Justice In Mexico Research Articles

Before Biodiversity: Trajectories of National Parks in Latin America (1930s–1980s)

Abstract Almost a century ago, long before biodiversity expressed a scientific value for nature, Latin American countries began establishing national parks. Today, they represent over 6 percent of Latin America’s landmass. By considering national park creation across a broad regional span and six crucial decades, this article explains a mode of state formation focused on caring for nature instead of just exploiting it. It examines how national parks expanded in the region by identifying three consequent trajectories: the use of these conservation units for frontier development in Argentina and as part of a broader project seeking social justice in Mexico; the formation of more haphazard park initiatives in various countries, taking Brazil and Chile as main examples; and the development of ecologically coherent park systems through the cases of Peru and Colombia. The article also addresses the role of science (especially forestry) and international cooperation in shaping national parks. In this manner, it uncovers the paths that faded from view after the idea that parks intend to protect biodiversity took hold and illustrates a rarely acknowledged aspect of state expansion.

Delinquent violence, criminal justice in Mexico, and Erich Fromm in real time

The efforts of the Mexican authorities to defeat insecurity, violence, and crime have not been successful. It seems that the prison system plays a major role in this. Delinquent violence forces us to look for different options and conditions. Proposals that emanated from the humanist psychoanalysis promoted by Erich Fromm, who lived in Mexico for over 20 years from the late 1950s to the mid 1970s, are therapeutic resources and paths of analysis. These allow us to identify both the productive and the creative aspects of the individual personality propelling the person to their social integration. The aim is to guide individuals toward a biophilic character and to the construction of a fair society provided with hope and liberty. The mission of the Instituto Mexicano de Psicoanálisis (IMPAC; Mexican Institute of Psychoanalysis), founded in Mexico City in 1963 by Erich Fromm, is to: spread Fromm’s intellectual legacy through psychoanalytic training; pay specialized attention to persons in need of psychotherapies and analytic psychotherapies; disseminate Fromm’s thoughts by publishing them; undertake professional research; plus, recently, collaborate with federal agencies for justice procurement and human rights defense. This has made it possible to convince us of the appropriateness, validity, and efficacy of humanist psychoanalysis to approach and become involved in benefiting Mexican society.

Energy poverty and social justice in Mexico: The rights of electricity consumers

This article analyzes energy poverty in Latin America and the Caribbean and the importance of energy efficiency to address this issue. The paper also touches upon energy subsidies in Mexico and their negative environmental and social consequences. Then, the article studies the potentially detrimental billing practices of Mexico’s state electricity company, which are provoked by the enterprise’s growing past-due portfolio and losses, and the possible infringement of electricity consumers’ rights. The authors propose three courses of action for consumers to protest the company's possibly perjudicial billing. Finally, the authors suggest that a distributed electricity system in Mexico could combat energy poverty and strengthen electricity users’ rights.

Conceptual legal analysis of restorative justice in Mexico

Conceptual legal analysis of restorative justice in Mexico

Legal Process Automation as a Tool for Access to Justice: A Proposal to Restructure First Contact Interviews in the Federal Institute of Public Defenders

This article argues that digitalization (which includes legal process automation) is a tool for bridging the gap of access to justice and improving operational performance through features that are scalable, standardized, asynchronous and accessible. Firstly, the article provides an introduction to digital justice and technology use in legal services, including subsections about the countries that are leading the way in digital justice. This article also develops an implementation proposal, using Mexico and the first-contact interview of the Federal Institute of Public Defenders (FIPD) as a possible example of legal process automation. Thus, the third section offers background information on access to justice in Mexico and the FIPD, as well as some ideas on the complexities of a first contact interview, and what elements should be taken into account when automating this process (software, databases, plain language and design). The final section presents the interview prototype through which the principles and ideas discussed in the previous sections are put into practice, ultimately demonstrating the feasibility of the proposal.

Review: En tela de juicio: Justicia penal, homicidios célebres y opinión pública (México, siglo XX), by Elisa Speckman Guerra

Review: <i>En tela de juicio: Justicia penal, homicidios célebres y opinión pública (México, siglo XX)</i>, by Elisa Speckman Guerra

Family Album: Stories by Gabriela Alemán

Reviewed by: Family Album: Stories by Gabriela Alemán Lanie Tankard Gabriela Alemán Family Album: Stories Trans. Dick Cluster & Mary Ellen Fieweger. San Francisco. City Lights Books. 2022. 120 pages. THE EIGHT SHORT stories in Family Album live up to the book's title, their names underscoring the concept: Baptism, Summer Vacation, School Trip, Family Outing, Marriage, Honeymoon, Costume Party, Moving Day. Ranging from eight to fifteen pages, these tales offer an astute portrait of author Gabriela Alemán's country, called Ecuador for the equator upon which it resides. Settings bounce from the capital of Quito high in the Andean foothills to the volcanic archipelago of the Galápagos Islands—but also a drilling platform near the Louisiana coast, Puerto Rico, a Brooklyn laundromat, Mexico, and the Faena Theater and Hotel in Buenos Aires. Storylines intrigue: a dying man wants to scuba dive for sunken treasure using Robinson Crusoe's map; memories of a 1967 biddy basketball match drive a man to drink; and John Wayne Bobbitt brings his reconstructed career to Argentina. Murder and mayhem abound along the Ecuadorian Amazon. Born in Brazil, Alemán draws on her journalistic experience as she toys with the short-story form. Clever noir blends fact and fiction with an amusing dash of the gothic, resonating César Aira, Carlos Fonseca, Italo Calvino, or Silvia Moreno-Garcia. "Costume Party" nods to Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño's 2666 ("The Part about Fate"), exploring movies about masked professional prizefighter El Santo, a symbol of justice in Mexico. The narrator believes there was a double in one film shot in Ecuador, terming the series a "house of cards, fragile." [End Page 66] A widow spins one of the strongest yarns in "Marriage" as she discovers her recently deceased husband led a double life. Cleaning out his desk in Quito, she sees he had another wife and children in Machala while funneling money for a construction company—and realizes "the hall of mirrors that my life had been." Each allegorical tale stands effectively on its own. Yet, dig deeper and therein resides Alemán's genius, for she embeds recent events such as the Brazilian Odebrecht scandal's connection to Ecuador or the power dynamics of oil versus Indigenous rights. She tosses hints all over the place. For example, "Moving Day" seems merely a fascinating tale of demonic possession until one ponders a character's name and recognizes what a Portuguese word indicates. Gabriela Alemán's compelling snapshots may be of Ecuador, but their relatives certainly appear in many family albums around the globe. The book is a work of art. Lanie Tankard Austin, Texas Copyright © 2022 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

The Struggle for Memory and Justice in Mexico

The debate about public memory has intensified in Mexico in a time of widespread violence and human rights abuses, particularly in the context of the guerra contra el narco (war against drug cartels) that began in 2006. Confronting government narratives that criminalize victims of enforced disappearance and criminal violence, and the state’s failure to bring the perpetrators to justice, families of victims and other activists have led a struggle for truth, justice, memory and reparations. Through diverse memorial interventions across the country, they call attention to the continuities in state violence over time, and the need for memorial spaces that transform the structural conditions underlying different forms of violence and state neglect.

The constitutional paradigm of restorative justice in Mexico and its link with international law through conventionality control

The constitutional paradigm of restorative justice in Mexico and its link with international law through conventionality control

John Hart Ely in the Mexican Supreme Court

Abstract In this article, I reflect upon the influence that John Hart Ely’s book Democracy and Distrust can have on our discussions about the Mexican Supreme Court. For that purpose, I distinguish the Mexican Court’s role under authoritarian rule and in democracy. In the former era, Ely’s theory would not have even been considered. In the latter, the Court has adopted a substantive conception of democracy and judicial review based on authors such as Ronald Dworkin, Robert Alexy, and Luigi Ferrajoli. Moreover, in the last twelve years, the Court has developed a human rights agenda. During this time, it has interpreted human rights and economic liberties, issuing rulings that are similar to those that preoccupied Ely forty years ago (Lochner v. New York or Roe v. Wade). In this regard, Ely’s theory is useful to think about the current situation of constitutional justice in Mexico, even if we do not embrace his proposal that limits the role of the Court to procedural issues. In a country such as Mexico, where the reality of our democracy is much feebler and deep economic and social inequalities predominate, the Court is compelled to play a transformative role.

Reshaping Spirituality: Indigenous Decolonial Struggles for Justice in Mexico

Departing from Christian spiritualities, even those emerging from feminist theologians and Latin American eco feminist liberation theologies, the indigenous women´s movements started to propose their own “indigenous spirituality.” In some key meetings like the “First Summit of Indigenous Women of the Americas” and at other later meetings, their basic documents, final declarations, collective proposals have a spiritual component that departs from the influences of the largely Christian Catholic background of the country. Their discourses, demands, and live presentations have also expressed this religious background. Through several years of interactions and sharing with women in the indigenous worlds of Mexico, the author has systematized a series of characteristics that emanate from a particular cosmovision and cosmogony. These religious references to an indigenous spirituality are inspired on ancestral references re-created today as the women struggle for social justice. The inspiration for their social justice fight is often anchored in these beliefs and practices. It is a reference to worlds of ritual, liturgy, and collective worship that—although being often attired in Catholic and Christian imagery—reveal a deep disjuncture with Christianity and affirm their epistemic particularity. Working from these “cracks of epistemic differences” (Mignolo 2006) the author presents them as a de-colonial effort. Women are actively proposing to recapture ancestral spiritualities to decolonize both the religious universes they were forced to adopt during the historical colonial invasion as well as from the influences of a neo-colonial feminist frame for gender equality.

Institutionalized Police Brutality: Torture, the Militarization of Security, and the Reform of Inquisitorial Criminal Justice in Mexico

How can societies restrain their coercive institutions and transition to a more humane criminal justice system? We argue that two main factors explain why torture can persist as a generalized practice even in democratic societies: weak procedural protections and the militarization of policing, which introduces strategies, equipment, and mentality that treats criminal suspects as though they were enemies in wartime. Using a large survey of the Mexican prison population and leveraging the date and place of arrest, this paper provides causal evidence about how these two explanatory variables shape police brutality. Our paper offers a grim picture of the survival of authoritarian policing practices in democracies. It also provides novel evidence of the extent to which the abolition of inquisitorial criminal justice institutions—a remnant of colonial legacies and a common trend in the region—has worked to restrain police brutality.

A history of infamy: crime, truth and justice in Mexico

In 2014, 43 students from the Ayotzinapa teachers college were disappeared in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero. Massive protests against the violence and the slow, stumbling government response followed. Months later, the Mexican government produced an investigation which blamed local political and criminal actors, calling the account ‘the historic truth’. Few in Mexico believed that ‘truth’; fewer still expected those truly responsible to be punished. Counter-investigations, conspiracy theories and press accounts followed, many of which were given much greater credence than the official account. The fundamental link between investigation of the crime, establishing truth and enacting justice was missing. The absence of that link is nothing new in Mexico, and the historian Pablo Piccato's A history of infamy offers a fascinating exploration of how public understandings of crime and justice have evolved in the country. This matter is no simple historical curiosity. Mexico today suffers a renewed wave of...

Sobre Pablo Piccato, A History of Infamy. Crime, Truth, and Justice in Mexico

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Pablo Piccato, A History of Infamy. Crime, Truth, and Justice in Mexico

El siglo xxi nos ha acostumbrado a series y peliculas policiales, algunas de excelente calidad, que indagan sobre las formas del crimen y las practicas y motivaciones de los criminales, asi como de las capacidades y metodologias de la investigacion policiaca, en diversas partes del mundo. En Mexico, este desarrollo del cine, la TV y el streaming ha corrido paralelo al del incremento en el numero, la variedad y el grado de violencia de los crimenes cometidos (notoriamente desde la guerra front...

A History of Infamy: Crime, Truth, and Justice in Mexico

A History of Infamy: Crime, Truth, and Justice in Mexico

A History of Infamy: Crime, Truth, and Justice in Mexico. By Pablo Piccato

A History of Infamy: Crime, Truth, and Justice in Mexico. By Pablo Piccato

Review: A History of Infamy: Crime, Truth, and Justice in Mexico by Pablo Piccato

Review: A History of Infamy: Crime, Truth, and Justice in Mexico by Pablo Piccato

Pablo Piccato, A History of Infamy: Crime, Truth and Justice in Mexico (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2017), pp. xi + 374, £27.95 pb.

Pablo Piccato, A History of Infamy: Crime, Truth and Justice in Mexico (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2017), pp. xi + 374, £27.95 pb.

At the intersections of multiple marginalisations: displacements and environmental justice in Mexico and Ethiopia

ABSTRACTThis article examines the politics of institutional governance of displacements and the intersecting experiences of environmental justice, drawing on case studies of flood disasters and urban displacements in Villahermosa, Mexico, and government-sponsored displacements and resettlements in rural Oromia, Ethiopia. We argue that a fuller understanding of how institutional governance produces multiple marginalisations requires political–ecological and intersectional analyses of residents’ experiences of injustices that encompass interlinkages between social position, gender and political power. The analysis is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Mexico and Ethiopia, comprising interviews, participant observation, document analysis and surveys. The study shows similarities and differences in patterns of governance, mechanisms of marginalisation and relations of authority and power concerning differentiated displacements and everyday vulnerabilities in different contexts of the global South. Our analysis enriches theoretical understanding of governance and justice, demonstrating how multiple marginalities are produced, reinforced and contested through political processes imbricated with forms of governance characterised by institutional intrusion and absence.