More than 10,000 people have died from drug-related violence in Mexico since 2007, according to news reports. Muggings, beatings and kidnappings have spiked, creating a security vacuum and a rise in vigilante justice. To fight the growing challenge, the country’s president, Felipe Calderón, recently declared a “war on traffickers.” An international cast of scholars discussed Mexico’s burgeoning violence and possible solutions at Columbia University on Nov. 15 and 16.

 

“Right now criminal violence and fear in Mexico seem to be unraveling out of control, but the research presented in this workshop suggests a more nuanced picture and presents new avenues for research,” said Pablo Piccato, associate professor of history and the lead organizer of the conference, “Crime, Insecurity, Fear in Mexico: Ethnographic and Policy Approaches.”

 

Dozens of scholars across the globe have been conducting significant research exploring the roots of violence in Mexico, but there is no academic or degree program in the country that focuses on criminology, said Piccato. The purpose of the conference, therefore, was to help fill that void and start an interdisciplinary conversation among scholars as a first step toward the creation of such a discipline. The panelists also spoke with an eye toward influencing public policy.

 

Held at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, the two-day conference included discussions about gangs, drug trafficking and propaganda, among other related subjects. A central goal of the discussions was to explain Mexico’s culture of fear, which Piccato called the engine behind the violence. “The deaths in Mexico have become numbers, rather than names and faces, and fear makes the national conversation difficult,” said Piccato, an expert in the history of Mexican crime, whose newest book, The Tyranny of Opinion: Honor in the Construction of the Mexican Public Sphere, will be published early next year.

 

During the first panel, speakers addressed the corruption within the ranks of the Mexican police force. Over the last few years, several dozen police have been caught in kidnapping schemes, said panelist Elena Azaola of the Center for Research and Higher Studies in Social Anthropology, based in Mexico City. In 2008, at the request of the city’s police chief, Azaola interviewed 35 incarcerated ex-policemen. “We found that these men become delinquent inside the police institution,” she said.

 

“Police are in some ways the very eye of the storm” where we begin to understand the complex dimensions of crime in Mexico, said panelist Daniel Goldstein, the director of the Center for Latin American Studies at Rutgers University. “Some people are more afraid of the police than they are of the criminals.”

 

In 2008, more than 1,000 kidnappings were officially recorded, but the real total is probably closer to 20,000, said Azaola. More than 15 percent of those kidnappings involved police collusion, she said, blaming the abuse within the hierarchy of the police force.

 

“It’s very important to address these issues here at Columbia, especially since Mexican migration to New York is increasing,” said Julia del Palecio, a doctoral student in the University’s Latin American program and native of Mexico City. More people than ever are now studying Latin America, she said, “and it’s very important to have forums like these so we can exchange ideas. It’s one of the reasons I came to Columbia.”

 

The conference was sponsored by the Institute of Latin American Studies and co-sponsored by the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy and the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race.