New forms of warfare:

from counterinsurgency to war on drugs in Guerrero, Mexico and the resistance of peasantry against dispossession

Abstract

This article reflects on the historical relationship between the counterinsurgency war and the contemporary criminal violence in Mexico. This text is part of a more general piece of research which attempts to make an issue of criminal aspects of the state phenomena, beyond the rhetoric of failure. The work is based on an ethnographic field research carried out within a network composed by victims of state and criminal violence in Guerrero, Mexico, as well as peasant and popular organizations and unions, which direct their efforts to processes of memory, justice, and compensation for the damages. The materials collected are here articulated with theoretical reflection and an historic review on the uses of the counterinsurgency doctrine in Mexico; also, they are articulated with contemporary criminal violence. The main result of this work is that, by means of paramilitary and mercenary phenomena, the transference of a violence’s episteme allows contemporary crime organizations to associate with the coercive system of the state to remove and depopulate the territories. The field work also permits to acknowledge how peasantry resists this kind of strategies.

ARK CAICYT: https://id.caicyt.gov.ar/ark:/s16688090/n073u5nmb