In Mexico and across other parts of Latin America local Indigenous
peoples have built community policing groups as a means of protection
where the state has limited control over, and even complicity in, crime
and violence. Luis Hernandez Navarro, a leading Mexican journalist,
offers a riveting investigation of these armed self-defense groups that
sprang up around the time of the 1994 Zapatista uprising in Chiapas.
Available in English for the first time, the book spotlights the intense
precarity of everyday life in parts of Mexico. Hernandez Navarro shows
how the self-defense response, which now includes wealthier rancher and
farmer groups, is being transformed by Mexico's expanding role in the
multibillion dollar global drug trade, by foreign corporations'
extraction of raw minerals in traditionally Indigenous lands, and by the
resulting social changes in local communities.
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*But as Hernandez Navarro acknowledges, self-defense is highly
controversial. Community policing may provide citizens with increased
agency, but for government officials it can be a dangerous threat to the
status quo. Leftists and liberals are wary of how the groups may be
linked to paramilitary forces and vulnerable to manipulation by drug
traffickers and the government alike. This book answers the urgent call
to understand the dangerous complexities of government failures and
popular solutions.