Torn from the World

by John Gibler

  3. Maribel Gutiérrez, Violencia en Guerrero, p. 223.

  4. Jon Lee Anderson, Guerrillas (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), p. xi.

  5. Guerrero state statistics for 1996 taken from the Encuesta Nacional de Alimentación y Nutrición en el Medio Rural.

  6. Laura Castellaños, México Armado. 1943–1981 (Mexico City: Ediciones Era, 2007), pp. 109–110, 113–114, 117–120; Marco Bellingeri, Del agrarismo armado a la guerra de los pobres (Mexico City: Ediciones Casa Juan Pablos, 2003), 1940–1974, pp. 121,125, 133–134, 178. One of the most powerful books on Guerrero during those years is Carlos Montemayor’s historical novel Guerra en el Paraíso (Mexico City: Debolsillo, 2009).

  7. In April 1970, 25,000 soldiers were deployed in Guerrero, a third of the standing army. “The articulate Secretary of Defense, General Hermenegildo Cuenca Díaz, justified this mobilization by referring to the struggle against drug trafficking and the support for vacationers,” Castellanos, México armado, p. 126.

  8. Carlos Montemayor, La guerrilla recurrente (Mexico City: Debate, 2007), p. 13.

  9. Ibid., p. 23.

  10. Carlos Montemayor, La violencia de Estado en México, p. 182.

  11. Salvador Corro, “En una sangrienta noche de terror, las fuerzas del EPR destruyen el mito de la pantomima,” in Proceso, September 1, 1996, pp. 13–17.

  12. While Ocampo continues to work at Radio UAG and AFP, he is now also the Chilpancingo correspondent for La Jornada.

  13. Maribel Gutiérrez is now an editor at El Sur, which changed its base to Chilpancingo; Hector Téllez is a photographer with Milenio in Mexico City; and Jesús Guerrero is still the Reforma correspondent in Chilpancingo.

  14. Michael Jordan played for the Chicago Bulls from 1984 to 1993 and then again from 1995 to 1998. During the 1995–1996 season Jordan scored more points than any other player in the National Basketball Association (NBA) and the Bulls won the NBA championship. National Basketball Association: www.nba.com/history/seasonreviews/1995-96/. Accessed January 28, 2018.

  THEY TEAR YOU FROM THE WORLD

  1. “The blindfold over my eyes has turned me into a defenseless target. Without vision I cannot evade or soften the blows. I sense the blows only as they make impact against me.” And: “This becomes a part of the scene of horror: that the torture victim is pulled at by many hands, and that the howls that chill the blood surge from many voices, as if from a pack of hungry wolves. The feeling of being at the mercy of an unknown number of people augments the fear of the torturers.” Claudio Tamburrini, Pase libre: La fuga de la Mansión Seré (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Continente, 2002), pp. 24 and 65. (All translations from works in Spanish are my own.)

  2. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 29 and 35. The world-destruction of a person is not alien to what is often called “civilization,” and it is not the destruction of civilization but rather a hidden part of its roots. As Idelber Avelar writes: “Torture has always entered into the very construction of what is understood and experienced anthropologically as ‘civilization,’ politically as ‘democracy,’ and philosophically and juridically as ‘truth.’ These are concepts whose history is quite indebted to the development of technologies of pain.” Idelber Avelar, “From Plato to Pinochet: Torture, Confession, and the History of Truth,” in The Letter of Violence. Essays on Narrative, Ethics and Politics (New York: Palgrave, 2004), p. 34.

  3. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain, p. 46.

  4. “Death is the only way out, I kept telling myself. They have all the time in the world, and you feel that dying is the only way to stop the endless suffering.” Nora Strejilevich, A Single, Numberless Death (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002), p. 15.

  5. Nora Strejilevich, “Testimony: Beyond the Language of Truth,” Human Rights Quarterly, 28(3): p. 702, August 2006.

  6. Idelber Avelar, The Letter of Violence (New York: Palgrave, 2004), p.31.

  7. Marguerite Feitlowitz, A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture (New York: Oxford University Press, revised edition, 2011). The quote reads: “They had so many ways . . . of erasing people, of trying to make you doubt the truth of your own life.”

  8. See, for example, James Baldwin, No Name in the Street (New York: Vintage International, 2007); Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Ch’ixinakax utixwa. Una reflexión sobre practices y discursos descolonizadores (Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón, 2010); Michel Foucault, “Society Must be Defended” Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–1976 (New York: Picador, 2003); Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), and Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007); Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics” (2003, Public Culture 15 [1]: pp. 11–40); Walter Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005); Aníbal Quijano, “Colonialidad del poder, eurocentrismo, y América Latina,” in E. Lander, ed., Colonialidad del saber. Eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales. Perspectivas latinoamericanas (Buenos Aires: CLACSO Libros, 2005), published in English as Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Social Classification,” in Mabel Moraña, Enrique Dussel, and Carlos A. Jáuregui, eds., Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); and Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2001).

  9. Tahar Ben Jelloun, This Blinding Absence of Light (New York: Penguin, 2006), p. 47. Jelloun’s novel is based on the experiences of a survivor of the Tazmamart secret prison in Morocco. The original quote reads: “I realized that dignity was also the refusal to have anything more to do with hope. To survive you had to give up hope. . . . Hope was a lie with sedative properties. To overcome it we had to prepare for the worst every day. Those who did not understand this sank into a violent and fatal despair.”

  10. Marguerite Feitlowitz, A Lexicon of Terror, pp. 76–77. The complete quotation, with the original emphasis, is as follows: “The physical evidence goes against you, you’re so weak, so sick and so tormented you think, if you can think: I am my shit; I am these stinking wounds; I am this festering sore. That is what you have to fight. And it’s goddamn difficult; because wherever they feel like it, they replenish the physical evidence that goes against you.”

  11. Mauricio Rosencof, former guerrilla fighter and political prisoner in Uruguay who participated in the mass escape from the Punta Carretas Prison in 1971. The quote is taken from Adrián Pérez, “La fuga de Punta Carretas, una epopeya,” in Página 12, September 9, 2011.

  THE SILENCES

  1. See the analysis of the theatricality of the horror carried out by torturers during the Argentine military dictatorship in Marguerite Feitlowitz, A Lexicon of Terror.

  2. Juliet Cohen, “Errors of Recall and Credibility. Can Omissions and Discrepancies in Successive Statements Reasonably Be Said to Undermine Credibility of Testimony?” Medico-Legal Journal, 69 (1): pp. 25–34, 2001.

  3. Ibid., p. 11.

  4. Quoted in Nora Strejilevich, “Beyond the Language of Truth,” Human Rights Quarterly, 28 (3): p. 704, August 2006.

  5. Strejilevich, “Beyond the Language of Truth,” p. 704. See also: Nora Strejilevich, A Single, Numberless Death (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002).

  6. Elaine Scarry writes with power and clarity about how pain breaks language in her book The Body in Pain. During an event in Mexico City called “La Guerra de los Dos Lados” (The War on Both Sides) poet Javier Sicilia said the following about the pain he felt on losing a child to murder: “No words can reach it. Language enters a zone of silence.” His son, Juan Francisco, and six other people were murdered on March 28, 2011. The other people murdered that day were Julio César Romero Jaimes, Luis Antonio Romero Jaimes, Álvaro Jaimes Avelar, Jaime Gabriel Alejo Cadena, María del Socorro Estrada Hernández, and Jesús Chávez Vázquez.

  THE INTERVIEW


  1. John Gibler, Mexico Unconquered, pp. 231–265.

  A PIECE OF BEING

  1. Lino Pastoriza, survivor of an accident at sea off the coast of Galicia, cited in Manuel Rivas, La mano del emigrante (Alfaguara: Madrid, 2000), pp. 150–151.

  WRITING AND VIOLENCE

  1. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed Books, 2nd edition, 2012), p. 30.

  2. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 44. Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, in their book The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450–1800, Anderson’s source for much of his analysis on print capitalism, write: “We know that by inventing paper the Chinese indirectly contributed to the discovery of printing in Europe. Nothing discovered so far suggests that we owe China any more than that, despite the fact that for nearly five hundred years before Gutenberg the Chinese knew how to print with moveable characters” (p. 71).

  3. Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 34.

  4. Ibid., pp. 33–34.

  5. Ibid., p. 39.

  6. Ibid., pp. 38, 39, 42–45.

  7. John Beverley, Testimonio: On the Politics of Truth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), p. 53.

  8. Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2nd edition, 2003), p. 3.

  9. Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 52.

  10. Janet Duitsman Cornelius, When I Can Read my Title Clear: Literacy, Slavery and Religion in the Antebellum South (Columbus: University of South Carolina Press, 1991), p. 66.

  11. This denial not only continues, it is not only still constitutive of white supremacy but is the core of an insidious “overrepresentation” of the concept of humanity itself. See No Humans Involved and “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” (CR: The New Centennial Review, 3 [3]: pp. 257-337, Fall 2003), both by Sylvia Wynter. No Humans Involved was recently republished as a pamphlet, the publication information for which is as follows: “This pamphlet is one in a series titled On the Blackness of BLACKNUSS, initiated by the Moor’s Head Press of BLACKNUSS: books + other relics and published by Publication Studio Hudson. The series is edited by Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts and was begun in the year of Eric Garner, John Crawford III, Mike Brown, Tamir Rice, Cameron Tillman, VonDerrit Myers, Jr., Laquan McDonald, Carey Smith-Viramontes, Jeffrey Holden, Qusean Whitten, Miguel Benton, Dillon McGee, Levi Weaver, Karen Cifuentes, Sergio Ramos, Roshad McIntosh, Diana Showman, and Akai Gurley.”

  12. José Rabasa, Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier: The Historiography of Sixteenth-Century New Mexico and Florida and the Legacy of Conquest (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), p. 8.

  13. Ranajit Guha, “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency” in Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Selected Subaltern Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 64.

  14. Ranajit Guha, “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency,” pp. 64 and 70.

  15. Janet Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), p. 144.

  16. Beth Lofredo and Claudia Rankine, “Introduction” to The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind (Albany: Fence Books, 2015), p. 22.

  17. Janet Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer, pp. 3, 142–143.

  18. José Rabasa, Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier, p. 25.

  19. Ibid., p. 22.

  20. Ibid., pp. 22–23.

  21. I understand Rabasa to be addressing specifically colonial violence. “[D]ecolonization,” Frantz Fanon writes, “is always a violent event.” Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2004), p. 1.

  22. I take this phrase from Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 8. Mignolo writes: “I am stating that the colonial matrix of power is the very foundational structure of Western civilization” (p. 16). Mignolo cites Aníbal Quijano’s concept of a “patrón colonial de poder” in elaborating his analysis. Quijano writes by way of introduction to his analysis: “What is termed globalization is the culmination of a process that began with the constitution of America and colonial/modern Eurocentered capitalism as new global powers. One of the fundamental axes of this model of power is the social classification of the world’s population around the idea of race, a mental construction that expresses the basic experience of colonial domination and pervades the more important dimensions of global power, including its specific rationality: Eurocentrism. The racial axis has a colonial origin and character, but it has proven to be more durable and stable than the colonialism in whose matrix it was established. Therefore, the model of power that is globally hegemonic today presupposes an element of coloniality.” Aníbal Quijano, Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Social Classification, p. 181.

  THE SOCIAL WORKER AND THE LAWYER

  1. Carlos Montemayor et al., Diccionario del Náhuatl en el Español de México: Nueva edición corregida y aumentada (Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and Gobierno del Distrito Federal, 2009).

  AN INCREDIBLE ESCAPE

  1. Claudio M. Tamburrini, Pase libre: La fuga de la Mansión Seré (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Continente, 2002) and Israel Adrián Caetano, Crónica de una fuga (K & S Films S.A. and 20th Century Fox, 2006). A transcription of Claudio Tamburrini’s official court testimony during the trials of the military dictatorship on June 7, 1985, may be found here: www.desaparecidos.org/nuncamas/web/testimon/tamburrini.htm. Accessed Januray 28, 2018. Antonio Orozco Michel’s book La fuga de Oblatos: Una historia de la LC23 de Septiembre (Guadalajara: La Casa del Mago, 2007) provides a firsthand account of the seemingly impossible escape of Mexican guerrillas from the Oblatos prison in Guadalajara in 1976.

  2. Xavier Montanyá, La gran evasión: Historia de la fuga de prisión de los últimos exiliados de Pinochet (Logroño and Barcelona: co-edition, Pepitas de Calabaza and Llaüt, 2009), pp. 117–173.

  3. Montanyá, La gran evasión, p. 165. The CNI was the Centro Nacional de Informaciones (National Information Center), a State agency of repression, persecution, murder, and forced disappearance active from 1977 to 1990.

  4. Luis Carlos Sáinz, Rejas rotas: Fugas, traición e impunidad en el sistema penitenciario mexicano (Mexico: Grijalbo, 2013), p. 17.

  5. Anabel Hernández, Los señores del narco (Mexico: Grijalbo, 2010).

  6. Alma Guillermoprieto, “Guzmán: The Buried Truth,” New York Review of Books, July 20, 2015: www.nybooks.com/daily/2015/07/20/guzman-escape-extradition-buried-truth/. Accessed January 28, 2018.

  7. El Universal, “Custodio revela a PGR trama de fuga de reos,” May 23, 2009.

  8. El Universal, “Custodios ayudaron en fuga de reos,” September 10, 2010.

  9. El Universal, “Son 85 los reos fugados de penal en Tamaulipas, September 10, 2010 and El Universal, “Cronología Fugas masivas de reos en México,” September 17, 2012.

  10. Luis Carlos Sáinz, Rejas rotas, pp. 245–246.

  11. El Universal, “Coahuila: se fugan 132 reos de penal,” September 18, 2012.

  12. El Universal, “Reos escaparon por la puerta, no por un túnel,” September 19, 2012.

  13. Interviews with Ramiro conducted on June 25, 2009, and with Gloria Arenas and Jacobo Silva conducted on September 14, 2010. Ramiro was murdered by paramilitaries on November 4, 2009.

  THE BROTHERS

  1. Secretaría de Seguridad Pública, Policía Federal Preventiva, Coordinación de Seguridad Regional, Jefatura de Distrito III, Comisaría de Sector 135-XXXI “Orizaba,” Parte Informativo de Servicios No. 043/2006, Orizaba, Veracruz, January 12, 2006.

  2. Alejandro Jiménez, “Revocan prisión a hermanos de Tzompaxtle,” El Universal, October 17, 2008, and Emir Olivares Alonso, “Liberan a tres presuntos miembros del EPR por no ha
llar pruebas en su contra,” La Jornada, October 19, 2008. While the three men were in jail the EPR published a communiqué declaring that none of the men belonged to their organization. Andrés Tzompaxtle also gave a clandestine press conference and published an open letter stating that the three men did not belong to armed movements. See: “Deslinda el excombatiente Rafael del EPR a sus hermanos de la guerrilla,” El Sur, April 14, 2006. The PGR carried out a forensic analysis concluding that the handwriting in the notebook did not belong to any of the three imprisoned men.

  THE DISAPPEARED

  1. Marcela Turati’s article about the march (titled “A March with Ten Thousand Absent”) begins: “They are the belittled of this administration, the invisible, the mocked, the ‘crazy ladies.’ They do not rest. They do not give up despite the years that they have spent going in and out of police stations, where nothing is ever solved. They are looking for their families. . . .” Marcela Turati, “Una marcha con diez mil ausentes,” Proceso, May 12, 2012.

  2. In 2017, the Mexican National Human Rights Commission, a semi-autonomous federal agency, released a report stating that there were 32,236 people reported disappeared and still not located in Mexico between January 1, 2007, and October 31, 2016. (Teresa Moreno, “Registra CNDH 32 mil desaparecidos en México hasta fines de 2016,” El Universal, April 4, 2017: http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/articulo/nacion/seguridad/2017/04/6/registra-cndh-32-mil-desaparecidos-en-mexico-hasta-fines-de-2016. Accessed January 31, 2018.) This number does not include the estimated tens of thousands of Central Americans disappeared while migrating through Mexico toward the United States over the past ten years. (See: Nina Lakhani, “Mexican kidnappers pile misery on to Central Americans fleeing violence,” The Guardian, February 21, 2017, www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/feb/21/mexico-kidnappings-refugees-central-america-immigration, accessed January 31, 2018.) The National Human Rights Commission’s figure also does not include estimates of people disappeared whose families did not register formal denunciations with the police, an occurrence all too common when the police are frequently those carrying out the disappearances. In November 2017, the nongovernmental organization Datacívica published an online database with the first and last names of 31,968 people included in the list of the disappeared. (See: datacivica. org.) Over the last six years since this book was originally published in Spanish, I have continued to analyze the terrifying increase in forced disappearances in Mexico as a result of the ongoing “merger” between or “integration” of the State and the transnational illegal drug entrepreneurs, leading to the use of such a particular State form of terror—forced disappearance—now also for mercantile ends. I explored this analysis in “Without Terror, There Is No Business,” NACLA Report on the Americas, 48 (2): pp. 135–138, Summer 2016; and “Las economías del terror,” in Jorge Regalado, ed., Pensamiento crítico, cosmovisiones, y epistemologías otras para enfrentar la guerra capitalista y construir autonomía (Gualalajara: Universidad de Guadalajara-CIESAS-Jorge Alsonso, 2017), pp. 125–157. My analysis has been greatly influenced by Achille Mbembe’s essay “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15 (1): pp. 11–40, 2003.