Self-Defense in Mexico - (Latin America in Translation/En Traducción/Em Tradução) by Luis Hernández Navarro (Paperback)

About the Book

Originally published in Spanish under the title of Hermanos en armas: policâias comunitarias y autodefensas in Mexico City by Brigada Para Leer en Libertad in July 2014.

Book Synopsis

In Mexico and across other parts of Latin America local Indigenous peoples have built community policing groups as a means of protection where the state has limited control over, and even complicity in, crime and violence. Luis Hernández Navarro, a leading Mexican journalist, offers a riveting investigation of these armed self-defense groups that sprang up around the time of the 1994 Zapatista uprising in Chiapas. Available in English for the first time, the book spotlights the intense precarity of everyday life in parts of Mexico. Hernández Navarro shows how the self-defense response, which now includes wealthier rancher and farmer groups, is being transformed by Mexico's expanding role in the multibillion dollar global drug trade, by foreign corporations' extraction of raw minerals in traditionally Indigenous lands, and by the resulting social changes in local communities.

But as Hernández Navarro acknowledges, self-defense is highly controversial. Community policing may provide citizens with increased agency, but for government officials it can be a dangerous threat to the status quo. Leftists and liberals are wary of how the groups may be linked to paramilitary forces and vulnerable to manipulation by drug traffickers and the government alike. This book answers the urgent call to understand the dangerous complexities of government failures and popular solutions.

Review Quotes

"[A] just testament to the struggle of so many poor, marginalized Mexicans to defend themselves, their families, and their communities from the violent oppression not just of so-called narcos, but of a corrupted and corrupting state."--H-LatAm

About the Author

Luis Hernández Navarro is a journalist and the opinion editor of La Jornada in Mexico City. He has a long record of covering social movements and activism and participated in the San Andrés Accords during the 1994 Zapatista uprising. Ramor Ryan is a translator and the author of several books, including Zapatista Spring.