Penal Statecraft in the Latin American City
| Author | Markus-Michael Müller |
| Published date | 01 December 2013 |
| Date | 01 December 2013 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663913482932 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Penal Statecraft in the
Latin American City:
Assessing Mexico City’s
Punitive Urban
Democracy
Markus-Michael Mu
¨ller
Universita¨t Leipzig, Germany
Abstract
This paper applies Loı¨c Wacquant’s work on penal statecraft to analyze the growing
punitiveness of urban politics in contemporary Mexico City. It demonstrates that the
intersection of the urbanization of neoliberalism and the democratization of local politics
contributed to the emergence of a punitive regime of governing urban marginality in the
city. This indicates the consolidation of a punitive urban democracy in which despite the
formal legal empowerment of the city’s residents during the last two decades, those at
the urban margins face a reverse process of punitive exclusion that takes the form of a
criminalization of poverty. In taking a closer look at the situation within the local penal
apparatus,the paper furthermore showsthat these exclusionary tendencies are reinforced
by informal institutional practices inside the local law enforcement bureaucracies.
Keywords
Democratization, Latin America, Mexico City, neoliberalism, penal state
In June 2004, several hundred thousand Mexico City residents mobilized by civil society
organizations like Mexico United Against Delinquency, the country’s most influential
anti-crime non-governmental organization, rallied to the streets of the nation’s capital
in order to protest against the inefficiency of the Mexican authorities in their efforts
Corresponding author:
Markus-MichaelMu¨ ller,Universita
¨t Leipzig,Centre for Area Studies, Thomaskirchhof20, Leipzig 04109,Germany.
Email: markus.michael.mueller@uni-leipzig.de
Social & Legal Studies
22(4) 441–463
ªThe Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/0964663913482932
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to confront the perceived crime wave haunting the city, and the country in general, as
well as the ‘leniency’ of existing penal laws. In this regard, the protest was accompanied
by widespread demands for retributive punishment and ‘tough on crime’ politics, includ-
ing calls for indefinite prison terms and the death penalty for kidnappers and murderers
(La Jornada, 2004a, 2004b). Nearly 2 years later, in spring 2006, car drivers and pedes-
trians strolling down one of Mexico City’s most trafficked streets, Insurgentes Avenue,
were confronted with a huge billboard on top of a multi-story building. The billboard,
placed there by a private initiative, offered a reward of 250,000 Mexican Pesos (about
US$ 23,000) for the capture of a presumed kidnapper and murderer; a capture that was
called a ‘community service’. Two years later, Mexico’s Green Ecological Party
distributed a leaflet among urban households in Mexico City. The leaflet contained two
photo stories. One story was about Maria whose daughter has been kidnapped and who is
threatened from ‘Moncho’, a prisoner, to pay the full ransom, otherwise her daughter
would have to suffer the consequences. Maria, the story tells us, despite the financial
support from her mother, is unable to pay the complete ransom and she never hears from
her daughter again. The other story is about Juan, presented as a ‘repeated offender’. He
is waiting at a street corner for his next victim. When a young boy and girl depart from a
bus, Juan tries to assault them, but the young man attempts at defending himself. A
dramatic series of photos shows how Juan stabs the young man, who dies in the arms
of his girlfriend. Below the photos, and next to the ecological party’s symbol, the leaflet
reads: ‘Death penalty for kidnappers and murderers. Let’s make it real and live in peace’.
These episodes are snapshots of a larger punitive turn in urban politics that accompa-
nied the democratization of the Mexican political system throughout the last two
decades. From the vantage point of Mexico City, the present paper argues that this puni-
tive turn is not primarily, nor exclusively, related to a real increase in urban crime.
Rather, it is inseparable from the imposition of a neoliberal vision of economic, social
and political order as well as a new regime of governing urban marginality under the aus-
pices of what Loı¨c Wacquant termed the ‘penal state’ (Wacquant, 2009a). As this
process is simultaneously overdetermined by the democratization of local politics, the
rolling out of the penal state in Mexico City, the paper furthermore claims, converts the
city into a punitive urban democracy. A democracy in which notwithstanding the formal
legal empowerment and growing political inclusion of urban residents, a growing num-
ber of the city’s residents, in particular those at the urban margins, are confronted with a
reverse process of punitive exclusion. The latter is inseparable from the enacting of new
laws that criminalize urban marginality, thereby converting the police, courts and prison
system into core institutions of the local state’s efforts of the ‘neoliberal governing of
poverty’ (Wacquant, 2009a).
In applying Wacquant’s analytical tools to explain the punitive turn in Mexico City,
the article confronts two types of criticism frequently directed at his analysis. First, in
providing an empirical case study that highlights the complex relationship between
larger macrostructural developments and their political and legal repercussions at the
subnational level, the paper addresses those critical commentators who feel uncomforta-
ble with the ‘macro-generalizations’ of Wacquant’s assessment of penal statecraft. The
former are said to leave little space for the analysis of ‘the connections betwixt the
policy, national, and local scales of analysis’ (Jones, 2010: 394, original emphasis), and
442 Social & Legal Studies 22(4)
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