Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
Violence in Mexico permeates every interstice of Mexican society. Nothing, absolutely nothing, escapes it. From the highest to the lowest. From all activities and professions to the most remote and humble chores. All of Mexico bears the stamp of violence.
In Argentina, a femicide provokes massive protest demonstrations. In Mexico, the murder of a woman with a knife by a man in the street, filmed on television, only prompts demands for the police to do something. Everything remains “normal”. An 11 years old girl in Argentina was murdered, and the presidential campaigns stopped dead in their tracks out of respect. In Mexico, nothing would stop a presidential campaign.
We have normalized violence. Or, to put it another way, we have incorporated violence as a central part of the daily life of the nation that lives with resignation and with a strange, not to say perverse, stamp of dignity, humility, and intimate defeat.
It is customary to say that the family is the most important thing for Mexicans. But the statistics on violence say otherwise. The highest rate of violence within families is, first and foremost, against the elderly. They are stripped of their property by their children, beaten (often to get their welfare cards), and thrown out on the street with nothing but their clothes of the moment. Secondly, girls especially, but also boys, are brutalized, enslaved, raped, beaten, and killed inside that “sacred” enclosure known as their home. Official statistics reveal this, so it is not a depressing and fictional vision.
The home is the seedbed of violence, spreading to social life’s intimate and public pores. However, this domestic violence is the product of generations that reproduced themselves in the same breeding ground. Does this make Mexico a more violent society than others? Perhaps violence is the norm of human life. Wars of conquest and dispossession have always existed. There is the case of Russia in an aberrant and crazy invasion against a country that did not threaten it. Why did it invade Ukraine? Because it thought it could do so with impunity and get a quick reward.
Violence escalates to other realms of social life. Schools and workplaces are breeding grounds for conflict, quarrels, envy, and hatred. Both in school and at work, there are grudges against each other. Friendships are made, true, but tribalism is also cultivated. That is, the creation of groups to confront “the others”. Violence within schools has grown alarmingly, with students and teachers sometimes at war with each other.
This social context creates violence, but not necessarily in extremis. They are environments in which specific legal rules and social norms serve to temper the most violent passions that, in some cases, can explode out of control.
What happens is that neither schools nor workplaces are exempt from the realities of the more general context of society. And that context is where violence is out of control.
The existence of a veritable army of drug traffickers, along with their petty criminals desperate for action, is something that society does not want to understand fully. The mere existence of this army of thousands of criminal soldiers, acting in an environment of total impunity, is enough to provoke the complete demoralization of the citizenry. Who dares to resist the force of criminal weapons? Furthermore, how to live in this environment of violence, coercion, and Statelessness without seeking a subjective mechanism of “normalization to live”?
But also, why doesn’t the State react to reality to alleviate the sorrow and anguish of the citizens? In fact, where is the State?
The State is busy with other things. First, Mexico has a head of State who talks every day about various things that matter to him but not to the citizenry who, in the meantime, hide in their shelters against violence. He says, day in and day out that the issue of violence is under control, and the opposition is the one who exaggerates it. However, this head of State assaults some members of society every day, but never those who break the law. He criticizes figures he considers could threaten his power and investiture, such as Claudio X González, Enrique Krauze, Lorenzo Córdova, and a long etcetera. Who are they? Most of the people do not necessarily identify them. But the President says he protects “the people” against the mafia interests. Does the head of State combat the mafia interests of criminals? No. He “fights” interests that are undefined, unclear, and intangible. But before them, the President trembles.
That is to say, the head of State allows crime to operate throughout the national territory and even defends it, but he does attack those citizen interests that are never well defined but which terrify, especially the President himself. When Ecuador says that the Sinaloa cartel is behind the assassination of a presidential candidate, the Mexican president defends the cartel. Even the brand new Secretary of Foreign Affairs says, in Washington, that it is unfair to accuse the Sinaloa cartel of such an action. Inexplicably, the Mexican State insists on defending the Sinaloa cartel, as if it were its great ally.
How can society not feel helpless, seeing the head of State attacking citizens instead of drug traffickers and criminals? Worse still is the realization that the Armed Forces are not being used to stop those who transgress the law day by day but to spy on the President’s “enemies,” to build his great works and, by the way, to benefit by becoming a new bourgeois business class, dressed in olive green.
Something is wrong with the national priorities. The head of State violently assaults society’s actors daily, normalizing verbal aggression, which will soon become physical. But he also openly protects criminals. And he diverts the attention of the military from its constitutional responsibilities to protect society from crime.
It turns out, then, that the State propitiates and facilitates violence in the Republic, being a national emulator of the mistreatment experienced at the level of the family nucleus. The President is the most potent vehicle for normalizing violence in Mexico. He has encouraged violence to be the most prevalent fact in the daily lives of all Mexicans. He will have to take responsibility for this crime against humanity he has committed, especially now that he is about to become a citizen without the presidential protective mantle.
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