Authorizing State Crime in Mexico: The Importance of a Destructive Social Milieu.

This essay seeks to specify some of the social-psychological determinants that led to the mobilization of deadly state crime in the Latin American authoritarian state context. The Mexican case provides an interesting case in which to specify some of these determinants because hundreds of leftist political party militants, often engaged in legal activities, have been gunned down by state agents (the police, the military, local politicians associated with the dominant party-state) or indirectly by hired guns on behalf of state leaders (Schatz 2001). I argue, in the Mexican case, that leadership authorization of destructive behavior was the critical activating historical condition activating deadly state crime because it created a permissive social milieu that allows for the utilization of more extreme forms of violence including the use of political assassination as a mode of social control. This permissive social milieu was, of course, aided by a passive legal system that generated the almost complete lack of penalties for state-sanctioned brutality. While none of these determinants alone may be sufficient to produce a wave of political-electoral homicides, when they all combine, it makes such destructive behavior very likely to occur. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]