This is an expanded paper based on a presentation I gave for the “NAFTA and Philosophy” conference in Mexico City at UNAM a couple of months ago, and is under review for publication in a Spanish version of a book that will also include other papers from the conference. Some of the content is recycled from previous stuff I’ve written — especially the first half, on globalization, NAFTA and the drug war — but the second half where I use Dussel and Taylor’s work and talk about the Caravan for Peace, is new.
The first word in my title, “Globalization,” signifies the more general context of the US-Mexico drug war in particular. While I cannot thoroughly theorize it here, I will nevertheless mention some of the key features of globalization that serve to underscore and give shape to the on-going drug-trade related violence. Secondly, I will touch on the unique dimensions of the relationship between globalization, NAFTA and the violence itself. I do not assume, however, that globalization is reducible to economic neoliberalism, nor that globalization or even NAFTA is the direct cause of increased violence, but rather that both – globalization and NAFTA – in this case, are preconditions furthering and to some extent enabling the poverty and political impunity that produces the suffering and insecurity that is being experienced. Lastly, I will try to illustrate how globalization, NAFTA and the drug war together have evoked a decolonial struggle of resistance on the part of victims by looking at one recent example and arguing that its ethos and aesthetics – not just its ethical or political theory – has been vital to its effectiveness.
Globalization as the Greater Context for the Drug Trade
Every particular political situation has its own historical location to be considered, but one can nonetheless speak today of certain globalizing tendencies with mounting planetary reach. So while the crisis in Mexico caused by the drug trade is indeed just one context among many, it is nonetheless seen here to be uniquely illustrative of the more universal context of globalization itself. Thus, it will serve to highlight some of the enduring marks of globalization, which I will now discuss.
By way of a definition, globalization is thought here to be a process or set of processes that embodies a transformation in the spatial organization of social relations and transactions (McGrew and Held (1999), p. 16). These relations are not only economic and political in nature but also culture and environmental. This process, however, is replete with contradictions, uncertainties and unevenness.
The contemporary globalizing world has seen rapidly increasing economic and political interdependence between nations on the one hand alongside growing disparity in terms of quality of life and security between and within nations on the other hand. At the same time, globalization is not a monolithic phenomenon. Not all societies are experiencing it. Hegemonic and counter-hegemonic forces alike are operative in its set of processes. Power asymmetries in zones of contact are broader and more numerous than in the past. Globalization is not a closed but open, entangled system of multiple, heterogeneous hierarchies and logics in which the natureof and relations between individuals and institutions are often conceived as hybridized.
Globalization, commercialization and criminalization together have brought about a major disjuncture between the formal reach of certain states’ military power and its effectiveness (McGrew and Held (2007), p. 28). The drug war is proof of this. States may have a monopoly on the ability to legitimize violence but not to totally control it. The invisibility of economic power structures and their ability to develop independently of legitimate political power is a key challenge engendered by globalization. This challenge is exacerbated by the permeation and extension of economic power beyond national borders.
Just as production has been outsourced in the age of globalization, so too have many aspects of organized violence. Trans-state organized cartel networks “have been able to exploit the infrastructures [and free trade policies] of globalization for their own illicit . . . purposes” (Mcgrew and Held (2007), p. 28). The imperialism of the industrial age, while certainly still prevalent, has been increasingly rivaled by non-state forces like the criminal insurgency of terrorists groups and drug trafficking organizations (or DTO’s). As social forces like drug abuse are selectively included or excluded from formal infrastructures, it is almost impossible to prevent the parallel formation of informal and illicit networks that conversely condone this abuse and profit from it (McGrew and Held (2007), p. 33).
Despite being increasingly challenged, unilateral U.S. hegemony does continue to dominate the globe in many important respects. At the same time, with transnational corporations exploiting and propagating an international division of labor, the supra-national nature of financial markets has demonstrated a new level of power and influence over the actions of nation-states, their central banks, and even corporations themselves. Thus, the limitations of their thesis notwithstanding, one can indeed notice today the extent to which Hardt and Negri’s Empire (2001) has formed.
To a significant degree, a transformation of the modern imperialist geography of the globe and the realization of the world market has scrambled the spatial divisions of developed and underdeveloped zones. Changing and complex regimes of differentiation and homogenization, and deterritorialization and reterritorialization, have constructed new paths and limits for global flows. So even at a time in which devising alternatives to free market capitalism has become increasingly difficult, globalization is neither coterminous with neoliberalism – as stated above – nor reducible to the field of political economy (Alcoff and Saenz (2003), p. 200). As the Mexican case confirms, non-governmental criminal trafficking organizations challenge many assumptions by wielding an enormous amount of cultural power – in addition to accounting for a substantial share of international trade and GDP in some countries.
In the midst of these acute crises, the persistence of cultural globalization portends to erode and trivialize all un-commodifiable values, leaving only the fetishized desires of individual subjects to govern from the global core. Excessive accumulation and consumption is tied closely to the alterations brought about by the media in the information age and what Manuel Castells (1996) calls a communication network society. It is beyond the scope of this paper, as my focus is on political economy, but it should be noted that cultural globalization plays an important role in this conflict as well. This is especially noticeable in the recent influence and celebration of “narcocultura,” such as in “narcocorridos,” which are musical ballads write and widely popularized in honor of the cartels and their famed leaders (Holden, 2013).
NAFTA and Neoliberalism
As already mentioned, one of the most predominant features of globalization is the increasing mobility and power of global capital flow (Soederberg (2006), p. 167). According to Queen’s University development studies professor Susanne Soederberg (2006), this change in economic and political policy has been characterized by a shift from a variety of Keynesian demand management tactics and the advancement of a welfare state to neoliberal forms of government intervention: “one of the main characteristics of competition states is that traditional policies aimed at achieving social justice through economic redistribution have been challenged and profoundly undermined by the marketization of the state’s economic activities and its focus on attracting and retaining capital flows” (p. 167). Soederberg (2006) further argues that while the Mexican state has taken on some of the defining traits of an advanced industrialized country, the assumption of neoliberal practices has neither succeeded in reducing the country’s “excessive vulnerability and dependence on external sources of capital, nor [in] bringing about conditions for sustainable economic growth” (p. 168).
Inherent to the liberalization of Mexico’s political economy were the steady belief in the trickle-down theory of wealth, the prioritization of industrialization and modernization before democratization, and the mistaken assumption that the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) corporatist structure represented the interests of the average Mexican (Soederberg (2006), p. 171). The tension between domestic and international policy imperatives has failed to be resolved or balanced. In the end it seems that efforts to restructure in accordance with international (read Western) expectations – though they have led to further integration in the world economy – have generally increased social class division between rich and financial vulnerability as a result of tenuous forms of capital accumulation such as the phenomenon of the maquiladorizacion of the economy (Soederberg (2006), p. 171).
Maquiladores (international, outsourced factories) are primarily located near the northern border of Mexico so as to as to ensure cheap transport of product to the United States. The average daily salary for workers at the maquiladores in Mexico is around seven dollars for ten hours of work (Chacon et. al. (2006), p. 118). These free trade zones are exactly where most of the more recent drug-related violence has taken place – in cities like Juarez. Furthermore, the real wages in Mexico are lower today than they were before the 1982 debt crisis (Soederberg (2006), p. 181) and the minimum wage is the same (Camp (2006), p. 262). In absolute numbers, substantially more Mexicans live without sufficient food than in the past two decades (approximately 26 million) (Camp (2006), p. 274).
As international financial markets have reached considerable levels of influence in the global political economy, daily turnovers in foreign exchange markets are often $1.3 trillion or higher (Soederberg (2006), p. 168). This number is much larger than the one trillion dollars available to those governments of advanced countries for the purposes of exchange rate stabilization (Soederberg (2006), p. 169). Moreover, the major players in the exchange rate game are no longer just big international banks but insurance and pension fund managers, as well as other portfolio investors who are mobile and less vulnerable (Soederberg (2006), p. 169). Consequently, private investment capital is a major source of financing for developing countries. Not surprisingly then, new national policy is increasingly established with both current and prospective private investor interests in mind. Such interests inevitably include low corporate taxes and fewer state-sponsored welfare programs.
Even more significantly, policy makers know that new creditors are going to want easy entry and exit investment strategy options. Therefore, the stability and growth predictability of developing countries has become increasingly tied to and proportionate with international financial markets and fluctuations of stocks on Wall Street. Countries finding themselves squarely in this dilemma have sometimes attempted to manipulate their exchange rates by devaluing currency in order to boost exports for instance, or by pegging currency value to interest-rates. Practices such as these are in part what led to the peso crisis not only in Mexico in 1994 but also in Argentina, which culminated in 2001.
The Mexican Drug War Itself
U.S. attempts to intervene in Colombian cocaine smuggling during the 1990’s coincided with the forging of NAFTA, which pushed drug trade activity to the U.S.-Mexican border. Trans-state cartel networks in various stratifications of organization have been able to take advantage of the infrastructures and free trade policies of globalization for their own illicit purposes (Campbell, 2009). According to approximations by the Trans-border Institute at the University of San Diego, more than 120,000 people have been murdered, and another 25,000 have disappeared since 2006 in the Mexican Drug War (Schaeffer-Duffy 2014, Booth 2012). These numbers are significantly higher than what is typically reported in mainstream media, and many of these murders are torturous and public in nature.
Once a kilo of cocaine reaches the streets in the U.S., it will be worth $100,000, or about $100 a gram (Gibler (2011), p.32). In the Columbian countryside the exact same substance is worth no more than $3,000, or about three dollars a gram (Gibler (2011), p. 32). The single greatest contributor to this giant surplus value is the illegality of the production, transport and consumption of the drugs themselves (Gibler (2011), p. 32). Investigative journalist John Gibler (2011) explains that,
[i]legality also requires that one [bolster] the moral discourse of prohibition with massive infusion of funds into armies and law-enforcement agencies. These infusions in turn require the production of arrests and drug seizures. Competitors in the drug economy use this need as a way to eliminate opponents and rivals, tipping off federal authorities to the whereabouts of [enemy stashes and hideouts] (p. 35).
And in this context, illegality adds another more blatant complication: every dispute within the industry must be settled outside the law. The most common method of conflict resolution in an illegal business culture where cash is rampant is contract murder (Gibler (2011), p. 38).
As a result of the competition at the border for trade smuggling routes between the different DTO’s to secure their gain from the $60 billion worth of narcotics that cross the border every year (Trans-border Institute, 2014). While the murder rate has subsided substantially in the past few years, less than 5% of these cases have been investigated, and many more deaths and disappearances are suspected to have gone unreported (Strauss, 2011). These two facts call attention to the urgency of and justification for this analysis, for it is arguably less the sheer number of people deaths that is most extraordinary, historically speaking, and more the combination of such a concentration of rampant murder with the absence of the rule of law. Such impunity intensifies the sense of injustice and betrays the degree to which the violence has been systemically produced.
Gibler further explains: “The blood and chaos that accompany drug trafficking from Mexico into the United States are inextricably related to the simultaneous demand within the U.S. population for the [drugs], and the insistence of U.S. politicians on an ideological commitment to prohibition that seeks to veil prohibition’s use for social control” (Gibler (2011), p. 43). Consequently, U.S. policy has not stopped the flow of drugs, but it has outsourced most of the killing (Gibler (2011), p. 203). And with dozens of reporters gunned down or disappeared since 2008, the DTO’s are especially skilled at silencing those who speak out. The targets seem to be anyone with access to major media channels, or anybody who annunciates facts that could be bad for business (Gibler (2011), p. 23).
The temptation on the part of U.S. citizens is often to dismiss organized crime as outside the “clean legal system,” rather than to recognize how interwoven official government is in drug trafficking. This is what makes the U.S. government’s deployment of the phrase “war on drugs” so misleading. And despite being an illegal form of capitalist accumulation, the drug industry is a substantial part of the U.S. and Mexican economic systems. Simultaneously, however, hundreds of businesses have closed down or moved away from Juarez since the army moved in and the violence escalated. So when poverty takes its toll on the economy, as it has in border cities like Juarez, often young, uneducated and unemployed men in particular – “ni-ni’s,” as they are sometimes called, which is short for “ni estudiar ni trabajar” (those who neither study nor work) – are seemingly faced with the narrow option to either join the DTO’s or live in material deprivation (Corcoran, 2012).
As alluded to above about violence and globalization in general, however, most peculiar is the degree to which DTO’s in Mexico have generally frustrated efforts by the military and police to curb their smuggling progress and success – despite their collusion with the state in many cases, and despite the country’s U.S.-backed billion-dollar budgets. It’s acknowledged by Mexico’s own government that the cartels have bribed and infiltrated not just the municipal police forces but occasionally high-level officials (Lacey, 2008). At the same time, “[p]roducing arrests is a necessary feature of the industry, and so, like murder, arrest becomes a way of settling accounts or invading territory” (Gibler (2011), p. 23). The drug machinery employs both the cops and the robbers, as it were.
Again, clear lines between the culpable and the innocent are blurred, and the hybridity of the drug war zone is glaring.DTO’s do not represent “parallel power,” separate from those of the state, “but rather a form of economic activity connected with, tolerated, promoted or protected by various sectors of the state” (Campbell (2009), p. 18). Large-scale drug trafficking is permitted, sustained and exploited on a national-political front.
Officials in charge of enforcing anti-drug laws both in Mexico and the United States have tremendous incentive to appease the public eye by capturing major drug kingpins or seizing large amounts of illegal shipments to be self-validating: “[E]ven though the drugs confiscated constitute only a fraction of the overall quantity crossing the border, and the smugglers arrested are easily replaced, these policing practices are politically popular expressions of the state’s moral resolve” (Andreas (2009), p. 11). Indeed, victims are victimizer and visa versa, on the ground level; at another level though – on the broader and global scale – there is a blatantly sharp distinction and nearly impassable gap between those with economic or political power, and those left vulnerable without it. It is still the free trade zoning coupled with continued illegalization (U.S.) – all of which is encouraged or permitted by a corrupt legal system (Mexico) – that has created the perfectly deregulated capitalist “laboratory,” which, in the words of author Charles Bowden (2010), has become “the global economy’s new killing field.”
All in all, 1) the context of widespread poverty, which neoliberalism and NAFTA exaggerates, the political legacy of impunity and official corruption, however varied – have been the major barriers to any genuine attempt to limit the power of organized crime. What will be insinuated below is that the costs of these failures creates what Enrique Dussel calls a surplus population that is rendered a “necessary sacrifice” by the logic of what he and Walter Mignolo refer to as the modern/colonial, and now global capitalist project (Taylor, 2014). The suggestion therefore, is that, though the lineage is fragmented and always taking on new forms, the oppressive impact of NAFTA on Mexico’s subaltern/subjugated peoples and the conversely lucrative payoffs for the ruling minority locates this twenty-year free trade experiment squarely in the tradition of European and now U.S. colonialism.
Obviously, to repeat, NAFTA is not solely or even directly responsible for the spike in drug-trade-related violence. Nor are US and Mexican elites the only perpetrators. There are cartels, US consumers, the prison industry, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), and others that are either complicit in the drug war or have a vested interest in the terms of NAFTA. Nonetheless, this characterization should provide a credible impression of the globalization/NAFTA/drug war matrix and the social context for the ethical response to follow.
A History of Decolonial Struggle
In light of this state of affairs, and in the midst of neoliberal economic policy and political compromise incentivized by globalization in this particular context, I will now turn to theorize what might constitute a critical movement of resistance inspired by an ethics of liberation (drawing on Dussel) and an aesthetics of decolonial struggle (taken from Mark L. Taylor). First, however, it should first be noted how Dussel’s deconstruction of modern-Enlightenment reasoning/epistemology can be used to situate this conflict historically.
While the U.S.-Mexico Drug War has a history that dates back several decades before the escalation of violence that began most noticeably in 2008, Enrique Dussel provides a much broader historical framework within which I think we can place this conflict and the political, cultural and economic forces at play within it. Dussel undertakes what is intended to be not only a systematic exploration into the epistemological and geopolitical pertinence of Latin America’s history but also a decolonial uncovering of a Eurocenctric conception of this history (Maldonado-Torres (2008), p. 11). This Eurocentric position, Dussel (2002) explains, was “first formulated at the end of the eighteenth century by the French and English ‘Enlightenment’ and the German ‘Romantics,’” and “reinterpreted all of world history, projecting Europe into the past and attempting to show that everything that happened before had led to Europe’s becoming, in Hegel’s words, ‘the end and center of world history’” (p. 201).
A basic presupposition of the myth of modernity is that European civilization has come about as a result of a fairly linear progression, which can be traced through selected cultures with respect to their historical rootedness in classical Greece and Rome. This view emerged during the Renaissance but reached its height in the philosophy of history that was formulated during the Enlightenment by Hegel but also others (Dussel (2002), p. 208). Dussel argues that the Enlightenment vision removed from its memory the disconnected and “Dark Age” Europe that lasted until the fifteenth century. In his work The Ethics of Liberation, Dussel demonstrates in a comprehensive historical genealogy of his own how even on a very generous reading, Europe was a periphery of the Islamic, Chinese and Hindustani world – “that “Oriental” world, much more “refined” and developed, from all points of view, that was the “center” of the old world, and the densest part of the world-system until the end of the eighteenth century” (Dussel (2002), pp. 231-232). Dussel (2002) goes so far as to contend that, “From Hegel, Marx and Comte to Weber – including Freud, Husserl, Heidegger, Popper, Levinas, Foucault, Lyotard, and Habermas – Eurocentrism shines unopposed,” and that “it would dominate the colonial world with the brilliance of “Western culture,” as humanity’s most developed center “since the beginning”” (pp. 231-232). The decisive case Dussel (1979) is gradually building from these observations is that modernity does not begin with the Enlightenment but with the Spanish Conquest:
“in the beginning of modernity, before Descartes discovered . . . a terrifying anthropological dualism in Europe, the Spanish conquistadors arrived in America. The phallic conception of the European-medieval world is now added to the forms of submission of the vanquished Indians” (vol. 3, p. 99).
Elsewhere Dussel develops the claim further (1995):
“The colonizing ego, subjugating the Other, the woman and the conquered male, in an alienating erotics and in a mercantile capitalist economics, follows the route of the conquering ego toward the modern ego cogito. Modernization initiates an ambiguous course by touting a rationality opposed to primitive, mythic explanations, even as it concocts a myth to conceal its own sacrificial violence against the Other” (p. 48).
Against the myth of modernity and the divorce of the Enlightenment narrative of progress from the preceding colonial conquest, however, Dussel (1979) urges that
It is now time to change skins to see through new eyes. It is now time to put off the skin and the eyes of the “I conquer” which culminates in the ego cogito or the will-to-power. One’s new hands are not those that clutch iron arms, and one’s new eyes are not those looking out from the caravels of the European intruders, who cry Land! with Columbus. The new skin is the soft, bronzed skin of Caribbeans, of the Andean people, of the Amazonians. The new eyes are those of the Indians who, with their bare feet planted on soft, warm, island sands, saw in wonderment new gods floating on the seas as they approached (p. 99).
In sum, Dussel’s philosophy of liberation challenges the myth of eurocentrism and modern/coloniality by:
- interrogating the links between philosophical projects and geopolitical positioning
- appreciating the relevance that the liberation of formerly colonized subjects has for philosophy that parallels that of other important moments such as the emancipation of the “people” and the bourgeois elites in the French Revolution
- taking as its horizon the struggle of the wide majority of people around the globe and seeks to elucidate the challenges they confront while listening to their demands, supporting their struggle, and aiming to give voice to their aspirations (Maldonado-Torres, 2008).
This gives an introduction to Dussel’s philosophy of liberation and his aim to restructure how Western history is conceived. Nonetheless, the increasing globalization of finance capital and the rearticulation of development theories through neoliberal policies, along with the increase of poverty in Latin America and around the planet, made it necessary for Dussel to revise his ethics of liberation for a new context.
Dussel’s Ethics of Liberation
To only speak of Eurocentism in terms of political conquest, modern vs. postmodern epistemology, or even cultural domination, however, is very misleading. For Dussel (1995) contests that
A new god ascended on the horizon of this new epoch. He began his triumphal march in the heavens, not under the sacrificial sign of Huitzilopochli, but under the auspices of modernity’s sacrificial myth. This new god was capital in its mercantilist phase, which prevailed in Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and after in Holland. This new fetish metamorphosed, acquiring its industrial face in the eighteenth-century England and its transnational embodiment in the twentieth-century United States, Germany and Japan (p. 116).
After studying Marx’s most mature writings in the later editions and volumes of Kapital, Dussel, like several other contemporary Marxian economists (e.g., Wolff, 2013; Eagleton, 2012; Harvey, 2010), believes that the core philosophical and methodological insight in Marx’s work is that living labor is the fountain of value. As that which is appropriated as surplus value and gives commodities the ability to generate value accumulated in the form of capital, labor, or living corporeality, is the ultimate source from which value is extracted, not capital. Hence, a commodity is “a coagulation, a crystallization, of living labor” (Mendieta (2007), p. 131).
Dussel (2013) then notes how Marx places the material in opposition to the merely formal in Hegel:
Against Hegel, for whom the supreme human act is the thinking that produces the thinking that thinks itself (formally), now what produces human life with self-consciousness is real human life, from its corporeality”, which has needs that animals do not – because human beings distinguish themselves from their life activity in their consciousness . . . Moreover, this material criterion on which ethics is grounded, the reproduction and development of human life, is universal, and . . . not solipsistic but communitarian. It concerns a “community of life” (p. 94).
From this point, Dussel (2013) puts forth “a universal principle of all ethics, especially of critical ethics: the principle to the obligation to produce, reproduce, and develop the concrete human life of each ethical subject in community” (p. 94). In order to follow this principle, Dussel explains, one must “situate oneself from the standpoint of the alterity of the system” – that is, “in the world of everyday life of prescientific common sense” (p. 207). According to Dussel, this is what allows for is the ability to adopt the perspective of the victims of a given ethical system without ethical complicity. Whereas Eurocentric modernity in the age of globalization and exclusion has often tended to make the production and consumption of commodities, and the growth thereof the measure of progress and civilization, Dussel avers that, following Marx, the measure of political economy and wellbeing begins with human bodies and their life, which is the source of value.
Going one step further, Dussel’s ethics of liberation proposes that victims, who in this case are those who have died, suffered and lost loved ones as a result of drug-trade related violence, affirm themselves and their dignity as a community through transformative social movements (p. 291). These victims’ communities also function as a “red light” or “social alarm” for the rest of society and especially their North American neighbors, calling out those in the prevailing systems of domination (p. 652). As called to by victims, participants in the system are “interpellated,” into solidarity with “the community of victims” in resistance to the system. As stated above, this is worked out in a corresponding material principle expressed as the obligation to produce life. And in being so interpellated, “both the material negation suffered by victims, and the affirmations of their material lives and dignity (affirmations both they and others make) constitute Dussel’s ‘material criterion of content’” (Taylor, 2014).
Dussel’s material principle is only one of three principles of co-determination in his Ethics. Dussel argues that
the mere “material” dimension is not sufficient for the fulfillment of the “goodness” claim of the maxim, act, institution, or system of ethical life. Other criteria or ethical-moral principles will be necessary for their fulfillment, such as the areas of consensuality of moral validity [and] the feasibility of mediations, in order to effectively reach ‘goodness’ (p. 57).
The second is a formal and procedural principle, that of discourse ethics. Bearing in mind, though, that discourse here is always carried out with the voice of victims setting the terms of dialogue. This is the condition that the “within eurocentrism” cannot provide.
Third, there is the co-determining principle and criterion of feasibility. It subsumes all the principles described before, and its theorizes what victims actually can effect strategically, thus also constituting the liberative principle. And again, the subjects are not only the victims but also those interpellated into solidarity with them.
These three criteria together form the difference of the critical-ethical reasoning or consciousness for Dussel:
Critical-ethical reason is a more developed moment of human rationality than those already analyzed; it subsumes material reason (because it assumes it affirmatively, as a way to discover the dignity of the subject and the impossibility of reproducing the life of the victim), formal reason (because it also assumes this in its perception of the exclusion of the victim from the possibility of arguing in his or her own defense), and reason concerning feasibility (because it interprets the conceivable mediations of the dominant system of ethics as “nonefficient” management for life, which at some level produce the death of the victims) (p. 208).
Despite its occurrence on a relatively small scale, I submit that this process critical-ethical reasoning and of interpellation is exactly what was accomplished by “The Caravan for Peace” movement which I will now briefly describe.
The Caravan for Peace as a Critical Movement of Resistance
In mid-August 2012, following the protest and march that ended in Mexico City in 2011, which drew more than a hundred thousand participants, the Caravan for Peace with Justice and Dignity — led by the family members of Mexicans murdered and disappeared during the drug war — sojourned across the United States (Global Exchange, 2013). They have since also had a second and smaller caravan as of the fall of 2013, but I’ve chosen to focus on the 2012 effort mostly because of its size and success in reaching a large US audience.
Starting from Tijuana/San Diego, the 120-person caravan traversed 5,700 miles, holding events in 26 cities and generating extensive coverage in most of the major media channels in the U.S. and Mexico. The Caravaners made an effort to transform their sufferings and losses into moral criticism and compassionate action. They were joined by some drug war victims north of the border who also sought peace and an end to the devastating consequences of drug prohibition. One of the Mexican survivors was the famous poet, Javier Sicilia, whose son and a group of friends were murdered by cartel members in 2011, and he has played a crucial role in building momentum for the peace Caravan.
Along its journey the Caravan spoke boldly and critically, and used creative non-violent actions to dramatize the issues while seeking common ground on which to build the difficult, bi-national consensus for peace. Parents of victims on both sides of the border found solidarity in their common experience of loss, anger and mourning in many candle-lit vigils held throughout the course of the Caravan. In total the Caravaners spoke to tens of thousands of people – not including the coverage in the media. Their collective moral rhetoric of the movement was crafted to elevate popular awareness and energy around four major areas of legislative reform:
- Drug Policy Reform (decriminalization if not legalization of marijuana)
- Opposition to the Militarization of Drug War
- An end to the arms trade to Mexico
- A criticism of NAFTA policy with respect to its effects on wages, infant industries in Mexico, and job growth
It should be especially noted how, in this movement, Sicilia’s loss in particular, as well as the losses decried in the many other testimonies from people of the Caravan, served to call out and implore people, to be hailed and interpellated into social, moral, and political solidarity with the victims. To conclude, I will enumerate several critical impulses that can be identified with the ethos and aesthetic nature of this particular movement, but also of CMR’s (Critical Movement of Resistance) in general. (The word “critical” is being used in the sense of reflective, thoughtfully attentive to complexity, and including an openness to self-criticism) (Taylor (2014), p. 136).
The Ethos of Critical Movements of Resistance According to Mark Lewis Taylor
In Mark Lewis Taylor’s essay “Decolonizing Mass Incarceration: Flesh Will Wear Out Chains” (2014) in which he considers the U.S. problem of mass-incarceration — which also happens to partly be a byproduct of the drug war – Taylor states that there are three critical impulses of CMRs, and I will relate each impulse to the Peace Caravan itself. Taylor understands each of these three impulses to feature both reflexive and cultivated aspects. First, as an impulse, and much as the term already suggests, there is an immediate and fairly reactive response to the suffering and injustice that is being experienced by victims of the drug war and free trade policy. There was in the Caravan for Peace movement an owning of agonistic being, whichwas enacted in the testimonies from family members and friends of victims on the Caravan who shared their grief and rage, and functioned as that social alarm or red light for those who would listen and pay attention. Taylor (2014) here actually note how Dussel’s privileging of the victims’ perspective and the material starting point, as well as the process of interpellation, begin with precisely the cry or “el grito” that “emerges as a roar from the pain of the victims, in their work, in their daily torment, or from the midst of their torture” (p. 137).
In a similar manner to that of Dussel, Taylor (2014) explains how the cry of the victim is not just a sad or disturbing feature of the generalized human condition. It is a marker of an agonism. Like Dussel’s alarm or red light, for Taylor the victim’s cry “is a ‘bellwether’ (leader or indicator) for all humanity, a call to guard dignity of all subjects, health of all bodies, justice for all persons. In the agonistic cry a space is opened in the concentrated mass of suffering, and victims begin constituting themselves as a community to negate systems that cause their suffering” (pp. 136-137).
Again, this is how victims call to others – “interpellate” them to their side from out of the system, for the purpose of ultimately building social forms and sustainable community together to end the victimization. Friends and families, and persons of conscience throughout the society wounded by drug-trade-related violence, take the antagonism carried in rage, lament and mourning, and in Taylor’s apt wording, “chisel it into an oppositional stance.” The cry may be the rage and grief of the thousands of children who have lost parents, and parents who have lost children. It may be, Taylor suggests,
the cry of ‘I am dying too soon,’ ‘I am without dignity,’ ‘I am raped,’ ‘I am tortured!’ When agonistic cries build a sense of group suffering, and a sense of historical violation of one’s group, then there comes the querying cry of “how long,” and the deeply bruising, answering cry of “too long!” Especially among those with the sense that the violence to which they are subjected has a colonial sociality and history to it, the interpellating cry, reverberates… ‘We are violently excluded, exploited and oppressed – as laborers, as women and sexual(-zed) others, as dark affectable subjects, as those denied life and dignity consigned to the underworlds and interstices of ever-surveilling state authorities’ (Taylor (2014), pp. 137).
One way agonism is shown is through the second critical impulse of cultivating of artful reflex. This ethos of CMRs described above must also be cultivated if it is to achieve a lasting effect. Otherwise reflexive actions are honed, concentrated and channeled to grow its consciousness-raising, interpellating and liberating impact (Taylor (2014), p. 136). For example, after a number of testimonies were heard from the Caravan’s stop in San Antonio, TX, at a local Catholic parish, the Sisters of the University of the Incarnate Word, where I currently teach, with representatives from several other faith traditions, performed an interpretative, interreligious peace dance that they had choreographed, inviting members of their respective faith traditions to draw on their own sacred resources for inspiration to partner with the Caravan.
Indeed, the dramatic, the theatrical, becomes especially important in a media-saturated age wherein information technology wields images to create spectacles that assure domination, enlisting citizen fear and fascination to reinforce inaction (Taylor (2014), p. 139). Hence, there were college-student interns with the social justice advocacy group Global Exchange that helped organize the Caravan who traveled with it to photograph and film the events and post them online through their social media accounts. Most of all, the artistic reflex, thus cultivated, offers to CMRs amid their agonistic sensibility, a celebratory function, a fore-tasting of the futures they dream and for which they struggle. Friends and family members of victims without any other options taking up the paint brush, the pen to write prose or songs, and these are powerful instances of artful reflex (Alexander, 2012).
The third critical impulse according to Taylor is the fomenting of resistance through politically adversarial practices. This “fomenting” follows the first mark of critical resistant communities, the owning of agonistic being, which, Taylor stresses, “as an “owning,” is an acceptance, an acknowledgement, one made perhaps reluctantly but with a sense of resolve, a resolution to see one’s being as what it is, in struggle, labile, tense, in readiness for tasks, but first known simply as a being-so-poised in (dis)stress” (Taylor (2014), 139-140). Moreover, the spirit of CRM’s is adversarial in its very presupposition that there is an enemy – not necessarily a person or group of people, though it could be, but indeed, that there is a matrix of antagonism and adversarial forces at play that have be named and challenged with righteous indignation (though not with hate or violence). It should further be emphasized, however, that the practices are not just for liberation from victimization, but also for restorative, structural change.
Furthermore, it is with its deployment of the arts like poetry and story-telling that resistance practice marshals most directly a creative and dramatic challenge to the powers at work in the theaters of narcoterrorism, as creativity and imagination become dramatic action that rallies a public to its sense of critical ethical consciousness. It is action that evokes a theatrical uprising of sorts. This happens in ways that galvanizes audiences and set them in motion, constituting what Taylor calls a “stealing of the show” from the narco-terrorism spectacle – beating their intimidation tactics to the stage, as it were. Mimmicking them, but from a higher moral ground, and in a way that humanizes rather than dehumanizes. One could think of how the mothers of the disappeared daughter of Juarez demonstrated their defiance by publically placing pink crosses and pictures of victims around the city for all to see, and writing on the crosses, “ni un mas!” (Rodriguez, 2007). These Movements are about forming new relations and coalitions for some transformative purpose that posits a concrete alternative to dominate rule, be it through cartel violence or unjust free trade.
To reiterate, Taylor reminds in conclusion that a theatric that would really counter the powers of state-collusion and cartel violence today is not content with mere personal stances, nor with occasional actions of creative non-violent drama – of agony and art. No, it presses further, and seeks to form networks and embody, as Taylor words it,
practices that have transformative effect, [and that] even pose an “incendiary risk” to structures of global U.S. sovereignty. This is to strike right at the heart of the [punitive] practices of colonizing and imperial power. Here, antagonistic sensibility and artistic expression constitute forces of resistance and subversion to exploitative power. Organized and organizing practices give a certain forceful “hardness” to lament and artistic expression (Taylor (2014), pp. 139-40).
Finally, Critical movements of resistance seek to sustain life-renewing activity and communal work. It is this dynamic-oriented character of the critical theater that prevents resistance movements from becoming mere aestheticism as is always the danger. They are safeguarded against this end, however, not only in their qualitatively different mode of contestation– with its values and display of justice and compassion in contrast to corporate, state or cartel violence – but also by the fact that its aesthetics is situated in a movement that identifies its opponent, namely, poverty-sustaining and/or producing political economic policy that imposes conditions of radically deregulated and therefore violent market competition that is part and parcel to the negative externalities of globalization. For this competition issues in the impossibility of ensuring life and well-being for large segments of the population, which fails to meet the fundamental criterion of Dussel’s ethics of liberation.
Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2008) argues that there can be another kind of globalization, a decolonial globalization, one that is counter-hegemonic, and that grows from below, from the global periphery – not the center. Perhaps CRMs like the Caravan for Peace can give birth to this kind of globalization, one that shifts the tides of culture and knowledge, and that raises consciousness and a sense of responsibility in both countries, but especially in the U.S., where the costs are too often rendered out of sight, out of mind, as it were, and where illegal drugs are continually demanded and consumed at an insatiable rate.
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In order for there to be a people well formed enough for good lawmaking, there must be good law, for how else will the people be well formed? The problem is: Where would that good law come from absent an already well-formed, virtuous people? But the seeming quandary of chicken-and-egg (which comes first, good people or good law?) takes off and attaches to democratic politics more generally once we see that established regimes are hardly rendered immune by their longevity to the paradoxical difficulty that Rousseau names. Every day, after all, new citizens are born, others immigrate into established regimes, still others mature into adulthood. Every day, established citizens mistake, depart from, or simply differ about their visions of democracy’s future and the commitment of democratic citizenship. Every day the traces of the traumas of the founding generation are discernible in the actions of their heirs. Every day, democracies resocialize, recapture, or reinterpellate citizens into their political institutions and culture in ways those citizens do not freely will, nor could they. Every day, in sum, new citizens are received by established regimes, and every day established citizens are reinterpellated into the laws, norms, and expectations of their regimes such that the paradox of politics is replayed rather than overcome in time.
Bill Walker | Blog 