Violence in Postrevolutionary Mexico

Abstract

Despite the formal end of civil war and armed conflict, Mexico continued to experience significant levels of violence during the 1930s and 1940s. This period has traditionally been associated with the process of pacification, institutionalization, and centralization of power that enabled the consolidation of rule in postrevolutionary Mexico, a process epitomized by the marked national decline in levels of homicide that began during the 1940s and continued during the second half of the 20th century. The dynamics of coercion and resistance that characterized state-society relations at the regional and local levels reveal, however, that violence pervaded all aspects of society and that it was perpetrated by a multiplicity of actors, including vigilantes, pistoleros, private militias, lynch mobs, military, police, and other violent entrepreneurs. Violence was used as both a means to contest the legitimacy of the postrevolutionary state project as well as an instrument of control and coercion on behalf of political elites and local power brokers. Conversely, violence superseded the realm of traditional politics and constituted a central force shaping Mexican society. Violence against women in the public and private spheres, violence driven by economic interests, and citizens’ attempts to control crime and social transgressions reveal that citizens—and not only state actors—contributed to the reproduction of violence. Although violence in postrevolutionary Mexico was neither centralized nor exercised in a top-down manner, impunity and collusion between criminal and political elements were central in the production and perpetuation of violence both within the state and within civil society. When examined in light of these two decades of the postrevolutionary period, the character and levels of violence in contemporary Mexico appear less as an aberration and more as the latest expression of a longer, though uneven and nonlinear, historical trajectory of decentralized, multifaceted, and multi-actor forms of violence.