town Council, organizing their own justice system within minor offenses and
banning political parties it is fair to say that CS is part of their way of relating. However, to explain
the uprising the link with the Relate Deprivation Theory is not enough.
Relationship Regulation Theory (RR) points out that “the core of our moral psychology consists of
motives for evaluating and guiding one’s own and others’ judgments and behaviors (including
speech, emotions, attitudes, and intentions) with reference to prescriptive models for social
relationships.” (Rai & Fiske, 2011) Failing in the behavior of the relational guidelines is considered
a moral transgression and leads to emotions like guilt, shame or envy; these emotions are the
ones that move behaviors like apologies, rectifications or self-punishment. Moral psychology also
related to the concerns and obligations we have towards others with who we have a relationship
with, leading to emotions like compassion, loyalty and apprehensiveness. “RR predicts that
intentionally harming others will be perceived as more or less acceptable, and even morally
praiseworthy, depending on the social-relational context within which it occurs. Such harm ranges
from everyday verbal aggression to full-scale ethnic conflict. When engaging a Communal Sharing
model, individuals will be motivated by Unity, whereby violence directed toward the in-group is
less acceptable than violence toward out-groups and violence is morally praise worthy if the
victim is perceived as a potential threat or contaminant to the in-group.” (Rai & Fiske, 2011)
Unity then, is a core value that is noticeable during Cheran’s uprising; the ringing of the bells, the
invitation of the woman towards using any means to throw away the potential threat, taking
loggers as hostages, using firecrackers and machetes to defend their town. Actions that called
towards unity and actions that were violent but morally accepted in this specifically social-
relational context. The narcos where a threat, they were also an out-group; they had to be
thrown out by any possible means.
Given these actions and demands organized by various sectors of civil society, the government
has limited itself to continuing with its project to give more power to the armed forces in the war
on drug trafficking. However, current Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, during
his election campaign in 2018, seemed to promise hopeful proposals on issues related to security.
During his campaign AMLO proposed to “…take the army out of the streets and improve the
coordination and professionalization of police officers nationwide. Another of his proposals that
generated more controversy was to raise an amnesty process for offenders involved in certain
crimes and who were willing to go through a re-adaptation process. In addition, he announced
that his government will develop a "reconciliation and peace plan for Mexico" and for that, he
said, will convene representatives of human rights, religious leaders and the UN, among others.”
(BBC News World, 2018)
Despite these promises, on June 30 of 2019, President AMLO officially announced the entry into
operation of the National Guard; a new security body made up of former policemen and former
members of the army and navy. According to the president, this “supposes the consummation of
a" historical "event and the fulfillment of one of his great promises upon coming to power; the
creation of a special military body responsible for security tasks.” (García, 2019) After the
deployment, 12 thousand members of the new created National Guard moved to monitor the
southern border in accordance with the promise made to Donald Trump to reduce the migration
flow through Mexico.
This implementation has intensified the debate about whether a military force should continue
to be present in the streets of Mexico, since this type of deployments usually come with an
increase of human rights violations and extrajudicial executions. This is the third time that Mexico
leaves the fight against organized crime in the hands of the army corps. “The previous presidents
Felipe Calderón and Enrique Peña Nieto used the armed body which failed to stop the violence
and raised 250,000 dead and 40,000 missing victims during the period from 2006 to 2018.”
(García, 2019)
The perception of justice from the Mexican government is related with an authority ranking
relationship. “People in an authority ranking relationship typically use spatial order and
magnitude order metaphors to differentiate themselves: They think of "higher-ups" and speak of
"belittling," classify people into leaders in the forefront and followers behind, speak of superiors
as "greater," use plural nouns to address them, or accord them a larger personal space.” (Fiske,
1992) If we focus on the president AMLO´s speech regarding the National Guard, we can find
adjectives like “historical” and “great promises” to describe both himself and his initiatives. This
perception of highness comes with a belief that the Mexican government, represented by his
present president, is greater than the organized crime and that military measures are the only
means to win the war and ensure security in the country; turning an eye on various initiatives
and number that indicate the contrary.
This type of actions that strive towards security assimilate to retributive justice. In this type of
justice “perpetrators are jailed, fined, or in some way reprimanded for their actions. Such
punishment schemes are typically seen as reasonable and legitimate by the public at large-indeed,
they are seen as cornerstones of the ''justice system."” (Jost & Kay, 2010) Narcos must be
confronted, found, prosecuted, punished. The National Guard initiative also has a high
percentage of citizen approval, thus legitimizing itself publicly. According to the Mexican
newspaper Reforma, who conducted a survey in February 2019 “82 percent of those consulted
nationwide support the creation of the National Guard. And although one of the criticisms by civil
organizations and human rights defenders is that it operates under military command, 72 percent
said they agreed to be directed by a military element.” (Sin Embargo, 2019)
Finally, from the academic point of view, we can find various investigations that have sought to
understand the phenomenon of drug trafficking and that bet on a different way out from the
militarization carried out by the government. Dr. Karina García explains in her research, Violence
within: Understanding the Use of Violent Practices Among Mexican Drug Traffickers, the context
in which people directly related to drug trafficking lived. Data was collected from a series of 33
semi-structured interviews to former “Narcos”. She suggests that understanding the logics in
which drug traffickers relate can lead us to develop better intervention processes that will guide
the generation of truly effective public policies regarding violence and insecurity in Mexico.
The drug business is capitalist; the employees, in this case the drug traffickers, learn skills that
are suitable for work: this is not only limited to drug trafficking, but also involves activities such
as murder, kidnapping and torture. The work is highly demanding; Canastas, one of the
interviewees explains “Due to the high demand, the drug business is constructed as a twenty-four
seven job. There is no Christmas or holidays for us.” Recruitment work is also very important to
get rid of traitors and be able to carry out all the activities of such a high demand work. The
traitors usually come from the lower of the organization, they are usually dealers or hitmen and
are called casual workers. They also usually come from a low socio-economic status and
neighborhoods where violence is prevalent. “Casual workers, those who are not part of the
payroll are thus assumed to be disposable: “… we did not care too much about them because we
knew there were many more where they came from” (García K., 2019) The higher stratum of
workers are considered less disposable and are usually people that already had military training.
They are usually the teachers and mentors of newcomers, bodyguards or have a higher decision-
making position in the cartel.
On the other hand, the form of organization and training that former “narcos” receive are very
similar to those given in the army. The interviewees even argue that both groups (narcos and
military) carry out the same activities, the only difference is that one of them has the support of
the law. “Participants recurrently compare narcos’ violence to that of the military or the police,
and even evoke militaristic terms such as ‘major’, ‘intelligence squads’, ‘deserters’, ‘martial
discipline’ and qualities such as ‘loyalty’, ‘courage’ and ‘stoicism’. As Tabo explains: “The military
does the same or even worse things than we did in the cartel. They also torture people, they also
kidnap people…That is their job and many of them, like us, did not like it but they had to do it
because it was their job. Same with us, but we did not have the uniform”. (García K. , Violence
within: Understanding the Use of Violent Practices Among Mexican Drug Traffickers, 2019)
Within the narcos logic we can find two relational models that intertwine: Market Pricing and
Authority Ranking. Fiske describes the interactions between people who organize through a
market pricing model as “reference to ratios of this metric, so that what matters is how a person
stands in proportion to others.” (Fiske, 1992) Within the narco organization you are measured by
how much competences you have; the more skilled you are towards the daily activities the more
valuable you become and the higher you stand in relation to others. This is endorsed even more
by the fact that casual workers are often disposable, their ratio is too low for them to go higher;
so eventually they get killed for betraying the cartel for some easy money or by their lack of
competences in their respective tasks.
Authority Ranking is obvious as on how the drug cartels are organized in a hierarchical way and
how training is also part of the steps that you need to accomplish to go up in the scale of ranking.
It´s also important to pay attention to how former narcos sustain that the military engages in the
same type of activities they do; using retributive justice to fight the organized crime. Here, the
perception of justice is determined by the law (another authority ranking agent); those who are
protected by them are using these actions for justices, those who are not are using these actions
to commit crimes.
In an interview for BBC Mundo, Karina also explains how the narco's discourse produces toxic
masculinities in which being aggressive, violent and womanizing is promoted. This violence is
quite rooted in Mexican culture, especially in precarious neighborhoods where the narco usually
recruits its future members. Here violence is vital to survive and is learned day by day. "As Jorge
explains:" When I was a child, the older children beat me, they took advantage of me because I
was alone. I was not violent ... but I had to become violent, more violent than them. You have to
do it if you want to survive in streets". (García K., 2020)
In the ranks of the narco, men survive thanks to their reputation. A real man must be
heterosexual, womanizer, "good for the party, drugs and alcohol." (García K., 2020) As part of
this speech, real men do not show their fears, emotions or weaknesses and exercise their power
through the strength and dominance of their territories, whether they are within the family or
within the drug business. A recurring theme that Karina also found was that all participants felt
resentment towards their father and that everyone had the fantasy of killing and making their
father suffer, this was one of their great motivations to enter the narco. Rorro explained: "When
I was a child, I had no illusions, or plans for the future, my only thought was to kill my father when
I grew up ... I wanted to cut it into small pieces." (García K., 2020) This desire for revenge lay in
the domestic and gender-based violence that all participants experienced during their childhood.
None of the participants fulfilled their desire; however, when they entered the narco, all of them
threatened their fathers with killing them if they touched their mothers again.
Combining this construction of a toxic masculinity that ends up with really angry and violent men
with the fact that violent measures with the fact that violent actions like murder, kidnapping and
torture are just “part of the business” ends up in a “normalization of violence and responds to
what Sayak Valencia (2012) defines as slasher capitalism.” (García K. , 2019) An extremely violent
neoliberal economic model sustained in normalized violence, logics of criminal entrepreneurs.
“The guiding idea is that unjust actions threaten the assumption that social consensus exists with
regard to justice and morality and that meting out punishment can be an effective way of
affirming shared values (Wenzel & Thielman, 2006). From this perspective, punishment serves to
communicate the group’s values and may therefore repair feelings of social identification” (Jost
& Kay, 2010) That is how the narcos communicate their values, that is why we see beheaded
people hanging from bridges or military helicopters bomb down. The narcos shared values are
about masculinity and dominance; values that are not even perceived in a negative way because
its all part of the job. Justice is seen and practice to punish the other, to state dominance, to
expand the market, to continue with the business.
Karina ends her research by suggesting some options for public policies concerning violence and
insecurity related to drug trafficking. The first is to reduce the amount of military forces in the
streets and only retract them in strategic areas. The second is to generate social programs that
work with street gangs, these groups tend to be the most affected in terms of the recruitment
from the narco. The third is to legalize the production, distribution and consumption of opium
and marijuana since this would take away the guns of the now illegal drug trade. Finally, it is
suggested that the Mexican government bet on programs that work with issues of masculinity
and gender, especially in the most dangerous neighborhoods of the country, in order to work on
root issues and begin to weave a less violent social fabric.

Here, Karina proposes a change in a various of structural factors to attend and reach justice. In
Social Dilemmas structural factors are link towards how competition or cooperation are taken
into place where the is a scarcity of resources. In the context of the War Against Drugs the
resource that is lacking is security. In Social Dilemmas cooperation increases when structural
changes are developed and through this creating a common social identity. But when people feel
uncertain about the availability of a resource, they will engage in a harvesting behavior that
would end up in resource hording. In matter of security we se how both: the military and the
organized crime try to ensure security as a resource by harvesting war: expanding traffic territory,
securing safe zones, establishing checkpoints and monitoring cities with militia caravans. There
is no cooperation between these two groups and there are no structural factors that can built it.
Karina´s proposal can become bridges of cooperation instead of territorial competitions, where
security as a resource can be recovered.
The War on Drugs is a situation in which various perceptions of justice and actions to achieve it
are interwoven. While civil society and the academy suggest or build restorative or community
measures to build a secure context; the high elites: narcos, government and militia continue to
confront each other from a retributive justice in which the other is who should be punished in
order to communicate dominion, power and above all their own perception of justice. Statistics
and history only prove that this interweaving of relational models only raises the amount of
violence as well as the number of dead and missing people. It is urgent that the authorities look
for other ways of doing justice: that they approach other models of restoration and peace, that
cooperation becomes a tool to reestablish the sense of security that’s been lacking for years, that
they pass laws about disarmament process and not of more militarization. Other models of
justice are needed to work and build other ways of relating; even beyond the independence of
authority like Cherán. We need to work in all fronts, securing our neighborhoods but also
demanding alternatives.

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