Representations of criminality
For convenience or economy of language, we tend to talk about crime and, in some cases, describe it as organized. This way of expressing ourselves makes us suppose that there is a more or less unitary group of criminals, whose members are armed and violent people; that is, the type of people who are usually represented with hats, large buckles, boots, chains and goat horns. The convenience of these images has led to the assumption that the criminal phenomenon is one and always characterizable under the same standards and characters. That it is possible to extrapolate what is known or believed to be known about a person or group of people to the totality of criminal activity in the country, even when what is happening in Mexico is far from what this vision provides.
Today's Mexican crime scene is a complex network of activities, people, relationships, interests, territories, codes, practices and violence that cannot be encompassed in a single vision. On the contrary, understanding it requires identifying the different participating groups, their operations and regulations or, more generally, their corresponding particularities. Otherwise, we will continue to assume that all crime can be represented by caricaturing hitmen when they are only part of broader and more complex groups.
The constant and practically invariable representation and, from there, the understanding that our current crime as a phenomenon of exclusive violence and mere participation of hitmen and thugs leads us to think about their motivations. It leaves out the question of the motives for assuming that something, which is varied and complex in itself, insistently presents itself to us in the unitary conditions just indicated. Why everything linked to current crime ends up being reduced to violence when, although this is its most dramatic and painful aspect, it is only part of a larger and more variegated whole.
The first thing that stands out about current representations of crime is their classism. The subjects of literary, essay, musical or cinematic stories are people belonging to lower socioeconomic strata. Poor and ignorant people who, we are told, are forced to participate in crime by contributing their youth and a kind of innate violence to fulfill the function of cannon fodder. By starting from the idea that all crime is reduced to contract killing and by simplifying the latter to poverty and marginalization, it has ended up being assumed that all crime is an issue and problem of the poor. That those who participate in it, or not, had another option in life or, even more, that their class is the very foundation of the threats and risks they impose on society.
The identification of crime with violent people and of these with a social class has justified the social, political and legal disposition of the criminals themselves. Considering that the threats and violence they exercise are not only a manifestation contrary to the law, but even more seriously, to the social order. By making contract killing the very expression of all criminal activity and identifying it with poverty and marginalization, the idea of a social subversion that goes beyond the criminal has been introduced into the collective imagination. And, in doing so, it has allowed the tolerance - if not the outright justification - of the processes of elimination of its members by agents of the State or by criminal or paramilitary adversaries.
The assignment of all criminal activity to hired killers has also allowed the demarcation of activities that, of course, are part of current criminality. If all criminal activity is reduced to bullets and thugs, nothing else can have that character. This reduction is convenient for all those who participate in the many areas and degrees of criminality. Thanks to it, their activities are, if not completely hidden, at least blurred, as they are not directly linked to the violence exercised by and from a social class.
If crime ends up being seen as violence and violence as the monopoly of a specific group, the support network made up of administrative officials, police, public prosecutors, judges, politicians, businessmen, bankers, civil society and churches cannot be seen as such. The proof of what is and is not criminal is binary. Everything directly or indirectly linked to contract killing is by definition criminal; anything not linked to it must be proven to be considered criminal.
This duality has allowed entire sectors of society to present themselves - and thus be perceived - as unrelated to crime or as victims of it. The attribution of practically everything that happens to thugs, their bullets and their deaths has allowed us to ignore money laundering, porous borders, the incompetence of prosecutors and judges, public and private corruption, electoral alliances and many other phenomena of our daily lives.
This narrative allows that, while the hitmen kill each other and threaten public safety and social order, other social sectors can carry out a wide range of criminal activities under cover of bullets. New buildings, sudden displays of wealth or curious political arrangements are hidden or diluted by the enormous physical violence and its consequent deaths, disappearances, decapitations, skinning and torture.
The reduction of crime to hired violence has allowed the proliferation of a wide variety of criminal activities, along with the production of justifications for the elimination of those who occupy the lower rungs of the criminal chain: for violating the legal order through their crimes and for trying to subvert the social order because of the class to which they belong.
@JRCossio
EL PAÍS
