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Bare Life in Ciudad Juárez: Violence in a Space of Exclusion

Author(s): Stephen Eisenhammer

Source: Latin American Perspectives , March 2014, Vol. 41, No. 2, IMAGINED
NARCOSCAPES: NARCOCULTURE AND THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION (March
2014), pp. 99-109

Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24575500

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Bare Life in Ciudad Juarez

Violence in a Space of Exclusion
by

Stephen Eisenhammer

At least 60,000 people have been killed in Mexico since former President Felipe
Calderôn declared war on drugs in 2006. Much of the worst violence has centered on the

border city of Ciudad Juarez. Despite the death toll, the killings have received scant aca
demic attention. A study based on field research and using Giorgio Agamben’s theory of

homo sacer to construct a theoretical framework proposes that the violence is rooted in
Juarez’s role as an export processing zone, where cheap labor diminishes the value of life.

It connects the recent drug-related violence with the murders of hundreds of women in the

city during the 1990s and early 2000s.

Han muerto por lo menos 60,000 personas en México desde que el anterior presidente,

Felipe Calderôn, declaraba una guerra contra el narcotrâfico en 2006. Una gran parte de
la peor violencia se ha centrado en la ciudad fronteriza de Ciudad Juarez. Pese al gran
numéro de muertos, las matanzas han recibido poca atenciôn académica. Un estudio
basado en investigation de campo y aplicando la teorta de “homo sacer” de Giorgio
Agamben propone que la violencia tiene sus raices en el hecho de que en Juarez, como zona

de exportation, la mano de obra abaratada disminuye el valor de la vida. Se conecta la
narcoviolencia con los homicidios de cientos de mujeres en la ciudad durante la década de

1990 y comienzos de la de 2000.

Keywords: Ciudad Juârez, Violence, Drug trafficking, Mexico, Giorgio Agamben,
Feminicides

I am sitting in a house in the western part of the Mexican border city Ciudad
Juarez. On the other side of a magazine-cluttered coffee table a middle-aged
woman, who runs a hardware store in the neighborhood, is talking. Her friend’s
husband has been kidnapped, she says. The ransom is 1 million pesos
(US$79,000). This is the second time he has been kidnapped. Last time they
paid; now they cannot—they are still paying off the debt from the time before.
She speaks matter-of-factly but with a noticeable jitter and an occasional causal
and chronological incoherence, as if everything were so interlinked that the
precise order were insignificant.

She explains that shops in the area are being forced to pay protection money
(la cuota) by youths, sometimes as young as 12, armed with guns. How these
children and young men relate to the so-called drug war is unclear, she says.

Stephen Eisenhammer is a correspondent for Reuters in London. He was previously a freelance
journalist in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and the editor of the Latin American news site Pulsamérica.

com. He graduated with an MPhil in Latin American studies from the University of Cambridge
in 2011, writing his dissertation on violence in northern Mexico.

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 195, Vol. 41 No. 2, March 2014 99-109
DOI: 10.1177/0094582X13509786
© 2013 Latin American Perspectives

99

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100 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

Some of them appear to be operating within a hierarchical gang of some sort,
while others seem to be merely profiteering in the atmosphere of fear and
impunity that has befallen this city of 1.5 million. Two such men had entered
her friend’s pharmacy demanding la cuota, and seconds later three plain
clothed men claiming to be police officers entered and arrested them. Fearing
that the gang members would suspect her of informing the police, she yelled,
“I didn’t snitch. I didn’t tell them you were coming” as they were escorted out.
Two days later, despite police assurances, her husband was kidnapped. It had
been two days now, and the family was beginning to fear the worst.1

This sort of event has become common along the northern border between
Mexico and the United States and particularly on the so-called frontline in
Ciudad Juarez. Since 2008 nearly 11,000 people have been killed in the city.2
Other violent crimes, such as carjackings, kidnappings, and extortion, have
also risen dramatically over the same period. Although all of Mexico has seen
a dramatic increase in its homicide rate, Juarez accounted for around a quarter
of drug-related murders nationwide before 2012. Things have improved
recently, with a decrease to 797 murders in 2012 from 2,086 the previous year,
but the murder rate remains more than double what it was before violence

enwrapped the city five years ago.
This essay, based on two and a half weeks’ fieldwork in April 2011 in the

neighboring cities of El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, aims to cut
through the mix of sensationalism and self-censorship that has characterized
much of the reporting coming out of Juarez. I hope, through creating a theo
retical framework inspired by my interviews and experiences on the border, to
find a middle path between two central and seemingly contradictory theories
for explaining the violence. One, the orthodox, government line, presents the
murders as a “war” between the Sinaloa and Juarez drug cartels. The other,
more controversial theory, put forward most forcefully by Charles Bowden
(2010), is that the situation in Juarez flows from an epidemic of drug addiction
and unemployment that has established violent street crime as part of the very
fabric of society. The violence for Bowden has “no top or bottom, no center or
edge,” no structure whatsoever. It is rather, he argues, “a pattern”—a fluid,
moving sheet like the ocean. By trying to link these two theories I am working
from the premise that there is some truth in both. The editor of a news site in El
Paso, Texas, that covers the “drug war” told me, “You can’t talk about two
theories. It’s both and more.” He compared Juarez to Baghdad, talking of a
mixture of forces on the ground and no single, all-encompassing explanation.
Even so, it remains my aim to tease out a single theory, one flexible enough to
encompass the mixture of forces on the ground.

Any research into the situation in Juarez faces overwhelming access issues.
The high number of murdered journalists in the city is evidence of the very real
danger of digging too far beneath the surface. The risks facing journalists also
have an effect on the amount of information readily available in the public
domain. The murders that are reported every day in the local newspapers are
written up without a context, without a history. People either do not know or
cannot say who committed the crimes or how they fit into the bigger picture of
violence in the city. “You can only go so far in your reporting,” the editor of a
main Juarez daily told me. “The location, the time, the names of the dead, the

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Eisenhammer / BARE LIFE IN CIUDAD JUÄREZ 101

weapons used—that you can write. Anything else, any analysis as to who
might have been responsible and why, no.” In such a climate rumors run riot
and academic analysis is both difficult and dangerous.

I do not, however, believe this to be an adequate excuse for the scant aca
demic attention being paid to the drug-related violence going on in Mexico at
the moment. This essay aims only to provide a blueprint for further research. It
is an attempt to force a debate on a topic that, although attracting a lot of media
attention, is weak on substance. The briefness of my fieldwork, combined with
the access difficulties, means that this essay is heavily reliant on theory. I do not,
however, consider this a weakness, since a framework for assimilating the
seemingly contradictory information emerging from ongoing events is particu
larly needed. The argument I propose emerges from an analysis of Juârez’s
position in the Mexican and global economy. I suggest that today’s violence is
best understood as a means by which the disenfranchised gain a sense of
belonging in a space of exclusion outside the law and the protection of the state.

Juarez, situated in a desert borderland historically suffering from frequent
periods of lawlessness, has long been excluded from Mexico’s national space.
The Apache roamed this terrain before and after lines were drawn in the sand
separating Mexico from the United States. The Mexican Revolution began here,
where Pancho Villa turned from smuggler to revolutionary, entering the politi
cal fray from a space outside the state. Prohibition again saw Juarez become a
center for lawlessness, dominated by brothels, gambling dens, and cheap alco
hol. But the point from which I want to pick up the story is 1965, when Juarez
officially became a space where a number of Mexican laws did not apply—an
export processing zone. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s (1998; 2005) notions of
sovereignty, the state of exception, and homo sacer (the “sacred” or “accursed”
man, who resides in this state and is reduced to bare life), I argue that becoming
an export processing zone turned Juarez into a city where people were disen
franchised and life was cheap. This disenfranchisement is inherently violent,
and Juarez has been balanced on a knife edge between production and destruc
tion ever since. In 2008 it tipped dramatically over into the latter, but the vio
lence already had a precedent in the city in the form of the murders of hundreds
of young women known as the feminicides.

Although Agamben’s theory of the state of exception is crucial to my analy
sis of Juarez, I suggest that it is limited by its focus on Nazi extermination
camps. Its concentration on eugenics seems to overlook the sign that hangs
over the gate to Auschwitz, “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Work Makes One Free). The
dehumanizing potential of human labor is vital to an application of Agamben’s
ideas to the localized spaces of the global economy. These have been explored
by Aihwa Ong (2006) in her study of Asian export processing zones as spaces
of “neoliberal exception.” That the situation in Juarez deteriorated in line with
the global economy is not surprising given that the majority of the population
was connected to the manufacturing sector, which was strongly tied to the
health of the U.S. economy. As the financial crisis hit consumption, factories
laid off workers and unemployment rocketed. A city whose infrastructure had
failed to keep up with its rising population, swelled since the 1980s with
migrants arriving to work in the factories known as maquiladoras, became a
hotbed of violent crime and murder.

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102 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

In the first section of this paper I explore the relationship between Juarez’s
position as an export processing zone and the violence against women that
swept the city in the 1990s. In the second I describe how this violence spread to
all parts of society as cartels battled for turf and the army and the federal police
arrived in force. In the third and final section I develop Agamben’s theory of
bare life to suggest that homo sacer is not merely a victim but also capable of
extreme violence.

NEOLIBERAL EXCEPTION

Before turning to the specific nature of the conflict in Juarez it is necessary to
outline briefly the key parts of Giorgio Agamben’s theory. Agamben (1998)
argues that the defining feature of sovereign power is the ability of the sover
eign to create a state of exception in which the laws of state do not apply. The
inhabitants of this space, he proposes, are stripped of any rights that may usu
ally be inferred from religion, nationhood, or even humanness. These people
are reduced to “bare life”—the purely biological status of an animal. He refers
to the person reduced to bare life as “homo sacer.” Turning to the ancient Latin
root (1998: 79), he rejects the common notion that sacer has always meant
“sacred,” drawing instead on a theory proposed by the English historian
William Warde Fowler that “sacer esto is in fact a curse; and homo sacer on
whom this curse falls is an outcast, a banned man, tabooed, dangerous.”
Agamben defines homo sacer, accordingly, as a “person that is simply set out
side human jurisdiction without being brought into the realm of divine law”
and someone “who may be killed and yet not sacrificed” (82). Homo sacer is by
his very nature exposed to violence: “This violence—the unsanctionable killing
that, in his case, anyone may commit, is classifiable neither as sacrifice nor as
homicide, neither as the execution of a condemnation to death nor as sacrilege”
(82). Agamben goes on to argue that it was under such a state of exception that
the Nazi death camps operated. The Jews, placed outside the law and reduced
to bare life, could be exterminated in the way that Hitler had announced—”like
lice” (114).

Homo sacer is the present-day slave; the iron words “Arbeit Macht Frei”
branded on the history of the twentieth century attest to that. The factory
assembly line is a form of dehumanization, and Juarez is a city entirely depen
dent on manufacturing. The link between violence and Juarez’s position in the
local and global economy was first put forward by a group of female academics
analyzing the murders of over 200 young women in the city between 1993 and
the early 2000s. The killings, which often involved horrific sexual acts of muti
lation, became known as the “feminicides” and attracted worldwide media
attention on account of both their gruesome nature and the appalling, almost
mysterious lack of convictions. Scholars such as Deborah Weissman (2005),
Melissa Wright (2004; 2006), and Jessica Livingstone (2004) argued that the
murders were connected to the city’s altered economic landscape. Juarez’s
transformation into an export processing zone “produced a category of victims:
poor women who are subordinated, if not rejected, from social protections in
the workplace as well as in their communities” (Weissman, 2005: 827).

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Eisenhammer / BARE LIFE IN CIUDAD JUÄREZ 103

In 1965 the local economy along Mexico’s border with the United States was
dramatically transformed. The Border Industrialization Program aimed to use
the geographic proximity to the United States by transforming the region into
a zone of manufacturing for export. The accompanying maquiladora program
enabled the creation of foreign-owned manufacturing plants able to import
raw materials and component parts duty-free as long as the finished products
were exported back to the United States. The companies were then taxed only
on the value added as the product crossed back across the border. Although the
industry got off to a relatively slow start, by the 1980s it had became the domi
nant economy on the border as Mexico attempted to use the foreign exchange
acquired through the export market to recover from its debt crisis.

Juarez became the center of this economic experiment, and by 2010 one in
four employees in Mexico’s manufacturing industry was based in the city
(Staudt, Fuentes, and Fragoso, 2010:25). How did this state of exception mani
fest itself in Juarez? First and most important, the population ballooned.
Between 1960 and 2008 the number of people living in the city grew from
around 200,000 to some 1.5 million. The city’s infrastructure was unable to keep
up, and many of the new arrivals were unable to find suitable housing (Fuentes
and Pena, 2010). This new population spilled over into unplanned housing to
the city’s west. Although the wages of a maquiladora worker are not, as is fre
quently reported, lower than elsewhere in Mexico (Vulliamy, 2011:126), they
are in relative terms very low. The cost of living in Juarez is substantially higher
than in central Mexico and is estimated to be around 90 percent of that in El
Paso across the border, where wages are significantly higher (Bowden, 2010:
24). Another important factor is that the workforce in the maquiladoras is not
unionized. For Mexico this is a rarity and a direct result of a changing economic
viewpoint. The lack of unions means that the big multinationals relocating to
Juarez are able to create their own terms of employment. The maquiladoras by
design employ people who cannot find employment elsewhere in order to keep
wages as low as possible. At first most employees were young female migrants
from the South, and although this gradually changed the reputation of maquila
work as women’s work continued (Weissman, 2005).

Not only was the population growth unmanageably fast but the people
arriving in the city were all taking up the same low-paid jobs and entering
society at the same low, working-class level. This resulted in a skewed social
demographic—a mass of unhoused female migrants, working in manufactur
ing plants without the usual workers’ rights. The maquiladora workers, dis
placed and relocated in a space where Mexico’s employment laws did not
apply, were not far removed from the status of refugees. Both found themselves
in a denationalized space where their protection had been handed over to the
international community, in the workers’ case to multinational companies. This
lack of protection and the atmosphere of impunity it bred resulted, it was
argued, in the feminicides.

The prejudice against female maquila workers, who were regarded as sub
verting traditional gender roles because they worked and were self-sufficient,
was also important. Joanna Swanger (2007) argues, on the basis of interviews
with a local nongovernmental organization that worked to support women in
Juarez, that a deep and violent sexism existed against the women who had

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104 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

arrived in the city to work in maquiladoras. As factory workers and migrants
they were regarded by many as little more than prostitutes: “Much of the pop
ular discourse in Ciudad Juarez propounds that the women who have been
disappeared brought it on themselves; they were ‘bad women’ who trans
gressed gender norms.” Weissman (2005) and Wright (2006) also draw connec
tions between the degradation of prostitution and factory work. Both jobs
involve the commodification of bare life, one through the bodily act of sex, the
other through the unskilled use of one’s hands. The exclusion of women
through manufacturing is similarly highlighted, although identified through a
different lens—that of sovereignty—by Ong (2006). She identifies the paradox
of export processing zones, which form an important part of the global econ
omy precisely because they are an exception to the general laws that govern it
(tariffs, taxes, and workers’ rights). Ong is heavily influenced by Agamben’s
theory of sovereignty as defined by the ability to create a state of exception.
However, in contrast to Weissman and others, she fails to regard the people
living and working in these spaces of neoliberal exception (who, she notes, are
predominantly women) as victims.

Yet, Agamben’s theory of homo sacer, “who can be killed but not sacrificed,”
is a philosophy of violence, an exploration of the relationship between power
and violence in the academic tradition of Thomas Hobbes and Hannah Arendt.

It is inherently about victims, those excluded from society and thus exempt
from one of its fundamental principles—the protection of its members. In
Juarez, through the work of Weissman, Wright, and Livingstone, I see a unifica
tion of these elements. The murders were the result of the social exclusion of

poor migrant women working in the maquiladoras, reducing them to homo
sacer, who could be killed without fear of reprisals. The result was a city where
murder went unpunished. Of the 76 cases classified as serial killings, only 3
convictions were obtained, and the accuracy of even these convictions was
widely doubted (Simmons, 2006:495).

SAME CITY, DIFFERENT VICTIMS

From 2008 on Juarez suffered an increase in violence unimaginable at the
time that Livingstone, Weissman, and Wright were writing. On his election in
2006, Felipe Calderön made an antinarcotics drive a pillar of his new govern
ment’s policy. His talk of “waging war” against the cartels was not mere rheto
ric, and he sent the army and heavily armed federal police into the
drug-trafficking heartland. In 2008, as violence in Juarez was beginning to esca
late from a turf war between Joaquin “Shorty” Guzman’s Sinaloa cartel and the
local Juarez cartel, Calderön sent 10,000 soldiers and federal police into the city.
They were supposed to deal a decisive blow to the cartels, partly because they
were well trained and heavily armed but also because they were not in the
pocket of the drug traffickers. It had long been accepted that the local police
were in cahoots with the cartels and therefore entirely ineffective. Far from
curbing the rising death rate, however, the army and the police were sucked
into the corrupt forces at play in the city.

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Eisenhammer / BARE LIFE IN CIUDAD JUÄREZ 105

Although official figures vary, the city saw around 10,000 homicides between
2008 and the end of 2011. That was more than the number of civilian casualties

in Afghanistan over the same period and more than double the number of U.S.
troops killed in the entire Iraq war. The jump in the murder rate eclipsed the
gender violence of the feminicides, with an increasing number of people now
dismissing the phenomenon as a journalistic fiction. One influential author on
recent events in Juarez told me that they no longer believed that the number of
women killed in Juarez during the 1990s was out of the ordinary for a city of its
size. The current ferocity of violence has moved the goalposts, making even the
feminicides seem ordinary. Many also reject the gender-oriented literature as
irrelevant to the current crisis, in which the vast majority of people killed are
male. This, however, is an untenable position. If the violence against women
was linked to the city’s transformation into an export processing zone, then it
stands to reason that the current violence is connected, at least in part, to simi
lar forces.

The feminicides demonstrated a violence and lawlessness linked to Juarez’s
position as a space of neoliberal exception. This lawlessness was linked to the
dehumanization of female maquila workers, many of whom were denounced
as prostitutes whose life was not worthy of recompense. As the military and the
federal police entered the fray, the drug war created a similar type of dehuman
ized person—the drug trafficker. Murders went unpunished, and the violence
and lawlessness previously restricted to the female factory workers became
part of the fabric of the city. Killings between the cartels, killings by the military
and police, and killings by kids on the street corner all became normalized and
dehumanized under the banner of the “drug war.”

Until the massacre of 16 innocent teenagers at a birthday party in Juarez in
2010, which shifted public opinion and blew apart the rhetoric, the government
line had consistently been that almost all of those dying were involved in the
drug trade. The challenging of government rhetoric became a national move
ment after the son of the Mexican poet Javier Sicilia was killed in Cuernavaca
in March 2011. Sicilia turned his grief outward, forming the jHasta la Madre!
(roughly “I’ve had it up to here!”) campaign and marching across the country
in protest of the drug war. This movement more than anything else highlighted
the way in which policy makers had attempted to frame the dead as guilty of
their own demise. Sicilia, in the open letter to the Mexican government that
signaled the beginning of his campaign, referred to Agamben and the theory of
bare life: “Every citizen of this country has been reduced to what philosopher
Giorgio Agamben has called, using a Greek word, zoe: that is, bare life, the life
of an animal, of a being that can be subjected to violence, kidnapped, ill-treated
or humiliated and murdered with impunity” (Sicilia, 2011).

Sicilia’s campaign drew attention to the way the dead had been marked out
as drug addicts, criminals, and gang members—dehumanized in a similar way
to the female murder victims. One interviewee, arrested for drug trafficking,
condemned the drug war for inspiring the “criminalization of a generation”
(Campbell, 2009: 115). Bodies continue to be discovered in mass graves or
dumped in the desert. Often they remain unidentified, and the crimes almost
always go unpunished. Those killed in the so-called drug war have been placed

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106 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

outside the state’s protection—declared homo sacer—in the same way as the
women working in the maquiladoras.

VIEW FROM BELOW

In order to explore how the violence in Juarez became so widespread, I will
argue that those reduced to bare life are not simply helpless victims as Agamben
suggests but have the power to wreak destruction themselves. The situation is
not simply a matter of cartels’ and government forces’ killing local people but
one of a violence that “courses through Juarez like a ceaseless wind” (Bowden,
2010:105). Agamben’s theory of the state of exception and homo sacer lacks the
view from below, from the position of bare life. What does the state look like
from there? How is one’s identity changed by being placed outside the law?
Within the category of homo sacer exists a tension between production and
destruction. This can be seen in the figure of the murdered and abused maquila
woman, where the productivity of bare life is pushed over the edge into destruc
tion. Wright (2006: 2) refers to this as the “myth of the disposable third world
woman.” This destruction …