Mexican Security Research Articles

“Undesirable” Travelers: U.S. Radicals, Mexican Security, and the Cold War Summer of 1968

ABSTRACT Two groups of U.S. travelers attempted but failed to reach Cuba in the summer of 1968. Traveling via Mexico City during the height of the Mexican student movement and in anticipation of the Olympics, both groups were detained by Mexican authorities and eventually deported back to the United States. Using oral histories and archival sources, this article explores the interaction between the New Left radicals and intelligence agencies in the U.S. and Mexico. Both sides sought to interpret and contextualize the other to fit and shape their own expectations of Cold War politics during the global Sixties. While there is a vast scholarship on 1968, at both a national and international scale, this story contributes to our understanding of the formulation of radical imaginaries of Cold War international surveillance and solidarity, as well as the construction of the transnational “outside agitator” narratives at the end of the decade.

The Nazas-Aguanaval Group: Radical Priests, Catholic Networks, and Maoist Politics in Northern Mexico

AbstractThis article deals with the emergence of the Nazas-Aguanaval group of priests in the northern region of La Laguna, in northern Mexico, after the Second Vatican Council and the 1968 Medellín Conference of the Latin American Episcopal Council (CELAM). I argue that both the reformism of the Second Vatican council and the push for a “preferential option for the poor” provided the space for an alliance between the progressive priests of the Nazas-Aguanaval group and the Maoist activists of Política Popular (People's Politics, PP). In this context, it was the Nazas-Aguanaval priests who introduced Política Popular's Maoism in La Laguna and Chiapas among peasants and students. At the same time, the radical tradition and economic conditions of La Laguna made it possible for local left-wing activists to connect with transnational currents such as the Movement of Priests for the Third World and Christians for Socialism. Based on a broad array of sources—including oral histories, Maoist pamphlets, local newspapers, Mexican security archives, and documentation from Mexican and Latin American priests’ organizations—this article brings together the regional history of protest in La Laguna, the historiography of the Global Sixties, and the history of the progressive factions of the Catholic Church in Latin America.

Rights to the rescue? The promotion of Indigenous women's political-electoral rights and the rise of the Mexican security state

This article demonstrates how the promotion of Indigenous women's political-electoral rights in Mexico has furthered a conservative agenda of state securitization. To do so, it presents a discourse analysis of national media reports focused on the story of Eufrosina Cruz, a Zapotec woman who became the figurehead for state-led initiatives to promote Indigenous women's rights. It argues that a colonial rescue narrative constructed through Cruz's figure helped generate new hegemonic discourses of gendered indigeneity that portrayed Indigenous peoples' alternative political practices and spaces as anti-democratic and illegal. In an era where advancements in party democracy were linked to processes of state securitization, these categorizations helped justify new forms of state intervention into Indigenous peoples' lives. By exploring how rights initiatives were discursively constructed through racialized, spatialized and gendered constructions of indigeneity, this article contributes to a critical geography of indigeneity within political geography.

An AML SupTech Solution for the Mexican National Banking and Securities Commission (CNBV) - R2A Project Retrospective and Lessons Learned

Supervisory Technology (SupTech) is poised to effect a paradigm shift in the fight against financial crime. SupTech-based data architectures that combine advanced data transmission, storage, and analytical technologies have the potential to dramatically enhance the accuracy, efficiency, and predictive power of traditional AML approaches, or supplant them altogether. In addition to automating many of the manual tasks in traditional methods, such as painstakingly reconciling FIs’ suspicious activity reports, supervisors can now leverage Big Data applications to scrutinize the raw transactional and customer data themselves drawing on historical and real time data. Cutting down on preparation and travel time for data collection frees up time and resources for deeper off-site analysis and more frequent on-site inspections. Dynamic and interactive dashboards helps supervisors visualize data in novel ways and draw insights that might have been previously hidden, which also helps to make investigations more targeted. Similarly, innovative machine learning models allows regulators and supervisors to identify new patterns of suspicious activities not detectable by manual analysis. This case studies describes the CNBV’s prototype developed under the auspices of R2A, which demonstrated large efficiency gains that could be reaped from a full-scale roll-out of this solution, particularly in time saved from routine manual work. Data collection and processing that required weeks and days of manual work under the traditional approach can now be completed in minutes and seconds. New analytical models also delivered concrete results that supervisors can already use to improve anomaly detection. With more data mining and machine learning, these models are likely to uncover more illicit activity or even predict money laundering before it happens.

Loans of the revolution: how Mexico borrowed as the state collapsed in 1912–13

AbstractThis article assesses why the French and US banks Paribas and Speyers underwrote a series of loans to revolutionary Mexico in 1912 and 1913, when the state was in the process of collapsing. This is a case of a war debt that failed to prevent the borrowing government from suspending payments and subsequently falling. Based on unpublished primary documents, the article shows that the 1913 loan involved a conflict of interest. The credit delayed a default and sustained the price of Mexican securities while Paribas, its main underwriter, was liquidating its Mexican portfolio. Evidence also suggests the existence of asymmetry of information. Paribas accessed pessimistic but accurate first‐hand information on Mexico, while the public read over‐optimistic press reports. Paribas forced the government to sell the bonds on the primary market at a price that was low, controlling for publicly available data. It subsequently sold the bonds at a margin on the secondary market. An additional reason for the lending is the Nacional railway, a state‐owned company that used a share of the funds to pay its debt. More exposed to Mexico than Paribas, the small and internationalized Speyers held the bad bonds it had underwritten.

The Challenges of the Mexican Intermediated Securities Holding System and Opportunities for Modernization

This article examines the legal institutions and doctrines underlying the current intermediated system for the holding of securities in Mexico. Rather than revamping the legal framework governing intermediated securities, Mexico’s legislature enacted several incremental changes in an attempt to align the framework with the practices and norms of the 21st century. These modifications were introduced without any coherent and consistent policy justifications, resulting in a framework inhospitable to transactions with intermediated securities, and especially secured loans. This framework also has many gaps, such as in the area of conflict of laws, which make it unsuitable for foreign investors. Given the recent successful efforts to modernize Mexico’s secured transactions law and the filing system, as well as the on-going digitization of the warehouse receipts system, using distributed ledger technologies (Blockchain), it is surprising that very little attention has been paid to modernizing the intermediated securities system. In its future modernization efforts, Mexico should seriously consider the recommendations of the UNIDROIT Legislative Guide on Intermediated Securities, adopted in May 2017, to align with the best international standards. The Legislative Guide is based on the principles underlying the U.S. Uniform Commercial Code Article 8, which would make the Mexican securities market more attractive for U.S. investors and lenders.

Governing Through Critique: Post-Conditionality and Bottom-Up Governance in the Merida Initiative

This article is about how the governmentality critique of top-down governance feeds into current interventionary policy thinking. Drawing on the Merida Initiative, a US–Mexican security cooperation agreement signed in 2007, the article brings out how neo-liberal civil society discourse continuously deconstructs the normative and analytical assumptions, categories, and concepts of modern liberal-universalism. In the Merida Initiative, civil society representatives were repeatedly delegitimized for being part of a detached internationalized NGO bubble. The goal was to enable idiosyncratic local knowledge-power to unfold its creative governing potential unencumbered by the oppressive and counterproductive reductions and exclusions of liberal-universal episteme. In this way, policy thinking actually coincides with the governmentality critique of standardized knowledge and top-down imposition. One of the negative implications is that international policy-makers lose their ability to arbitrate according to fixed normative standards.

What Does the Trump Administration Mean for the Mérida Agreement?

What Does the Trump Administration Mean for the Mérida Agreement? Carolyn Gallaher Historically, Mexico has not figured prominently in US presidential campaigns. The 2016 campaign was an exception. Republican nominee Donald Trump consistently used Mexico and its citizens as metaphors for what ails the US. During the first presidential debate, for example, he described the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) as "the worst trade deal maybe ever signed anywhere" (Gillespie 2016). Mexican citizens fared no better in Trump's rhetoric. He accused Mexico of dumping its rapists in the US and promised to build a wall to keep them out (Gamboa 2016). Given Trump's relentlessly negative portrayal of Mexico and its citizens, this paper asks what Trump's win might portend for the bilateral Mérida Initiative. I argue that Trump will likely weaken what is positive about the agreement and exacerbate what is negative about it. [End Page 179] A Brief Review of Mérida In 2007, US President George W. Bush and Mexican President Felipe Calderón met in the Yucatan city of Mérida to discuss the problem of narco-trafficking. Eight months later, the Mérida Initiative was officially born. In the joint press release announcing the agreement, the two countries described narco-trafficking, and the solutions to it as a shared responsibility and promised to improve cooperation between their respective law enforcement agencies. The US Congress also pledged up to $1.4 billion in appropriations to get the ball rolling (U.S. Department of State 2008). To assess what the new Trump administration might mean for Mérida going forward, I begin by briefly outlining the initiative's strengths and weaknesses. I focus on one of the agreement's central strengths and one of its foremost weakness. A Needed Thaw The US and Mexico have long had a testy relationship where narco-trafficking is concerned. The low point in the relationship came in 1985 when Enrique "Kiki" Camarena, a Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) agent stationed in Guadalajara, was murdered. The DEA believed Mexican law enforcement purposely bungled the investigation because Camarena's killers paid them off. By contrast, Mexican officials were angry the DEA was operating in their country and believed Camarena was in over his head (Shannon 1988). For the next thirty years, bilateral cooperation on narco-trafficking was limited and marked by mutual distrust. In this context, the Mérida Initiative represented a major rupture. Mexican government officials had long demanded that the US acknowledge the role of demand in fostering narco-trafficking. As such, when the US announced the agreement by describing the fight against narco-trafficking as a "shared responsibility," Mexicans felt vindicated. Mexican scholar Raùl Benítez Manuat (2009) described Mérida as a paradigm shift in the two countries' relationship. For their part, US officials felt like they could finally engage in cooperation without Mexico labeling their efforts as breaches of sovereignty (Gallaher 2016). Many observers credit the final capture and arrest of Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán to the improved cooperation Mérida begat (LaFranchi 2017). In my interviews for a collaborative research project funded by the National Institute of Justice (award number 2011-IJ-CX-0001) on US/Mexican law enforcement cooperation, I also found that better cooperation bled into casework not directly related to narco-trafficking, such as homicide and child kidnapping cases. Complicity For nearly a decade, human rights groups have accused Mexican security forces of violating human rights in their war against narco-traffickers (Amnesty 2015). When the US works with, or funds, units engaging in these violations, it risks becoming complicit in their abuses. Critics of Mérida claim the US has been slow to respond to this moral hazard. Indeed, Mexico has used Mérida money to purchase military equipment, such as Black Hawk helicopters, and to train military and police units—some with known ties to narco-traffickers (Franzblau 2015). They also argue that the US has been reticent to subject [End Page 180] Mexico to the Leahy Laws, which allow the US Departments of Defense and State to withhold foreign aid to countries not abiding by human rights standards (Seelke and Finklea 2017). The George...

Uso del análisis de conglomerados para la detección de encuadres noticiosos en el tratamiento periodístico de la Iniciativa Mérida

Matthes y Kohring (2008) han planteado que es indispensable para los estudios de framing el optar por métodos de identificación de encuadres con los que puedan obtenerse resultados fiables y válidos. En este estudio se empleó un análisis de conglomerados jerárquico para inferir inductivamente los encuadres específicos en la cobertura de la promoción y aprobación de la Iniciativa Mérida realizada por periódicos mexicanos.

Tumores mandibulares de conducta agresiva en pacientes pediátricos reconstruidos con placas de titanio (reporte de 3 casos)

Tumours of the facial region in children are rare, but the damage they cause in tissues leads to changes in the development and growth of the face, causing physical, aesthetic and psychological disorders. The histopathological origin of lesions is variable, but they are often locally aggressive, not corresponding to their benign histological appearance. To reach a correct diagnosis is important to determine the clinical and image characteristics presented by each lesion. A proper biopsy must be taken, as well as having a histopathologist with experience in recognising these tumours, since the correct treatment to be performed depends on this. The aim of the treatment is the resection of the lesion, restoring function and facial aesthetics and, where possible, to promote the growth of the defected anatomical structures.This article reports 3 cases of tumours in paediatric patients, rare and of histological different lineages, but with the same local aggressiveness, treated in the high speciality hospital number 71 of the Mexican Security Institute, Torreón, Coahuila, Mexico.

Expansive Intervention as Neo-Institutional Learning: Root Causes in the Merida Initiative

ABSTRACTInterventions since the 1990s have greatly expanded in policy scope. While neo-liberals understand expansion as an attempt to work on the enabling preconditions of liberal market democracy, Foucauldian governmentality studies see in expansion a set of increasingly intrusive disciplinary techniques of responsibilization. This paper introduces an alternative lens: neo-institutional learning. Through a case study of the Merida Initiative, a US–Mexican security cooperation agreement, the paper argues that expansion grows serendipitously out of the repetitive discovery of new, ‘deeper’ unknowns within a neo-institutional framework of analysis. Importantly, downward penetration requires deconstructing reductionist liberal-universal knowledge claims. Paradoxically, then, the more statebuilders learn (empirically), the less they know (analytically).

From Surveillance to Securocracy

From Surveillance to Securocracy Tony Cella (bio) Campo de guerra (Battleground) Sergio González Rodríguez Editorial Anagrama www.anagrama-ed.es/novedades 168 Pages; Print, $17.07 Campo de guerra (2014) is Mexican journalist and novelist Sergio González Rodríguez’s third non-fiction work in Spanish on violence in Mexico. Its predecessors are Huesos en el desierto (2006) and El hombre sin cabeza (2013). Huesos documents the systematic torture and murder of young women in Juárez during the 1990s while El hombre—part memoir, part anthropological study, and part visual critique—examines the semiotics of dismemberment and human sacrifice to la Santa Muerte, or Saint Death, by Mexican drug cartels. Campo de guerra continues in the vein of the author’s earlier works while addressing new topics that reach far beyond Mexico’s borders. The main purpose of the book is to propose a new approach to the Drug War in Mexico, one that ceases to see it strictly as a criminological phenomenon and focuses more on the US’s geopolitical interests and strategic use of Mexican security forces. Another goal is to explain, contextualize, and ultimately denounce the move towards a new global model of control and surveillance: a “Securocracy.” Winner of Anagrama’s award for best essay in 2014, Campo de guerra is 168 pages long and comprised of four chapters and an epilogue. Throughout the book, González Rodríguez explores the social, political, and economic factors that have contributed to an increase in drug-related violence in Mexico since the 1990s. He also reflects on global topics such as ultracontemporary battlegrounds— including cyber warfare, espionage, and other militarily-driven technologies—and planetary transhumanism, or the displacement of the human subject from the center of modern life by machines. Among the questions the author raises we find: what factors have led Mexico to be considered a “Narco-state,” and is it accurate to classify it as such? Where do Mexican citizens turn for justice given the prevalence of political and judicial corruption? How can we contest the paramilitarization of the police and the cyber-meddling of unchecked government agencies? And finally, how might human welfare be reprioritized in a world increasingly centered on the profits of financial institutions and militarily-induced technological expansion? González Rodríguez does not leave these questions open ended, nor does he try to eschew controversy. As in past works, he intends to both inform and spur activism. In the first chapter, González Rodríguez addresses his concerns about the future of privacy, human rights, and sovereignty in the post 9/11 world. Later, he proceeds to argue that the US has orchestrated the Drug War, in large part, to force Mexico to adopt a number of productive, intelligence, penal, and security reforms. These reforms, he contends, have led to major spatial and symbolic transformations in Mexico but failed at making the country any safer. The target of his criticism is the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP) signed by presidents George W. Bush and Vicente Fox Quesada, an agreement whose aim, according to the author, is to pressure Mexico’s armed forces into protecting US national security interests in Central America and the Caribbean. This may sound like a conspiracy theory, but González Rodríguez goes to great lengths to cite official documents from the Pentagon, the State Department, the Office of the Mexican Attorney-General (PGR, in Spanish), and the United Nations to support his claims. He also provides information given to him by former intelligence operatives that worked with American and Mexican officials in the War on Drugs. González Rodríguez does not forget about internal politics. In the second and fourth chapters, he explains how former Mexican president Felipe de Jesús Calderón Hinojosa’s efforts to eradicate drug trafficking began without any regard for, nor previous consultation of, the Mexican people. According to the author, Calderón encouraged Mexico’s armed forces to take a more proactive role in policing the country, despite their duties being restricted to specific areas and tasks by the Mexican constitution. Here, González Rodríguez explains how Mexican authorities...

La otra guerrilla mexicana. Aproximaciones al estudio del Ejército Popular Revolucionario

An aspect of Mexican life which has not been sufficiently examined is the post-zapatista guerrilla. It appeared in 1996, but in the course of four years it disintegrated and became almost non-existent. The influence of zapatismo, the militar y actions under taken by Mexican security agencies, its relationship with social struggles, and the unsteady process of a democratic transition that is unable to reach the rural areas, limited this process in various ways; although, it is also impor tant to highlight the social suppor t that the armed struggle receives. The poor media coverage it received is another difference experienced by the EPR, which currently struggles with internal problems, repression and the termination of its original project.

Central American Migrants in Mexico: Implications for U.S. Security and Immigration Policy

Central American migrants are fleeing increasingly untenable conditions in their home countries. Corruption among Mexican officials and tightened security at borders and checkpoints inside Mexico push these migrants into the hands of criminal organizations while in transit. As such, they are vulnerable to extortion, assault, kidnapping, and murder by those organizations and corrupt authorities. Members of the Catholic Church are stepping in to protect and advocate on behalf of migrants attempting the hazardous trek through Mexico, often atop freight trains, but hundreds of thousands are facing daunting, often lethal perils. The result is a humanitarian crisis that simultaneously strengthens criminal organizations – the unanticipated consequences, as seen by the Church and human rights advocates, of both U.S. and Mexican security and border control policies. Without changes in those policies, they believe, there is little chance that this situation will be overcome. As conditions continue to deteriorate in Honduras and elsewhere in Central America’s Northern Triangle, and the U.S. promises ever-stricter border enforcement, both the volume of out-migration of these refugees and the threats to the physical wellbeing of migrants will likely increase.

The Legalization of Marijuana, Drug Trafficking, and U.S. and Mexican Security

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The Case of Deregulation of Investment Advice Services in Mexico: A New Face of Regulation

Los reguladores del mercado de valores continuamente enfrentan diversas disyuntivas, por ejemplo, entre promover la eficiencia del mercado o la protección a los inversionistas, o entre fomentar la innovación o reducir los riesgos de productos financieros.

Zones of Exclusion: Offshore Extraction, the Contestation of Space and Physical Displacement in the Nigerian Delta and the Mexican Gulf

Abstract: This article examines two aid interventions that manifest the merging of community development/relief and industrial security policy in the petroleum offshore of the Nigerian Niger Delta and the Mexican Gulf. In the Nigerian case, the article considers the crisis in the Warri region of Delta State in 2003, the subsequent evacuation of local residents, and the surrounding context of oil‐related violence. Simmering since the 1990s, the 2003 Warri conflict displaced thousands due to competing community claims to territory that “hosts” oil installations, Shell and Chevron primarily. In Mexico, the analysis centers on the implementation of 2003 Mexican security legislation, prompted by International Maritime Organization post 9/11 security policy, that amplifies the “Zone of Exclusion” around offshore installations. To offset the loss of livelihoods resulting from the “exclusion zone”, Mexican state agencies offered financing to support the conversion of the displaced small‐scale fishers to fish farming. The varying forms of displacement prompted by these two “liberating” interventions reflect the socio‐historical specificity of territorial relations in the Nigerian and Mexican extractive regimes. These relations constitute divergent extractive settings which have come to play contrasting roles in the global political economy of oil, one highly volatile, the other relatively stable.

Mexico: Financial Sector Assessment Program Update: Detailed Assessment on the Implementation of the IOSCO Objectives and Principles of Securities Regulation

The Detailed Assessment report on Mexico’s implementation of the International Organization of Securities Commissions Objectives and Principles of Securities Regulation is analyzed. The Mexican securities market is dominated by daily trading in short-term government debt securities, primarily through repo transactions among banks, brokers, institutions, and private investors. The 2001 Financial Sector Assessment Program noted significant structural issues in the Mexican repo market, and recommended government action to create a standard master agreement for repo transactions.

Consequences of Firms' Relational Financing in the Aftermath of the 1995 Mexican Banking Crisis

This paper shows that, in the aftermath of the 1995 banking crisis, relational financing was a two-edged sword for firms listed on the Mexican Securities Market. On the negative side, only bank-linked firms observed on average a dependence on cash stock to finance their investment projects. On the positive side, the banking connection was important to boost their profit rates during the 1997–2000 period, at least for financially healthy firms. These econometric results are derived from dynamic panel data models of investment and profit rates, which are estimated by the Generalized Method of Moments, where level and difference equations are combined into a system.

Internal Capital Markets and Financing Choices of Mexican Firms Before and During the Financial Paralysis of 1995-2000

This paper shows that, contrary to conventional wisdom, once the Mexican economy moved from financial liberalization to financial paralysis in 1995, liquidity constraints were relaxed for many large and financially healthy firms listed on the Mexican Securities Market. In the latter period, only those firms with a banking tie observe, on average, a dependence on cash stock to finance their investment projects. Econometric results are derived from dynamic panel data models estimated with the Generalized Method of Moments, where level and difference equations are combined into a system.