Lynching and States of Fear in Urban Mexico

Authors

  • Leigh Binford Benemerita Universidad Autonoma de Puebla
  • Nancy Churchill Benemerita Universidad Autonoma de Puebla

Keywords:

popular justice, neoliberalism, state and society, urban Mexico

Abstract

On 23 November 2004 people in San Juan Ixtayopan, an urban community of Mexico City, lynched three agents of the Federal Preventative Police, accused of attempting to kidnap children attending the Popul Vuh elementary school. This article discusses how the state assumed a "law-and-order" approach to the lynching, missing an opportunity to interrogate critically the broader impact of neoliberal policies. While any particular lynching is the partial product of social and historical relationships on local social fields, neoliberal political economy establishes a broad context for grasping the recent spate of lynchings in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Downloads

Published

2022-06-30

How to Cite

Binford, L., & Churchill, N. (2022). Lynching and States of Fear in Urban Mexico. Anthropologica, 51(2), 301–312. Retrieved from https://cas-sca.journals.uvic.ca/index.php/anthropologica/article/view/2564

Issue

Vol. 51 No. 2 (2009): Ethnographic Approaches to the Study of Fear

Section

Thematic Section:

License

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Authors contributing to Anthropologica agree to release their articles under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 Unported license. This licence allows anyone to share their work (copy, distribute, transmit) and to adapt it for non-commercial purposes provided that appropriate attribution is given, and that in the event of reuse or distribution, the terms of this license are made clear.

Authors retain copyright of their work and grant the journal right of first publication.

Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.