From Surveillance to Securocracy

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...