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In this paper, I report on research about the experience of a group of English teachers who returned from the violent gang culture of Southern California to Mexico, seeking a means of changing their identities from gang members into productive, educated members of society. On returning to Mexico, the teachers had to negotiate their otherness and differences stemming from the customs and traditions they learned to perceive as normal. They learned to adapt to and blend the culture and values they had in Southern California with those of Mexico, using their English as capital to join a new community of practice, English Teaching. Through teaching they were able to gain cultural capital and bring meaning and purpose to their lives as they adapted and their identities changed through time and space. This paper offers insight into the struggle of transnational youth and how they adapt to different communities. This is especially important in a country like Mexico, where Mexican youth often grow up in the United States and have to come back to Mexico, a country they often do not feel they belong to.

This article offers a sampling and critique of the history of education in North America, including Canada, the United States and Mexico. Being Black and Indigenous academics, respectively, the authors' scholarship centres on community relationships, considering activism around #BlackLivesMatter and Indigenous Peoples, especially with the news of thousands of unmarked graves at former Indian Residential Schools in Canada. Amidst increasing global calls for decolonisation, social justice and accountability, we ask: how should one consider the history of education in North America amidst social unrest, climate change, the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, ongoing colonialisms, gender inequities, police violence against Black bodies and unmarked graves of Indigenous children? This paper traces histories of Indian Residential Schools, explores schooling structures and emerging settler states, and examines the growing focus on local histories to offer new directions in the history of education that challenge antiquated national narratives.

This paper focuses on sharing methodologies implemented in the classroom setting to identify gender-based violence (GBV). Rooted in Feminist Geography, these methodologies include focus groups and counter-cartographies that centre the concept of cuerpo-territorio as a scale of analysis in order to understand structural violence in our spaces of production and reproduction, how it is embodied and how we can collectively transform violent spatialities. We argue that collective knowledge as a means of preventing GBV can be produced through concepts taught within the subject of Geography. The locations of the high schools involved include Mexico City, San Luis Potosi and Oaxaca.

This paper takes the notion of inclusion as an imperfect and contested project toward educational and social justice, which seeks to address social and historically constructed exclusion. It aims to problematise 'inclusion research' of school and community relationships in Mexico by examining the orientations and implications for inclusion of doing educational research aligned with a more 'Western' critical approach to social justice as opposed to research explicitly situated in a decolonial and intercultural perspective. It firstly characterises how inclusion is dealt with by critical and decolonial perspectives. Secondly, through a comparative exploration of two ethnographic research projects about school-community relationships, it analyses the implications of both approaches and explores the articulation between 'substantive power' and 'formal power' in the research, arguing for the need to include an epistemic and ontological dimension in inclusion as social-justice-oriented research.

Building durable peace through education requires addressing the gender ideologies and hierarchies that encourage both direct physical aggression and indirect harm through marginalization and exploitation. Although formal education systems are shaped by gendered patterns of social conflict, enmity, and inequity, schools can help young people to build on their inclination, relationships, and capability to participate in building sustainable, gender-just peace. In this paper, we draw from focus group research conducted with youth and teachers in public schools in Mexico, Bangladesh, and Canada to investigate how young people understood the social conflicts and violence surrounding them and what citizens could do about these issues; and how their teachers used the school curricula to address them. The research revealed that gender-based violence was pervasive in students' lives in all three settings, yet the curriculum the teachers and students described, with minor differences between contexts, included few opportunities to examine or resist the gender norms, institutions, and hierarchies that are the roots of exploitation and violence.

This article explores gaming manifestations of the US-centric Mexican threat narrative in the context of the so-called drug war, by analyzing Manichean representations of characters, settings, and language (English and Spanish). It argues that videogames construct the concept of the Mexican subject in direct opposition to the US subject--in a decontextualized enemy-hero dialectic--fueling damaging stereotypes that have important repercussions in social, economic, and political discourses in and about Mexico and the United States. This paper examines the stereotypes of Mexican peoples and cartels in videogames depicting the drug conflict and released between 2011 and 2016: "Call of Juarez: The Cartel," "Army of Two: The Devil's Cartel," "Grand Theft Auto V," and "Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Wildlands." Additionally, it reflects on projects such as "NarcoGuerra," which aims at counteracting stereotyped hegemonic discourses by promoting informed and empathetic representations of the so-called war on drugs. The overarching goal of this analysis is to provide an insight into gaming representations of the relationship between Mexico and the United States, the geopolitics of drug trafficking, and the neocolonial hegemonic frameworks that fuel them.

The relation between being out of school and participating in criminal economies is widely documented in the literature on youth delinquency. However, the complex connection between these two phenomena has not yet been fully unpacked. This paper draws from two studies that we, the authors, conducted separately to explore the role educational experiences play in shaping the delinquent trajectories of male youth who participate in the drug business in urban centers located in Mexico and Colombia. The first consists of in-depth interviews and surveys conducted in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, while the second is based on long-term ethnographic engagement in Medellín, Colombia. We provide unique insights into the educational experiences of this hard-to-reach population and find that economic hardship does not wholly explain why these young people leave school and engage in delinquent activities. These youth do not "drop out" of school in search of money; rather, they are "pushed out" by a vicious cycle of stigmatization, segregation, punishment, and exclusion. By exploring these dynamics in two cities that have waged long drug wars, this article furthers understanding of the nexus between crime-related violence and educational experiences, thus making an important contribution to the field of education in emergencies.

Initially written in the form of an essay, this letter is written to my children from a place called Land. It unveils the entanglements coloniality creates in young, racialized, and gendered lives through the colonial logics structuring childhood, memory, and borders. From a diasporic perspective, Land emerges as "flesh" rooted in the "saberes," the knowledge of our mothers and grandmothers. Remembering and returning to the places we call home, in my case, US/Mexico border, help us grapple with trauma and also learn ways people respond to the violence. I illuminate the colonial wounds we bare and the knowledge we carry to suture and heal.

Mexico has a long history of tensions between the government and student activists. This history dates back to student protests that ended with the State's violent repression of students in 1968. These tensions were reignited with the student occupation of Mexico's National Autonomous University from 1999 to 2000, which ended through intervention by the national federal police. In the 21st century, student expression and activism occurs in the physical world as well as on social media sites. For example, the hashtag #YoSoy132 was created by a student movement begun at the Jesuit "Universidad Iberoamericana" in opposition to the then candidate and now President of the country, Enrique Peña Nieto. In this paper, we conceptualize social media sites as virtual public spaces, and we employ cultural critical visual discourse analysis to examine the case of student "hashtivism," online activism through hashtags, in response to the forced disappearance of 43 students from the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers College of Ayotzinapa in September 2014.

This paper discusses findings from focus groups with youth located in underprivileged surroundings in one large multicultural city in Canada and in a moderately large city in Mexico, examining their understandings and lived experiences of migration-related conflicts. Canadian participants framed these conflicts as a problem of racist attitudes towards immigrants in an otherwise welcoming city. Mexican youth understood emigration as a questionable individual dream to overcome precarious economic conditions, bringing about violence to those travelling and family fractures for those who stay. We identify tensions between these dominant narratives about mobility and conflict--usually also present in intended curriculum--and students' first-hand, every day experiences with migration in each setting. We point out to youths' contrasting imaginaries of citizenship--sense of agency and identity positions--with regards to migration in each setting, showing the limited opportunities they have to make sense of their lived (globalized) conflicts beyond their own localized cultural explanations. We argue that connecting the recognition of cultural differences in the world with the power imbalances, unequal positions, and historically structured global inequities revealed by issues such as migration, must become a crucial effort in citizenship education on global issues.

Public education is one influence on how young people learn to navigate social conflicts and to contribute to building democratic peace, including their sense of hope or powerlessness. Social studies curricula, in particular, introduce core concerns, geographies, governance and civil society, and participation skills and norms. History education narratives frame identity, (dis)trust or peaceful coexistence, and provide exemplars of how social conflicts and injustice have been handled in the past. To shed light on these peacebuilding and peace-blocking choices, this paper examines government-sanctioned social studies and history curricula in contrasting contexts of violent conflict and peace: Bangladesh, Colombia, México, and (Ontario) Canada. Our comparative analysis shows how these official curricula (de)normalize violence and militarism, present national identities as hegemonic/exclusive or plural/inclusive, and create opportunities for teaching/learning peacebuilding citizenship competencies such as conflict dialog, human rights awareness, and engagement in collective processes of civil society and governance.

Worldwide, it is widely recognized that violent conflicts constrain economic growth and development. Thus, it is necessary to research and analyse the main causes of violence and their relationship with development. This paper analyses how violence has affected economic development in the Mexican context during the 2000–2015 period. It takes into account that in the last decade, this country has had increased levels of violence, especially since the 'war on drugs' against drug trafficking was promulgated in 2006. This study uses different econometric models that apply the assessments of the panel unit root and cointegration tests and panel cointegration estimation. The results indicate that the tests used to validate the data allow the panel data cointegration relationships to be calculated. They demonstrate the existence of a long-run relationship between violence and economic development. Specifically, the results take into account that gross domestic product per capita and public investments have inverse relationships with the homicide rate, whereas poverty, unemployment, illiteracy and the Gini index have direct relationships with the homicide rate. Moreover, violence is strongly related to the deterrence variables. The findings of this study demonstrate that drug trafficking explains the increased violence in Mexico. Thus, it is important to develop and formulate adequate policies to control this situation, take measures to control violence starting with its root causes and promote social and economic development with a strategy to strengthen legal activities in society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper extends scholarship on Gender-Based Violence (GBV) through a case study in Saltillo, Mexico. The work is based on interviews (N:12) and survey work (N: 611) with women who have experienced GBV in spaces of public transport (busses) in this city. We extend existing work through an analysis of the role of the local state in GBV by exploring women's experiences of the systems in place to report and redress episodes of GBV in spaces of public transport. Building on existing conceptual work in feminist geography, we argue that systems for reporting gender-based violence in public transport can function as a mechanism of re-victimisation on the part of local authorities. Based on this analysis, we argue that the Mexican state is not only failing in its commitment to enable women to live lives free from violence but also acting as an agent of further violence [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Undocumented Central American migrants in Mexico are legally eligible for free access to the public health system through the new Instituto para la Salud y el Bienestar (INSABI) health program, but many experience structural vulnerability and stigmatization that prevent them from accessing health-care facilities. The purpose of this study is to investigate the discrepancy between the migrants' Human Right to health, proclaimed by the Mexican Government and supposedly guaranteed by law, and the reality of the migration process. Design/methodology/approach: This study reviewed relevant literature on the health risk factors, social and structural vulnerability, stigmatization and structural violence experienced by undocumented migrants as obstacles to their Human Right to health. It also reviews the current legal framework in Mexico and internationally. Findings: This review demonstrates the lack of implementation of the current legal framework in Mexico and identifies a set of complex obstacles to effective access to health for undocumented migrants. Although the migration process itself was not found to be directly associated with major health issues, the social conditions of the migratory journey expose the migrants to serious threats, especially sexually transmitted diseases and tuberculosis. Practical implications: This paper makes 10 practical recommendations for interventions collectively involving the state, international and civil organizations and the migrant community. These are especially relevant since the implementation of the INSABI health program in 2020. Social implications: The paper lays the basis for influencing Mexican health system stakeholders to improve the health of migrants. Originality/value: The sociological barriers to health access for undocumented populations in Mexico have not been fully explored. In addition, this paper provides a unique reflection on opportunities and challenges linked to the 2020 health system reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how state agents and civilians justify human rights violations when the military perform police tasks. Based on a set of interviews and documents, it analyses the actions of the armed forces and the police during a military‐led operation that targeted drug trafficking organisations in Tijuana. In a context of limited civilian control over the armed forces and the police, the paper identifies two discourses that supported the illegal action of state agents: the construction of a foreign other who does not belong to society and the need to use violence to accomplish a greater good. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Countries in the Global South are particularly vulnerable to social and political violence. This paper suggests that such violence makes certain recalcitrant economic interests more open to taxes and spending on social welfare. Using results from a survey experiment of business owners and operators in Mexico, we show that relative to more innocuous institutional weaknesses, concerns over violence generally increase support for anti-poverty spending and decrease support for tax cuts. To build a theory, we explore heterogeneous effects and textual data. The findings suggest that business interests see anti-poverty spending as a tool for shoring up costs of violence in consumer markets, with some leaders even extending support to welfare-enhancing taxes. However, violence can create challenges in labor markets that increase operational costs, leading some business interests to resist tax policies that ask them to help fund social programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper analyzes, from the perspective of desecuritization theory, the manner in which Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) changed the policy of the Mexican government for tackling drug trafficking in the country from a military to a social approach. The aim is to establish whether this strategy has been successful in comparison with the open war waged against the drug cartels over the twelve years preceding the AMLO administration. Given that this desecuritization strategy resulted from political decision-making rather than social pressure, the analysis presented here focuses on the President’s position and the actions he has taken. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the effects of drug-related crimes on employment in Mexico at the state level during the period 2005–2014. Results indicate that such crimes have a negative impact on employment. We are able to decompose employment into low-skilled and high-skilled employment, and results are heterogeneous among both types of employment. Results indicate that a 10% increase in drug-related crimes reduces total employment up to 0.9%. Additionally, our empirical findings indicate that high-skilled employment is more sensitive to an increase in drug-related violence than low-skilled employment. Low-skilled employment decreases up to 0.3%, while skilled employment declines up to 1.5% when drug-related violence increases by 10%. It is also found that skilled employment responds at an increasing rate when drug violence skyrockets. We also find that a rise in drug-related crimes increases wages as a mechanism to retain jobs in violent places. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Austral de Ciencias Sociales is the property of Facultad de Filosofia y Humanidades, Intituto de Ciencias Sociales, Universidad Austral de Chile and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

• Case study on smallholder agrobiodiversity and drug crops in Oaxaca, Mexico. • Drug and food crops complement each other until a threshold of violence is crossed. • Crop specialization tends to favor violence-driven abandonment of agriculture. • Crop/livelihood diversification reduces peasants' exposure and sensitivity to violence. • Organized, militarized, and diversified peasants mitigate violent agrarian change. Drawing on political-ecological vulnerability theory, this paper analyzes the impact of illegal-drug cultivation and its related violence on smallholder agrobiodiversity in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico. Oaxaca is a global agrobiodiversity hotspot where cannabis and opium poppy have been widely cultivated for decades. The study is based on 76 structured/semi-structured interviews with imprisoned farmers, harvest gatherers, and former soldiers in four state prisons. Results show that illegal-drug crops and native-food crops complement each other until a threshold of violence is crossed, which leads to the abandonment of agriculture due to murder, imprisonment, and out-migration. The specialization of smallholder agriculture in illegal-drug crops tends to favor crossing the threshold of violence. In most municipalities in this study, however, rather a diversification process took place in which illegal-drug crops were incorporated to food production systems, reducing both the exposure and the sensitivity of smallholders to structural and direct violence. Other adaptation strategies involved local organization and militarization of smallholders for collective-risk management and territorial control. Ultimately, by comparing five vulnerability scenarios, this paper argues that the combination of peasant organization, militarization, and crop/livelihood diversification in Oaxaca mitigates the violent agrarian change associated with this illegal economy, while conserving agrobiodiversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Urban Studies (Sage Publications, Ltd.) is the property of Sage Publications, Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Journal of Politics in Latin America is the property of Sage Publications Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Foro Internacional is the property of El Colegio de Mexico AC and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper evaluates correlates of trichomoniasis among female sex workers who inject drugs (FSWIDs) in two Mexico-US border cities. HIV-negative FSWIDs aged 18 years or older were enrolled in a study between 2008 and 2010 in Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez (Cd.), Mexico. All participants underwent a baseline interviewer-administered survey and did a rapid test for trichomoniasis. Using regression to estimate prevalence ratios, we examined sociodemographics, sex work characteristics, sexual health and behavior, substance use, and police and violence exposures as potential correlates of trichomoniasis. Of 584 women (284 in Tijuana, 300 in Cd. Juarez), prevalence of trichomoniasis was 33.6%. Factors associated with trichomoniasis in multivariable analysis were having money stolen by police in the past six months (adjusted prevalence ratio [aPR] =1.448, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.152-1.821), recent methamphetamine use (aPR = 1.432, CI = 1.055-1.944), lifetime syphilis infection (aPR = 1.360, CI = 1.061-1.743), ever use of a home remedy to treat vaginal symptoms (aPR = 1.301, CI = 1.027-1.649), and number of regular clients in the past month (aPR = 1.006 per client, CI = 1.004-1.009), while controlling for age and city of interview. Alongside the need for trichomoniasis surveillance and treatment programs, findings indicate that both structural and behavioral factors serve as primary correlates of trichomoniasis among FSWIDs in these cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a vast literature documenting negative impacts of crime on human capital accumulation, which has focused on large‐scale armed conflicts affecting both individuals and infrastructure. However, there is much less evidence in contexts where violence is not accompanied by the destruction of infrastructure. To fill this gap, this paper studies the effects of Mexico's War on Drugs (WoD) on individuals' schooling decisions. Our results show only small effects of violence on total enrollment of children and young adults, in contrast to recent studies which find significant negative effects for some specific age‐by‐gender groups. Our analysis, which aims to assess the overall impacts of the WoD on enrollment decisions and takes advantage of various rounds of administrative data, the population census, and labor force surveys, shows that many families responded to the increase in violence by migrating to less affected municipalities. However, we find that their education decisions have been quite robust as greater violence did not affect their probability of being enrolled in school. In the long term, however, it is still possible that the increase in violence affects human capital accumulation through indirect effects arising in skill acquisition in early childhood and other stages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2010, ten years after Mexico’s so-called ‘transition to democracy,’ the country commemorated two hundred years of independence and one hundred years of revolution. To celebrate, the state spent nearly 230 million dollars on diverse sites of memory, mass spectacles, and works of art. These commemorative projects, including the controversial, gigantic statue dubbed theColoso, triggered extensive debates that addressed the country’s myriad contemporary political issues. These discussions revealed a growing disappointment with electoral democracy and an increasing anxiety about the war on the drug trade launched by president Felipe Calderón. The state’s manifestation of power during the celebrations was paradoxically seen as a reminder of its inability to curb the growing violence, and the commemorations were widely regarded as a failure. This paper examines this failure by analyzing how the Coloso generated political discourses that fostered new forms of resistance and critique. Soon after its display, the statue was abandoned and inadvertently became an ephemeral monument. This paper argues that the literal rise and fall of theColosois symptomatic of the state’s increasing inability to control the nation’s symbolic landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

México is powerfully associated with extreme violence. We explore why this should be in terms of the war on drugs, colonialism, oligarchic history, neoliberalism, and gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses the surge in drug-related violence in Mexico to study the effect of violent crime on married women's decision-making. Using a fixed-effects regression model, we find that increased violence is associated with a reduction in women's participation in household decision-making. Yet, the effect is small—at the average, it leads to women making 0.11 fewer decisions, a decrease of 1.2% relative to the baseline value. Further, the effect is short-lived—the effect of past homicides is not significant when controlling for current levels of violent crime. We find that violence is associated with higher probability of working and higher number of working hours for women, while men experience a reduction in their probability of working. This implies that our results are likely not due to changing norms or women losing economic power but rather women spending less time at home while men take on some of the household responsibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the dynamics of racialized securitization for transnational migrants across multiple borders—from Central America toward Mexico and the United States. Rather than a singular process where US policies, funding, and attitudes toward border security direct Mexican immigration enforcement, I argue that Mexican state collaboration redirects US xenophobia away from Mexican migrants and toward Central American migrants. Migrants' testimonies point to the ways that US and Mexican discourses are mobilized in different—but complementary—ways that shape them as racialized subjects with differential life chances. This is clearest through a crude mapping of people onto nationalities for deportation based on hair, language, and tattoos. Beyond legal violence, deported migrants describe their vulnerability as constructed within tacit networks of collaboration between actors in the US and Mexico, both licit and illicit, in an effort to extort migrants and their families. While race is a key signifier in border securitization, the differences between these racial states have material consequences in the differential state violence in immigration enforcement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Temas Americanistas is the property of Temas Americanistas and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

From 2006, the state's highly securitised and militarised anti-narcotics strategies resulted in an unprecedented level of violence and casualties in Mexico. Furthermore, political and judicial channels have been partially closed to the civil society suffering from the ongoing violence and war on drugs. This study elaborates on the emergence and development of Movimiento por la Paz con Justicia y Dignidad (MPJD), which took place in 2011 as a civil society response to the increasing extrajudicial killings. Aiming to analyse how Mexican authorities' policies and strategies of the movement relationally shaped each other and forged the pathway of MPJD, the paper deploys the Discursive Opportunities Structure (DOS) approach. Drawing on the theoretical and conceptual toolkit of DOS and its conceptualisations, the article argues that MPJD has succeeded in achieving many of its goals, most notably making the victims of the war on drugs visible and becoming a considerable political movement in Mexican politics. By analysing the case of MPJD, which emerged and developed during the ongoing war on drugs in Mexico, the study contributes to the social movements studies that aim to understand the drug wars and political opportunities that arise in these environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Ciencia Jurídica is the property of Universidad de Guanajuato and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Mexico has a long history of tensions between the government and student activists. This history dates back to student protests that ended with the State's violent repression of students in 1968. These tensions were reignited with the student occupation of Mexico's National Autonomous University from 1999 to 2000, which ended through intervention by the national federal police. In the 21st century, student expression and activism occurs in the physical world as well as on social media sites. For example, the hashtag #YoSoy132 was created by a student movement begun at the Jesuit Universidad Iberoamericana in opposition to the then candidate and now President of the country, Enrique Peña Nieto. In this paper, we conceptualize social media sites as virtual public spaces, and we employ cultural critical visual discourse analysis to examine the case of student ''hashtivism,'' online activism through hashtags, in response to the forced disappearance of 43 students from the Raú l Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers College of Ayotzinapa in September 2014. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the discourse of 'shared responsibility' that the governments of the United States and Mexico created through the 2008 Mérida Initiative. This discourse fixed the terms of an unruly debate that stood in the way of bilateral cooperation - are Mexico's drug cartels terrorists, and if so is Mexico in danger of failing? Specifically, the discourse does three things. First, it clarifies the formal position of both governments that Mexico's drug cartels are criminals, not insurgents. Second, by using the term 'transnational criminal organisation' ( TCO) to label the cartels, the United State accepts some responsibility for them. Finally, the discourse establishes a territorial notion of sharing so that US participation inside Mexico is limited. Although 'shared responsibility' has been characterised as a 'paradigm shift' in how the two countries deal with one another (Benítez Manaut 2009, R evista M exicana de P olítica E xterior 87), I argue here that it reinforces a militarised status quo. By defining 'shared responsibility' as an obligation between states, the two countries do not have to articulate a joint responsibility to Mexico's civilians, who bear the brunt of both the cartels and the bilateral fight against them. This framing also helps explain the US government's muted response to abuses by the Mexican military since the agreement took effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Longitudinal data from the Mexican Family Life Survey, in conjunction with aggregated vital statistics and census data, are used to examine how Mexican adults' experiences of violent victimization and perceptions of personal safety, as well as the homicide rate in their local community, are associated with the likelihood that they migrate to the USA. Multilevel logistic regression analyses provide suggestive evidence that Mexicans who report being recent victims of violence and who perceive a recent deterioration in their personal safety are more likely than others to migrate to the USA. The association between perceived deterioration in personal safety and the probability of migrating to the USA is particularly strong among residents of urban areas. We find no evidence that a generalized fear of crime or exposure to a high municipality-level homicide rate is associated with USA-bound migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Peri-urban areas are often subject to intensive construction, through both formal and informal processes. As land transitions from rural to urban status, different land tenure and administration systems may come into conflict, leading to disputes, contestation and, in some cases, violence. However, little is known about the precise causes of peri-urban land conflict. In Mexico, peri-urban growth has historically proceeded peacefully, owing to the control exerted by a corporatist system of government, and the political use of land tenure regularisation. However, the effects of land reforms on transactions at the peri-urban fringe, in the context of wider processes of liberalisation, may be increasing vulnerability to conflict over land. This paper explores these issues through a case study of an irregular settlement on the peri-urban fringe of the provincial Mexican city of Xalapa, where contestations over informally developed land have escalated into violent encounters between groups of settlers and the state. The findings show that vulnerability to conflict in peri-urban areas can be attributed to the interaction of macro-level processes with local-level factors, including diverse claims, overlapping legal and governance frameworks and, critically, local power relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, violence related to the so-called Mexican Drug War has escalated to unprecedented levels. As cartels seek to undermine the sovereignty of the Mexican State, they convey their message of social control to the public through various means, including corpse messaging, or leaving threatening and signatory messages on or around the bodies of their victims. Cartels use intimidation and brutality to scare the public into complicity, paralyzing its will to act by making violence a pertinent presence in quotidian Mexican life. This ever-present threat makes for an interesting relationship between the cartels and Mexican citizens. While self-defense militias have formed recently, many citizens seem to revere their social captors, or at least view them as the better of two evils, recognizing the criminal organizations as more legitimate authoritative figures than the Mexican officials, and the propaganda of the narcoculture industry perpetuates this reverence. This paper frames cartels as a ‘counterpublic’ in order to explore how drug organizations rely on the ‘reflexive circulation of discourse’ and the abduction of victim agency for the establishment of the social space needed to legitimize their conduct and how this new normality of performative violence can influence socio-political behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Despite catastrophic fallout from the Mexican drug war, headlines fail to capture the full cost to civilians. Using three waves of survey data on the same households, conducted between 2002 to 2012, we show that households adjusted both their consumption habits and altered their behaviour in response to increased homicide rates in their municipality. We demonstrate that higher murder rates are associated with households reducing expenditure on visible commodities and with individuals avoiding carrying valuables and going out at night. The spending changes occurred mainly for middle- and upper-income households, while the behavioural adjustments happened mainly in households that were poorer or headed by a female. Assuming that household behaviour was in equilibrium before the escalation in violence, these adjustments represent a non-obvious, but significant, welfare loss which should be considered in any account of the costs and benefits of the drug war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Obstetric violence is a human rights violation that consists of actions or omissions of healthcare personnel that harms people during pregnancy, childbirth or puerperium. Some practices through which it is expressed are the mistreatment, unnecessary procedures, denying of medical attention or provoking damage either physically or mentally. In particular, we understand obstetric violence as the result of a colonization of the womb, that is, of the occupation of the concept of motherhood by the dictates of patriarchal ideology (Fineman, 1991; Ehrenreich, 1993) and of the Colonial/Modern Gender System, proposed by Lugones (2007). The objective of this paper is to analyze the experiences of obstetric violence and the different agency forms of women who have experienced it in hospitals in Tijuana, Mexico. To achieve this, we follow Galtung (1969, 1990, 1998) who states that direct violence is just the tip of the iceberg of cultural and structural forms of violence that are more difficult to see. Based on Bourdieu (2001) and De Certeau (1998), agency is classified in four categories: 1) unawareness, 2) passive awareness, 3) tactics and 4) strategies. The intersectional analysis of the narrative stories of 20 women leads us to conclude that both those who have privileged positions and those who experience different oppressions based on their identity characteristics perform their agency in various ways. Including modern and non-modern knowledges, relations, values and practices, Decolonial Feminism (Lugones, 2010) contributes to an understanding of the decolonization of the womb at the collective level while simultaneously influencing individual learning and promoting social justice and the formation of a culture of rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social life in Mexico’s state of Michoacán is consumed by a crisis of violence. Foregrounding critical planning, this paper presents a grounded local history of the municipality of Tancítaro, Michoacán, which has the largest concentration of avocado production globally, and analyzes violence there in light of the production of space, uneven development, and the spatial politics of land. This quantitative and archival research, coupled with theoretical explanations on violence, suggests that considerations of crises and planning require situated analyses with ethnographic methods and embedded fieldwork that cross geographic scales and disciplinary boundaries as they foreground perspectives of affected community residents.

ABSTRACTWorldwide, it is widely recognized that violent conflicts constrain economic growth and development. Thus, it is necessary to research and analyse the main causes of violence and their relationship with development. This paper analyses how violence has affected economic development in the Mexican context during the 2000–2015 period. It takes into account that in the last decade, this country has had increased levels of violence, especially since the ‘war on drugs’ against drug trafficking was promulgated in 2006. This study uses different econometric models that apply the assessments of the panel unit root and cointegration tests and panel cointegration estimation. The results indicate that the tests used to validate the data allow the panel data cointegration relationships to be calculated. They demonstrate the existence of a long-run relationship between violence and economic development. Specifically, the results take into account that gross domestic product per capita and public investments have inverse relationships with the homicide rate, whereas poverty, unemployment, illiteracy and the Gini index have direct relationships with the homicide rate. Moreover, violence is strongly related to the deterrence variables. The findings of this study demonstrate that drug trafficking explains the increased violence in Mexico. Thus, it is important to develop and formulate adequate policies to control this situation, take measures to control violence starting with its root causes and promote social and economic development with a strategy to strengthen legal activities in society.

This article utilises logistic regression analysis to determine the factors that influence people from Mexico, El Salvador, and Guatemala deciding to flee to other countries. By broadening the traditional migration literature, we argue that organised crime, violence, and insecurity, not purely economic calculations, play a crucial role in one's decision to emigrate to the U.S. Although concretely economic motivations, such as the household's wage level, and social capital-related factors like having family ties in the destination country, are strong correlates in our models, we show that victimisation and fear of crime also affect the decision to live or work abroad. We contend that these factors are directly related to the presence of gangs and other criminal organisations in all three countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Around the world, non-state armed actors have been linked to the illegal extraction of energy resources. This research note explores the case of Mexico. Anecdotal evidence suggests that criminal groups have been gaining control of energy infrastructure across the country. At the same time, oil tapping has been directly associated with criminal violence. Yet, there has not been a systematic effort to causally identify the relationship between illegal extraction and criminal violence. In this research note, we use the exogenous variation in international oil prices—as a measure of potential profits—to assess the effect of access to energy infrastructure on criminal-related violence. Our results show that increases in oil prices are associated with higher levels of homicide rates in municipalities with pipelines and in neighboring municipalities. Specifically, a standard price increase during this period is associated with approximately 20% more homicides per year in municipalities with gasoline pipelines. A locality-level analysis suggests a non-linear distance effect. Finally, we also explore criminal fragmentation as the mechanism connecting access to resources and violence. We find that access to pipelines is associated with higher presence of organized crime groups, but not necessarily with more fragmentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The monopoly of violence in the hands of the state is conceived as the principal vehicle to generate order. A problem with this vision is that parts of the state and its law enforcement apparatus often become extensions of criminality rather than solutions to it. We argue that one solution to this dilemma is to “opt out from the state.” Using a multi-method strategy combining extensive qualitative research, quasi-experimental statistical analyses, and survey data, the paper demonstrates that indigenous communities in Mexico are better able to escape predatory criminal rule when they are legally allowed to carve a space of autonomy from the state through the institution of “usos y costumbres.” We demonstrate that these municipalities are more immune to violence than similar localities where regular police forces and local judiciaries are in charge of law enforcement and where mayors are elected through multiparty elections rather than customary practices.

How government agencies and non-governmental organizations address the significant increase in the number of unaccompanied minors arriving at the United-States Mexico border, mainly from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, has received significant attention among both popular and scholarly audiences. Less well-examined, however, is how such groups address the arduous processes of transit migration that these young people experience prior to reaching the US-Mexico border. While many child migrants suffer forms of violence that qualify them for international protection as refugees in Mexico, the growing number of unaccompanied minors detained by Mexican authorities are typically deported to the countries from which they flee after dubious best interest determinations. Drawing on 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork within non-governmental migrant shelters across Mexico, including in-depth interviews with unaccompanied minors and social service providers, this paper examines the experiences of young people who seek formal humanitarian recognition yet avoid detention by government agencies while in transit. I explore how these dynamics reveal tensions in how the best interests of unaccompanied minors are assessed and determined by government agencies and non-governmental organizations. In doing so, I demonstrate how migrant shelters both support and subvert best interest standards and call for a more mobile approach to aiding unaccompanied minors and their families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]