TY - JOUR
T1 - “Involved in something (involucrado en algo)”
T2 - Denial and stigmatization in Mexico’s “war on drugs”
AU - Moon, Claire
AU - Trevino-Rangel, Javier
N1 - Funding Information:
This work is dedicated to the memory of our teacher, mentor and friend, Stan Cohen. The research was supported in part by the Wellcome Trust (grant number?205488/Z/16/Z). Grateful thanks to the Programa de Pol?tica de Drogas at Centro de Investigaci?n y Docencia Econ?micas, Aguascalientes, Mexico, and the Sociology Department at the London School of Economics for hosting visiting fellowships for the authors in 2018 which facilitated this research. Grateful thanks also to Paul Rock for early advice, Alejandro Pocoroba, Francisco Mena Ramos, and Francisco Guillermo Esparza Guevara for research assistance, and to two anonymous reviewers for their excellent comments.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 The Authors. The British Journal of Sociology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of London School of Economics and Political Science
PY - 2020/6/8
Y1 - 2020/6/8
N2 - This article responds empirically to the question posed by Stan Cohen about “why, when faced by knowledge of others’ suffering and pain—particularly the suffering and pain resulting from what are called ‘human rights violations’—does ‘reaction’ so often take the form of denial, avoidance, passivity, indifference, rationalisation or collusion?”. Our context is Mexico's “war on drugs.” Since 2006 this “war” has claimed the lives of around 240,000 Mexican citizens and disappeared around 60,000 others. Perpetrators include organized criminal gangs and state security services. Violence is pervasive and widely reported. Most people are at risk. Our study is based on qualitative interviews and focus groups involving 68 “ordinary Mexicans” living in five different Mexican cities which have varying levels of violence. It investigates participant proximity to the victims and the psychological defense mechanisms they deploy to cope with proximity to the violence. We found that 62 of our participants knew, directly or indirectly, one or more people who had been affected. We also found one dominant rationalization (defense mechanism) for the violence: that the victims were “involved in something” (drugs or organized crime) and therefore “deserved their fate.” This echoes prevailing state discourses about the violence. We argue that the discourse of “involved” is a discourse of denial that plays three prominent roles in a highly violent society in which almost no‐one is immune: it masks state violence, stigmatizes the victims, and sanctions bystander passivity. As such, we show how official and individual denial converge, live, and reproduce, and play a powerful role in the perpetuation of violence
AB - This article responds empirically to the question posed by Stan Cohen about “why, when faced by knowledge of others’ suffering and pain—particularly the suffering and pain resulting from what are called ‘human rights violations’—does ‘reaction’ so often take the form of denial, avoidance, passivity, indifference, rationalisation or collusion?”. Our context is Mexico's “war on drugs.” Since 2006 this “war” has claimed the lives of around 240,000 Mexican citizens and disappeared around 60,000 others. Perpetrators include organized criminal gangs and state security services. Violence is pervasive and widely reported. Most people are at risk. Our study is based on qualitative interviews and focus groups involving 68 “ordinary Mexicans” living in five different Mexican cities which have varying levels of violence. It investigates participant proximity to the victims and the psychological defense mechanisms they deploy to cope with proximity to the violence. We found that 62 of our participants knew, directly or indirectly, one or more people who had been affected. We also found one dominant rationalization (defense mechanism) for the violence: that the victims were “involved in something” (drugs or organized crime) and therefore “deserved their fate.” This echoes prevailing state discourses about the violence. We argue that the discourse of “involved” is a discourse of denial that plays three prominent roles in a highly violent society in which almost no‐one is immune: it masks state violence, stigmatizes the victims, and sanctions bystander passivity. As such, we show how official and individual denial converge, live, and reproduce, and play a powerful role in the perpetuation of violence
KW - Mexico
KW - bystanders
KW - denial
KW - stigmatization
KW - victims
KW - war on drugs
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85086025050&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1111/1468-4446.12761
DO - 10.1111/1468-4446.12761
M3 - Article
SN - 0007-1315
VL - 71
SP - 722
EP - 740
JO - The British Journal of Sociology
JF - The British Journal of Sociology
IS - 4
ER -