In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

285 CHAPTER TWELVE National Security versus Public Safety Femicide, Drug Wars, and the Mexican State Melissa W. Wright In 1994, a handful of women and their corresponding civic organizations spearheaded a political movement against violence in northern Mexico. Their initial protests sought to call attention to the violence that stalked women in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, the border city famous for its export-processing maquiladoras , young female workers, and nightclubs. The protestors came to call this violence “femicide” (feminicidio) to refer not only to the crimes but also to the impunity provided by the state and enjoyed by the criminals. Over the next ten years, the antifemicide protestors generated criticism of the Mexican government , at all levels, for its failure to provide public safety to the country’s working poor and their families along the border. By the mid-2000s, this criticism had intensified along with the violence that now terrorizes much of the Mexican border and especially Ciudad Juárez. As the Chihuahua legislator Victor Quintana has recently written, Ciudad Juárez is experiencing a “violence and social deterioration . . . in its maximum intensity” (2010). Linked to what the government broadly calls “drug violence,” more than 6,000 people have died violently in the city since 2008, and the reputation of “feminicidio” is now giving way to the infamy of “juvenicidio” (youth-killing), as young men kill young women and men at alarming rates on an almost daily basis. This violence has spiraled in direct response to the federal government’s declaration in 2006 of “war” against the cartels—the organizations that control the smuggling of drugs and people through the country and across its north- 286 • Melissa W. Wright ern border. One year later, the government deployed several thousand troops to Ciudad Juárez and other cities as part of this war—a move that has only seen a rapid increase in the murder rate across the city, where violence in 2009 broke all records since the revolution decade over a century ago. Yet as the wellknown Mexican historian, Victor Orozco (2009) declares, for some the violence indicates a failure of the state to provide for public safety, while the federal Mexican government points to this same violence as actual proof of its own success in winning the war and securing the nation against threat. The meaning of this violence, in other words, has become a battleground for determining whether the Mexican state is failing or is excelling in its duties to protect Mexico and its people. In this chapter, I examine how the social movement against femicide provides a lens for understanding what is at stake for Mexican democracy in the battle over the meaning of violence. Toward this end, I juxtapose the Mexican government’s militarized reaction to the drug violence to its response to the violence against women that was publicized by the antifemicide activists. To do so, I employ a post-structuralist and feminist analysis of the biopolitical strategies deployed by the governing elites of Ciudad Juárez to hew the concepts of national security from public safety as they respond both to the femicide and to the drug violence. Central to this effort has been an attempt by governing officials to portray the antifemicide activists and their allies as dangerous public women who, along with their demands for public safety, represent threats to the state, to the economy, and to Mexican families. In other words, I argue that the government’s discourse of public women has functioned as a biopolitical tactic for marginalizing the activists and their claims that the crisis of public safety exposes a crisis of the state. I then use this discourse analysis of “public women” and the meaning of violence as a frame for examining how governing officials seek to marginalize the victims of drug violence in a way that substantiates their claims that an increase in violence (and the correlated deterioration of public safety) indicates a strong state. This battle over the interpretation of violence and its meaning for the Mexican state and its citizens demonstrates the importance of examining the significance of fear for the relationship linking governance and subjectivity (see Foucault 2009; Mbembe 2003). For, on the one hand, the Mexican government contends that a fear wrought by uncontrolled violence in a climate of impunity is actually indicative of a secure state that is committed to the modern and liberal principles of civilian rule, while, on the other, many activists and scholars who are concerned about civil...

Share