Territorial Sovereignty and Second State Crimes (PDF)

Machine Translated by Google Rita Laura Sawed University of Brasilia Territorial territory, so...

Machine Translated by Google Rita Laura Sawed University of Brasilia Territorial territory, sovereignty sovereignty and and crimes , crimes of the of second women State: in the bodies the writing of women on the in bodies Ciudad of Juarez in Ciudad Juarez 1 Abstract: This essay examines the case of femicides that have resulted in at least 300 women being murdered over the past 11 years in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, on the northern border of Mexico. In all these years, the authorities have presented only a few suspects, without ever managing to convince public opinion of their guilt. Impunity and protection of the murderers are evident both to local public opinion and to international observers. I suggest that what is written on the bodies of the brutally murdered women is the signature of a local and regional power that also has national tentacles. These acts of apparently irrational violence enunciate, beyond any doubt, the discretionary power of their perpetrators and the control they hold over the people and resources of their territory, sealing and reinforcing a pact of fraternity. Keywords: expressive violence, gender violence, mafias, masculinity, territoriality, economic power. Copyright ÿ 2005 by Revista Estudos Ciudad Juárez, in the state of Chihuahua, on Mexico’s Feministas 1 This article northern border with El Paso, Texas, is an emblematic place of has already been published in Spanish in the book Ciudad Juárez: de este lado del women’s suffering. There, more than anywhere else, the motto puente (Mexico: Epikeia and Instituto “women’s bodies, danger of death” becomes a reality. Ciudad Nacional de las Mujeres, nov. 2004) and in Juárez is also, significantly, an emblematic place of economic the virtual magazine labrys, feminist studies, globalization and neoliberalism, with its insatiable hunger for études féministes (n. 6, Aug./Dec. 2004-août/ greed. The sinister shadow that covers the city and the constant déc. 2004, available at http://www.unb.br/ih/ his/gefem/labrys6/p1.htm). fear that I felt during each day and each night of the week that I was there follow me to this day, more than a month after my return to Brazil. There, the direct relationship that exists between capital and death, between unregulated accumulation and concentration and the sacrifice of poor, dark-skinned, mixed-race women, devoured by the chasm where the Feminist Studies, Florianópolis, 13(2): 256, May-August/2005 265 Machine Translated by Google RITA LAURA SEGATO articulate monetary economy and symbolic economy, control of resources and power of death. I was invited to Ciudad Juárez during the month of July 2004 because, the previous year, two women from the Mexican organizations Epikeia and Nuestras Hijas de Regreso a Casa had heard me formulate what seemed to me to be the only viable hypothesis for the enigmatic crimes that ravaged the city – the deaths of women of similar physical type which, being disproportionately numerous and continuous over the past 11 years, perpetrated with excessive cruelty, with evidence of collective rapes and torture, presented themselves as unintelligible. The initial nine-day commitment to participate in a forum on feminicides in Juárez was interrupted by a series of events that culminated, on the sixth day, with the cable television signal dropping across the entire city when I began to present my interpretation of the crimes. in an interview with journalist Jaime Pérez Mendoza, from local channel 5. The frightening chronometric precision with which the loss of the signal coincided and the first word with which I would begin my answer about the reasons for the crimes made us decide to leave, leaving Ciudad Juárez the following morning, to preserve ourselves and as a protest against the censorship suffered. What would our impression be when we realized that everyone we spoke to confirmed that the decision to leave immediately was a sensible one. Let us not forget that in Ciudad Juárez there do not seem to be fortuitous coincidences and, as I will try to argue, everything seems to be part of a great communicative machine whose messages become intelligible only to those who, for some reason or another, have entered the code. This is why the first problem that the horrendous crimes of Ciudad Juárez present to outsiders, to distant audiences, is a problem of intelligibility. And it is precisely in their unintelligibility that the murderers take refuge, as in a dark code of war, an argot composed entirely of acting outs. Just to give an example of this logic of meaning, journalist Graciela Atencio, from the newspaper La Jornada in Mexico City, also wondered, in one of her articles about the women murdered in Ciudad Juárez, whether it had been something more than coincidence that precisely on August 16, 2003, when his newspaper published for the first time the news of a revealing “FBI report that described a possible modus operandi in the kidnapping and disappearance of young people”, mail problems prevented its distribution in Ciudad Juárez. 2 2 ATENCIO, 2003. 266 Feminist Studies, Florianópolis, 13(2): 265-285, May-August/2005 Machine Translated by Google TERRITORY, SOVEREIGNTY AND SECOND STATE CRIMES... Unfortunately, this was not the only coincidence that seemed significant to us during our stay in the city. On Monday, July 26th, after I had finished my first exhibition, halfway through the total duration of the forum that brought us together and exactly four months after having found the last body, the corpse of a maquiladora worker appeared, Alma Brisa Molina Baca. I spare here the account of the number of irregularities committed by investigators and the local press in relation to Alma Brisa's remains. It was, without any exaggeration, seeing-it-is-believing it; being there to witness the inconceivable, the unbelievable. However, I would like to note that the body appeared in the same vacant lot in the city center where, the previous year, another victim had been found. This other victim was the murdered daughter – still a child – of the mother we had interviewed the day before, July 25, in the gloomy Lomas de Poleo neighborhood, located in the harsh desert that crosses the border between Chihuahua and the state of New Mexico, in the country. neighbor.3 General comments also pointed to the fact that, last year, precisely coinciding with the federal intervention in the state of Chihuahua, ordered by President Fox, another body had been found. The cards were dealt. The sinister “dialogue” seemed to confirm that we were within the code and that the trail we were following led to an outcome. 3 The remains of Alma Brisa were found among sunflowers on the same plot of land in the city center where the body of Brenda Berenice, daughter of Juanita, one of the main collaborators of the Epikeia project and a character in the book of interviews where this text was published, had been found. for the first time (Ciudad Juárez: de este lado del puente). This is the interpretative path that I want to expose here and, also, what I was about to say when the cable television signal went down, in the early hours of Friday, July 30, 2004. This is precisely the relationship between the deaths, the crimes resulting from the fierce neoliberalism that globalized on the margins of the Great Border after NAFTA and the unregulated accumulation that was concentrated in the hands of some families in Ciudad Juárez. In fact, what is most impressive when listening to Ciudad Juarez is the vehemence with which public opinion rejects one by one the names that public forces present as allegedly guilty. It gives the impression that people, despite being disoriented, want to look in another direction, hoping that the police will direct their suspicions in the other direction, towards the rich neighborhoods of the city. The illegal trafficking of all types of profits to the other side includes the goods produced by the extorted labor of maquiladora workers, the surplus value that the surplus value extracted from this labor adds, as well as drugs, bodies and, finally, the sum of the considerable capital that these businesses generate south of paradise. Their illicit transit resembles a process of return Feminist Studies, Florianópolis, 13(2): 265-285, May-August/2005 267 Machine Translated by Google RITA LAURA SEGATO constant to an unjust, voracious and insatiable taxer who, however, hides his demand and is free from the seduction he exerts. The border between the misery-of-excess and the misery-of-lack is an abyss. * There are two things that can be said in Ciudad Juarez without risk, and that, moreover, everyone says – the police, the Attorney General’s Office, the Special Prosecutor, the Human Rights Commissioner, the press and NGO activists: one of them is that “the responsibility for the crimes lies with the drug traffickers”, referring to a guy who looks like a criminal and reaffirming our terror regarding the margins of social life. The other is that “these are sexually motivated crimes”. The Tuesday newspaper, the day after Alma Brisa’s body was found, repeated: “another sexually motivated crime”, and the special inspectors emphasized: “it is very difficult to reduce sexual crimes”, once again confusing the evidence and misleading the public by leading their reasoning down a path that I believe is mistaken. This is how authorities and opinion makers, even though they claim to speak in the name of law and rights, encourage an indiscriminate perception of the number of misogynistic crimes that occur in this location, as in any other in Mexico, Central America and the world: crimes of passion, domestic violence, sexual abuse, rape by serial aggressors, crimes for debts from trafficking, trafficking in women, crimes of virtual pornography, organ trafficking, etc. I understand this desire for indistinction, as well as the permissiveness and naturalness with which all crimes against women are perceived in Ciudad Juárez, as a smoke-screen, a smokescreen whose consequence is to prevent a clear view of a central nucleus that presents particular and similar characteristics. It is as if concentric circles formed by a variety of aggressions concealed within them a particular type of crime, not necessarily the most numerous, but rather the most enigmatic due to its precise, almost bureaucratic characteristics: kidnapping of young women with a defined physical type and most of them workers or students, deprivation of liberty for a few days, torture, “group” rapes – as former head of forensics Oscar Máynez declared in the forum more than once –, mutilation, strangulation, certain death, mixing or misappropriation of clues and evidence by law enforcement, threats and attacks against lawyers and journalists, pressure 268 Feminist Studies, Florianópolis, 13(2): 265-285, May-August/2005 Machine Translated by Google TERRITORY, SOVEREIGNTY AND SECOND STATE CRIMES... deliberate decision by the authorities to blame clearly innocent scapegoats, and the uninterrupted continuation of the crimes from 1993 to the present. Added to this list is the fact that no accused has ever seemed credible to the community and no “line of investigation” has yielded results. The impunity over the past 11 years has been shocking and can be described in three ways: 1) the absence of defendants who are convincing to the public; 2) the absence of consistent lines of investigation; and 3) the consequence of the two previous ones: the endless cycle of repetition of this type of crime. On the other hand, two courageous investigative journalists, Diana Washington – who is preparing a book about the women murdered in Ciudad 4 The Harvest of Women, soon to be Juárez4 – and Sergio González Rodríguez – author of Huesos em el desert,5 released in Mexico and the United States, beaten and left for dead on a street in Ciudad Juárez Mexico four years ago, fragments of which appeared in his when he was in the midst of research for his book, which caused him to lose all column in the El Paso Times. his teeth and forced him to remain hospitalized for a month – they gathered countless data that the police discarded over the years and came up with a list 5 GONZALEZ RODRIGUEZ, 2002. of places and people that are, in one way or another, related to the disappearances and murders of women. I spoke with Diana Washington on two occasions on the other side of the border (since the FBI does not allow anyone to cross the bridge without an escort) and I read Sergio González's book. What it shows is that "good" people, large landowners, are linked to the deaths. However, a crucial link is missing: what leads these respected family heads, successful in their finances, to get involved in macabre crimes that, by all indications, were committed collectively? What is the plausible link between these gentlemen and the kidnappings and gang rapes that would allow them to be indicted and brought to trial? There is a reason missing. And it is precisely here, in the search for this reason, that the idea that is so abused about the "sexual motive" proves insufficient. New typifications and a refinement of definitions are necessary to understand the specificity of a restricted number of deaths in Juárez, and it is necessary to formulate new legal categories. Above all, it is necessary to say what seems obvious: that no crime committed by common criminals goes on for so long with total impunity, and that no serious police force speaks so lightly about what is generally the product of a long investigation: the motive, the impulse, the reason for a crime. These elementary truths caused a stir in Ciudad Juárez and were unspeakable. Feminist Studies, Florianópolis, 13(2): 265-285, May-August/2005 269 Machine Translated by Google RITA LAURA SEGATO Science and life Some time before I first heard about Ciudad Juárez, between 1993 and 1995, I conducted research on the mentality of convicted rape prisoners in the Brasília penitentiary.6 My “listening” to the 6 I present the results in my book The accounts of these prisoners, all of whom were convicted of sexual Elementary Structures of Violence. Essays assaults committed in the anonymity of the streets and on unknown on Gender between Anthropology, victims, supports the fundamental feminist thesis that sexual crimes Psychoanalysis and Human Rights (SEGATO, 2003). are not the work of individual deviants, mentally ill individuals, or social anomalies, but rather expressions of a deep symbolic structure that organizes our acts and fantasies and gives them intelligibility. What emerges from the interviews with greater force than ever is what Menacher Amin had already discovered through empirical 7 AMIR, 1971. data and quantitative analysis:7 that, contrary to our expectations, rapists, in most cases, do not act alone, they are not asocial animals who stalk their victims like solitary hunters, but rather that they do so in company. There are not enough words to emphasize the importance of this discovery and its consequences for understanding rapes as true acts that occur in society, that is, in a communication niche that can be penetrated and understood. The use and abuse of the body of another without the latter participating with compatible intention or will, rape aims at the annihilation of the victim's will, the reduction of which is precisely signified by the loss of control over the behavior of her body and its agency by the will of the aggressor. The victim is expropriated of control over her body-space. This is why it could be said that rape is the allegorical act par excellence of Schmitt's definition of sovereignty – legislative control over a territory and over the body of another as an annex to that territory. Unrestricted control, arbitrary and discretionary sovereign will whose condition of possibility is the annihilation of equivalent attributions in others and, above all, the eradication of their power as indices of alterity or alternative subjectivity. In this sense, this act is also linked to the consumption of the other, to a cannibalism through which the other perishes as an autonomous will, and its opportunity to exist only persists if it is appropriated and included in the body of the one who devoured it. The rest of its existence persists only as part of the dominator's project. Why does rape acquire this meaning? Because, due to the function of sexuality in the world we know, it combines in a single act domination 270 Feminist Studies, Florianópolis, 13(2): 265-285, May-August/2005 Machine Translated by Google TERRITORY, SOVEREIGNTY AND SECOND STATE CRIMES... physical and moral subordination of the other. And there is no sovereign power that is only physical. Without the psychological and moral subordination of the other, the only power that exists is the power of death, and the power of death, in itself, is not sovereignty. 8 FOUCAULT, 1999. Complete sovereignty is, in its extreme phase, that of “making live or letting die.”8 Without control of life as life, domination cannot be complete. This is why a war that results in extermination does not constitute victory, because only the power of colonization allows the display of the power of death before those destined to remain alive. The trait par excellence of sovereignty is not the power of death over the subjugated, but rather their psychological and moral defeat, and their transformation into an audience receiving the display of the discretionary power of death of the dominator. It is because of its quality of expressive rather than instrumental violence – violence whose purpose is the expression of the absolute control of one will over another – that the aggression closest to rape is torture, whether physical or moral. Expressing that one has the will of another in one's hands is the telos or purpose of expressive violence. Dominion, sovereignty and control are its universe of meaning. It is worth remembering that the latter, however, are capacities that can only be exercised before a community of living beings and, therefore, have more affinity with the idea of colonization than with the idea of extermination. In a regime of sovereignty, some are destined to die, so that the sovereign power may leave its mark on their bodies; in this sense, the death of those chosen to represent the drama of domination is an expressive death, not a utilitarian death. It is necessary, however, to understand that all violence, including that in which the instrumental function dominates, such as, for example, that which aims to appropriate someone else's property, includes an expressive dimension, and in this sense we can say what any detective knows: that every act of violence, being a discursive gesture, has a signature. And it is in this signature that we recognize the repeated presence of a subject behind an act. Any detective knows that, if we recognize what is repeated in a series of crimes, we can identify the signature – the profile, the presence of a recognizable subject behind the act. The modus operandi of an aggressor is nothing more or less than the mark of a style in various speeches. Identifying the style of a violent act, as one identifies the style of a text, leads us to the perpetrator, in his role as author. In this sense, the signature is not a consequence of deliberation, of will, but rather a consequence of the automatism of the enunciation itself: the recognizable trace of a subject, of his position and his interests, in what he says, in what he expresses, in words, the act.9 9 DERRIDA, 1972. Feminist Studies, Florianópolis, 13(2): 265-285, May-August/2005 271 Machine Translated by Google RITA LAURA SEGATO If rape is, as I argue, an utterance, it necessarily addresses one or more interlocutors who are physically in the scene or present in the mental landscape of the subject of the utterance. It turns out that the rapist sends his messages along two axes of dialogue and not just one, as is generally considered, when thinking exclusively about his interaction with the victim. On the vertical axis, he does speak to the victim, and his speech acquires a punitive aspect, and the aggressor, a moralizing profile, a champion of social morality because, in this shared imaginary, the woman's destiny is to be contained, censored, disciplined, reduced, by the violent gesture of someone who reincarnates, through this act, the sovereign function. However, the most interesting contribution of my research among the prisoners in Brasília is possibly the discovery of a horizontal axis of dialogue. Here, the aggressor addresses his peers, and does so in several ways: he asks them to join his society and, from this perspective, the raped woman behaves like a sacrificial victim sacrificed in an initiation ritual; she competes among them, showing that she deserves, because of her aggressiveness and power of death, to occupy a place in the virile brotherhood and even to acquire a prominent position in a fraternity that only recognizes a hierarchical language and a pyramidal organization. This is because in the very long history of the gender, so long that it overlaps with the history of the species, the production of masculinity follows different processes to the production of femininity. Evidence from a cross-cultural perspective indicates that masculinity is a status conditioned upon its attainment – which must be reconfirmed with a certain regularity throughout life – through a process of proof or conquest and, above all, subject to the exaction of tributes from another who, due to his naturalized position in this status order, is perceived as the provider of the repertoire of gestures that nourish virility. This other, in the same act in which he delivers the instituting tribute, produces his own exclusion from the caste that he consecrates. In other words, for a subject to acquire his masculine status, as a title, as a degree, it is necessary that another subject does not have it, but grants it through a persuasive or imposing process that can be efficiently described as taxation.10 Under socio-politically “normal” conditions in the status order, we, women, are the ones who 10 See the chapter “The violent deliver the tribute; they, the receivers and beneficiaries. And the cell that Lacan did not see: a structure that relates them establishes a symbolic order marked (tense) dialogue between by the inequality that is present and organizes anthropology and psychoanalysis” in my 2003 book already cited. 272 Feminist Studies, Florianópolis, 13(2): 265-285, May-August/2005 Machine Translated by Google TERRITORY, SOVEREIGNTY AND SECOND STATE CRIMES... all other scenes of social life governed by the asymmetry of a law of status. In short, according to this model, the crime of rape results from a mandate that emanates from the gender structure and guarantees, in certain cases, the tribute that ensures each new member's access to the virile brotherhood. And I come to think that the tense intersection between its two coordinates, the vertical, of the victim’s consumption, and the horizontal, conditioned on obtaining tribute, is capable of illuminating fundamental aspects of the long and established cycle of feminicides in Ciudad Juárez. In fact, what led me to Ciudad Juárez is that my interpretative model of rape is capable of shedding new light on the enigma of feminicides and allows me to organize the pieces of the puzzle, making a recognizable pattern emerge. Inspired by this model that takes into account and emphasizes the role of the horizontal coordinate of dialogue between members of the fraternity, I tend not to understand the femicides in Ciudad Juárez as crimes in which hatred towards the victims is the predominant factor.11 I do not dispute that 11 As stated, for example, in the book by misogyny, in the strict sense of contempt for women, is widespread in the Jill Radford and Diana EH environment where the crimes occur. However, I am convinced that the victim Russell Femicide: The Politics of Woman is the secondary product of the process, a disposable piece, and that extreme Killing (RADFORD e RUSSELL, 1992). conditions and demands to cross the threshold of belonging to the peer group are behind the enigma of Ciudad Juárez. The ones who dominate the scene are the other men and not the victim, whose role is to be consumed to satisfy the demands of the peer group. The privileged interlocutors in this scene are equals, whether they are allies or competitors: the members of the mafia fraternity, to guarantee their belonging and celebrate their pact; the antagonists, to display power in front of their competitors in business; local authorities, federal authorities, activists, academics and journalists who dare to intrude on the sacred domain, the subordinate relatives – parents, siblings, friends – of the victims. These demands and forms of exhibitionism are characteristic of the patriarchal regime of a mafia order. The feminicides of Ciudad Juárez: a criminological challenge I present here a list of some ideas that, combined, form a possible image of the place, motivations, purposes, meanings, occasions and conditions of possibility of feminicides. My problem here is that the exposition can no longer be done in the form of a list, since the themes exposed Feminist Studies, Florianópolis, 13(2): 265-285, May-August/2005 273 Machine Translated by Google RITA LAURA SEGATO form a sphere of meaning; not a linear succession of successive items, but rather a meaningful unity: the world of Ciudad Juárez. And that is why it is not necessary for the deeds to form part of a discursive consciousness on the part of the authors, since they are, fundamentally, actions that constitute their world. To speak of causes and effects does not seem appropriate to me. To speak of a universe of intertwined meanings and intelligible motivations, yes. The place The place – the Great Frontier On the border between excess and lack, North and South, Mars and Earth, Ciudad Juárez is not a happy place. It is home to many tears, many terrors. Border that money must cross to reach solid ground where capital is finally safe and bears fruit in prestige, security, comfort and health. The frontier behind which capital moralizes and the banks that are worth it are found. The border with the most controlled country in the world, with its close and almost infallible surveillance trails. From this point on, from this line in the desert, any illicit business must be carried out with the strictest secrecy, in clandestine societies more cohesive and sworn than anywhere else. The seal of strict silence is their requirement. The border where big businessmen live on one side and “work” on the other; of great expansion and territorial appreciation – literally, land stolen from the desert every day, ever closer to the Rio Bravo. The frontier of the most lucrative trafficking in the world: drug trafficking, body trafficking. The border that separates one of the most expensive labor forces in the world from one of the cheapest labor forces. This border is the scene of the largest and most prolonged number of attacks and murders of women with a similar modus operandi that have been reported in “peacetimes”. The purposes The purposes The evidence of a very long period of inertia on the part of the Justice system regarding these crimes immediately draws our attention to their permanent subtext: the crimes speak of impunity. Impunity is their great theme and, therefore, impunity is the gateway to their deciphering. It could be that, although the environment in which the murdered were cultivated is the context I have just described, characterized by the concentration of economic and political power and, therefore, with high levels of 274 Feminist Studies, Florianópolis, 13(2): 265-285, May-August/2005 Machine Translated by Google TERRITORY, SOVEREIGNTY AND SECOND STATE CRIMES... privilege and protection for some groups, I believe, however, that we are mistaken when we think of impunity exclusively as a causal factor. I wish to propose that the femicides in Ciudad Juárez can be better understood if we stop thinking of them as a consequence of impunity and imagine that they behave as producers and reproducers of impunity. This was my first hypothesis and it is also possible that it was the first purpose of its perpetrators in the chronology of events: to seal, with the collectively shared complicity in the horrendous executions, a pact of silence capable of guaranteeing inviolable loyalty to mafia confraternities that operate through of the most patrolled border in the world. It also proves the capacity for cruelty and the power to kill that high-danger businesses require. The sacrificial ritual, violent and macabre, unites the members of the mafia and makes their bond inviolable. The sacrificial victim, part of a dominated territory, is forced to deliver the tribute of his body to the cohesion and vitality of the group and the stain of his blood defines the esoteric belonging to it on the part of his killers. In other words, more than a cause, impunity can be understood as a product, the result of these crimes, and crimes as a way of producing and reproducing impunity: a blood pact in the victims' blood. In this sense, it is possible to point out here a fundamental difference between this type of crime and gender crimes perpetrated in the intimacy of the domestic space, against victims who belong to the circle of relationships of the abusers – daughters, goddaughters, nieces, wives, etc. If, in the shelter of the domestic space, men abuse women who are dependent on them because they can do so, that is, because they already form part of the territory they control, the aggressor who appropriates the female body in an open, public space does so because he must, to show that he can. In one, it is a confirmation of an already existing domination; in the other, it is a display of the capacity for domination that must be repeated with a certain regularity and can be associated with ritual gestures of renewal of vows of virility. Power is, here, conditioned on a public display often dramatized in a predatory act of the female body. But the production and maintenance of impunity through the seal of a pact of silence is in reality indistinguishable from what could be described as the display of impunity. The classic strategy of sovereign power to reproduce itself as such is to publicize and even spectacularize the fact that it is beyond the law. Feminist Studies, Florianópolis, 13(2): 265-285, May-August/2005 275 Machine Translated by Google RITA LAURA SEGATO We can also understand the crimes of Ciudad Juárez in this way and suggest that, if on the one hand they are capable of sealing the alliance in the mafia pact, on the other hand, they also fulfill the role of exemplarity through which the disciplinary power of all law. This is because, in his ability to kidnap, torture and kill repeatedly and with impunity, the perpetrator of these crimes displays, beyond any doubt, the cohesion, vitality and territorial control of the corporate network he commands. It is clear that the continuation of this type of crime for 11 years without its recurrence being disrupted requires abundant human and material resources that involve: control of an extensive and loyal network of associates, access to places of detention and torture, vehicles for transporting the victim, access and influence or power to intimidate or blackmail members of the government and public administration at all levels, including the federal level. What is important to note is that, at the same time that this network of allies is activated by those who command the corporate crimes of Ciudad Juárez, its existence is flaunted, in a frank display of totalitarian control of the locality. The meanings The meanings It is precisely by fulfilling this last role that murders begin to behave as a communication system. If we listen carefully to the messages that circulate there, we will be able to access the face of the subject who speaks them. Only after understanding what he says, to whom and for what purpose, will we be able to locate the position from which he emits his speech. This is precisely why we must insist that, every time the slogan of sexual motivation is invoked frivolously before thoroughly analyzing what is “said” in these acts of interlocution, we lose the opportunity to follow the trail of who hides behind the bloodstained text. In other words, feminicides are messages emanating from an authorial subject who can only be identified, located, and profiled through rigorous “listening” to these crimes as communicative acts. It is in this subject’s discourse that we find the subject who speaks, it is in this discourse that the reality of this subject is inscribed as identity and subjectivity and, therefore, becomes traceable and recognizable. Even so, in his statement, we can find the trace of his interlocutor, his mark, as a negative. This is not only true for the violent acting outs that the police investigate, but also for the speech of 276 Feminist Studies, Florianópolis, 13(2): 265-285, May-August/2005 Machine Translated by Google TERRITORY, SOVEREIGNTY AND SECOND STATE CRIMES... any subject, as a variety of contemporary philosophers and literary theorists 12 See an overview of this form of have explained.12 If the violent act is understood as a message contemporary “listening” to the text in and crimes are perceived as orchestrated in a clear responsorial style, authors such as Bakhtin, Lacan, we find ourselves with a scene where acts of violence behave like a language Lévinas and others in David PATTERSON, 1988. capable of functioning effectively for those who understand, those who are informed, those who speak it, even when they do not directly participate in the enunciative action. This is why, when a communication system with a violent alphabet is installed, it is very difficult to uninstall it, to eliminate it. Violence constituted and crystallized in the form of a communication system is transformed into a stable language and begins to behave with the quasi-automatism of any language. In these cases, asking why people kill in a certain place is similar to asking why a certain language is spoken – Italian in Italy, Portuguese in Brazil. Each of these languages was established one day through historical processes such as conquest, colonization, unification of territories under a single nation state, or migration. In this sense, the reasons why we speak a language are arbitrary and cannot be explained by a necessary logic. Therefore, the processes by which a language is abolished or eradicated from a territory are also historical. The problem of rape as a language is further aggravated if we consider that there are certain languages that, under certain historical conditions, tend to become lingua franca and become widespread beyond the ethnic or national borders that served as their original niche. We then ask: Who is speaking here? To whom? What does it say? When? What is the language of feminicide? What signifier is rape? My answer is that the perpetrator of this crime is a man who values greed and territorial control above all else, including his own personal happiness. A man with his entourage of vassals who makes it absolutely clear that Ciudad Juárez has owners, and that these owners kill women to show that they are. Sovereign power cannot assert itself if it is not capable of sowing terror. He addresses the other men of the region, the guardians or those responsible for the victim in his domestic circle and all those who are responsible for his protection as representatives of the State; he speaks to the men of other friendly and enemy fraternities to demonstrate the resources of all kinds that he has and the vitality of his support network; he confirms to his allies and business partners that the communion and loyalty of the group continues. Feminist Studies, Florianópolis, 13(2): 265-285, May-August/2005 277 Machine Translated by Google RITA LAURA SEGATO unscathed. It tells them that its control over the territory is total, that its network of alliances is cohesive and reliable, and that its resources and contacts are unlimited. It is pronounced this way when a fraternity is consolidated; when a business is planned, threatened by the danger of illicit activities on this patrolled border; when the doors are opened to a new member; when another mafia group challenges control over the territory; when there are external intrusions, inspections, in the totalitarian heart of the locality. The language of feminicide uses the signifier female body to indicate the position of what can be sacrificed for the sake of a greater good, a collective good, such as the constitution of a mafia fraternity. The female body is the index par excellence of the position of the one who pays tribute, of the victim whose sacrifice and consumption can more easily be absorbed and naturalized by the community. Part of this digestion process is the habitual double victimization of the already victim, as well as the double and triple victimization of her family, represented most often by a sad mother. An almost uncontrollable cognitive defense mechanism makes us, in order to reduce the dissonance between the logic with which we expect life to behave and the way it behaves in reality, hate those who embody this inversion, this infraction of the grammar of sociability. Given the definitive absence of an aggressor, someone has to be held responsible for the collective misfortune thus caused. Just as it is common for the convicted person to remember his victim with great resentment, associating her with the outcome of his fate and the loss of his freedom, in the same way the community sinks deeper and deeper into a misogynistic spiral that, in the absence of more adequate support to rid itself of its discomfort, allows it to place the blame on the victim herself for the cruelty with which she was treated. We easily choose to reduce our suffering in the face of the intolerable injustice we have witnessed, claiming that “there must be a reason.” Thus, the murdered women of Ciudad Juárez quickly become prostitutes, liars, party girls, drug addicts and everything that can free us from the responsibility and bitterness that inoculates us when we come face to face with their unjust fate. In the language of feminicide, the female body also means territory, and its etymology is as archaic as its transformations are recent. It has been constitutive of the language of wars, tribal or modern, that the woman's body is annexed as part of the conquered country. The sexuality invested in it expresses the domesticating, appropriating act, when it inseminates the territory- 278 Feminist Studies, Florianópolis, 13(2): 265-285, May-August/2005 Machine Translated by Google TERRITORY, SOVEREIGNTY AND SECOND STATE CRIMES... woman's body. Therefore, the mark of the territorial control of the lords of Ciudad Juárez can be inscribed on the bodies of their women as part or extension of the domain asserted as their own. Gang rape is, as in blood pacts, the mixing of bodily substances of all who participate in it; the act of sharing intimacy in its fiercest aspect, of exposing what is most jealously guarded. Like the voluntary cut from which blood emerges, rape is a publication of fantasy, of the transgression of a limit, a radically compromising gesture. Rape, sexual domination, also has the characteristic of combining not only physical but also moral control of the victim and her associates. Moral reduction is a requirement for domination to be consummated and sexuality, in the world we know, is imbued with morality. What, then, is feminicide, in the sense that Ciudad Juárez gives to this word? It is the murder of a generic woman, of a type of woman, simply because she is a woman and belongs to that type, in the same way that genocide is a generic and lethal aggression against all those who belong to the same ethnic, racial, linguistic, religious or ideological group. Both crimes are directed at a category, not at a specific subject. Precisely, this subject is depersonalized as a subject because the category to which she belongs is made to predominate over her individual biographical or personality characteristics. There is, however, in my opinion, a difference between these two types of crime that should be examined and discussed in more detail. If in genocide the rhetorical construction of hatred for the other leads to the action of their elimination, in feminicide the misogyny behind the act is a feeling closer to that of hunters for their trophy: it resembles contempt for their life or the conviction that the only value of that life lies in its availability for appropriation. The crimes, therefore, would seem to speak of a true bestial Right of Pernada of a feudal and post-modern Lord with his group of acolytes, as an expression par excellence of his absolutist dominion over a territory, where the right over the woman's body is an extension of the lord's right over his land. However, in the more than terrible contemporary post-modern, neoliberal, post- state, post-democratic order, the Lord has become capable of controlling his territory in an almost unrestricted manner as a consequence of the uncontrolled accumulation characteristic of the region of border expansion, exacerbated by the globalization of the economy, and the loose rules of the neoliberal market in force. His only strength Feminist Studies, Florianópolis, 13(2): 265-285, May-August/2005 279 Machine Translated by Google RITA LAURA SEGATO regulatory power is rooted in the greed and predatory power of its competitors: the other Lords of the place. Regional microfascisms and their totalitarian control of the province accompany the decline of national order on this side of the Great Border and urge, more than ever, the application of forms of legality and control of an internationalist nature. The mysterious death of the women of Ciudad Juárez may be the definitive clue that decentralization, in a context of privatization and neoliberalism, can only install a provincial totalitarianism, in a regressive conjunction between postmodernity and feudalism, in which the female body is once again annexed to the territorial domain. The conditions of possibility Extreme asymmetry due to the unregulated extraction of profits by a group is a crucial condition for establishing a context of impunity. When the inequality of power is as extreme as in an unrestricted neoliberal regime, there is no real possibility of separating legal from illegal business, since inequality becomes so pronounced that it allows absolute territorial control at the sub-state level by a few groups and their support and alliance networks. These networks then establish a true provincial totalitarianism and begin to demarcate and express unambiguously the regime of control in force in the region. The unambiguous crimes of women in Ciudad Juárez seem to me to be a way of signifying this type of territorial domination. A strong characteristic of totalitarian regimes is their closure, the representation of the totalitarian space as a universe without an outside, encapsulated and self-sufficient, in which a barricade strategy on the part of the elites prevents the inhabitants from accessing a different, external, alternative perception of reality. A nationalist rhetoric that asserts itself in a primordialist construction of national unity – as is the case of “Mexicanity” in Mexico, “tropical civilization” in Brazil or “being national” in Argentina – benefits those who hold territorial control and the monopoly of the collective voice. These metaphysics of the nation based on an anti-historical essentialism, however popular and demanding they may be, work with the same logical procedures that supported Nazism. This same type of national ideology can also be found when a regional elite consolidates 280 Feminist Studies, Florianópolis, 13(2): 265-285, May-August/2005 Machine Translated by Google TERRITORY, SOVEREIGNTY AND SECOND STATE CRIMES... their dominion over space and legitimizes their privileges in a primordialist ideology of the region, that is, by working on their identification with an ethnic group or with a civilizational heritage. Powerful nativist slogans pressure for the formation of a feeling of loyalty to the emblems of territorial unity with which the elite, on the other hand, designs its heraldry. Popular culture means, in a totalitarian environment, appropriated culture; the people are the inhabitants of the controlled territory; and the authorities are the owners of the discourse, of the traditional culture, of the wealth produced by the people, and of the totalized territory. As in the totalitarianism of a nation, one of the main strategies of regional totalitarianism is to warn/prevent the community against any speech that could be labeled as non-native, not emanating from and sealed by the commitment of internal loyalty. “Foreigner” and “stranger in the region” are transformed into categories of accusation and the possibility of speaking “from outside” is confiscated. Therefore, the rhetoric is that of a cultural heritage that must be defended above all else and that of a territorial loyalty that predominates and excludes other loyalties – such as, for example, the rule of law, the struggle for the expansion of rights and the demand for activism and international arbitration for the protection of human rights. This is why, if the “inside” and the state of media siege are the unequivocal strategy of totalitarian leaders, the “outside” is always the fulcrum for action in the field of human rights. In a totalitarian environment, the most insistent value is the “ we. ” The concept of “we” becomes defensive, entrenched, patriotic, and anyone who violates it is accused of treason. In this type of patriotism, the first victims are the other people within the nation, the region, the locality – always women, black people, indigenous peoples, dissidents. These other people within are forced to sacrifice, keep quiet, and postpone their complaints and arguments about their differences in the name of the sacred and essentialized unity of the collective. It is by brandishing this set of typically totalitarian representations – of provincial totalitarianism – that the Juarense media disqualify external observers one by one. The discourse of the media, when one “hears” the subtext of the news, when one reads between the lines, is: it is better to have one’s own murderer, however cruel he may be, than someone else’s vigilante, even if he is right. This well-known elementary propaganda strategy builds, every day, in the face of any threat from the outside world, the totalitarian wall of Ciudad Juárez, and has Feminist Studies, Florianópolis, 13(2): 265-285, May-August/2005 281 Machine Translated by Google RITA LAURA SEGATO contributed, over these 11 years, to hiding the truth from the people and to neutralizing the forces of law that resist a prosthetic articulation with local powers. It's impossible not to remember Ciudad Juárez when lemos Hannah Arendt: 13 Alexandre KOYRÉ, 1945. Totalitarian movements have been called “secret societies in broad daylight.”13 Indeed, [...] the structure of the movements [...] reminds us first of all of certain characteristics of these societies. Secret societies also form hierarchies according to the degree of “initiation,” regulate the lives of their members according to a secret and fictitious assumption that makes each thing appear to be something else; they adopt a strategy of coherent lies to deceive the uninitiated masses outside; they demand unrestricted obedience from their members, who are held together by loyalty to a leader who is often unknown and always mysterious, surrounded, or supposedly surrounded, by a small circle of initiates; and these, in turn, are surrounded by semi-initiates who constitute a kind of “buffer” against the profane and hostile world. Totalitarian movements also have in common with secret societies the dichotomous division of the world into “sworn blood brothers” and an indistinct and inarticulate mass of sworn enemies [...] based on absolute hostility towards the world around them. [...] Perhaps the clearest similarity between secret societies and totalitarian movements lies in the importance of ritual. [...] [however], this idolatry does not prove the existence of pseudo-religious or heretical tendencies [...], they are simple organizational tricks, much practiced in secret societies, which also forced their members to keep secrets out of fear and respect for frightening symbols. People bond more firmly through the shared experience of a secret ritual than through simple admission to knowledge of the secret.14 14 ARENDT, 1998 , pp. 425-427. But what kind of State is this? What kind of leadership is this that produces the effect of regional totalitarianism? It is a second State that needs a name. A name that serves as the basis for the legal category capable of classifying its owners and the network of complicity they control under the law. The femicides in Ciudad Juárez are not common gender crimes , but corporate crimes and, more specifically, they are crimes of a second State, of a parallel State. They are more similar, in their phenomenology, to the rituals that cement the unity of secret societies and totalitarian regimes. They share an idiosyncratic characteristic with the abuses of political power: they present themselves as crimes without a personalized subject carried out on a victim who is also not personalized: a secret power abducts 282 Feminist Studies, Florianópolis, 13(2): 265-285, May-August/2005 Machine Translated by Google TERRITORY, SOVEREIGNTY AND SECOND STATE CRIMES... a type of woman, victimizing her in order to reaffirm and revitalize her capacity for control. Therefore, they are closer to state crimes, crimes against humanity, where the parallel state that produces them cannot be classified because we lack efficient legal categories and procedures to confront it. This is why it would be necessary to create new legal categories to classify them and make them legally intelligible and classifiable: they are not common crimes, that is, they are not gender crimes motivated by sexuality or a lack of understanding in the domestic sphere, as law enforcement officials, authorities and activists frivolously claim. They are crimes that could be called second state or corporate crimes, in which the expressive dimension of violence prevails. I understand “corporation” here as the group or network that manages the resources, rights and duties of a parallel state, firmly established in the region and with tentacles in the headwaters of the country. If we were to reverse the terms for a moment and say that the telos or purpose of capital and the “commandments of capitalization” is not the process of accumulation, because that would mean falling into a tautology (the purpose of accumulation is accumulation; the purpose of concentration is concentration) and, therefore, we would be describing the closed cycle of an end in itself; if instead we were to say that the purpose of capital is the production of difference through the reproduction and progressive expansion of the hierarchy to the point of the extermination of some as an incontestable expression of its success, we would conclude that only the death of some is capable of adequately and self-evidently allegorizing the place and position of all the dominated, of the dominated people, of the dominated class. It is in exclusion and its signifier par excellence, the capacity to suppress the other, that capital is consecrated. And what could be more emblematic of the place of submission than the body of the mixed-race woman, of the poor woman, of the daughter and sister of others who are poor and mixed-race? Where could one better signify the otherness produced precisely to be conquered? What trophy would better symbolize the sinecure of great business beyond any rule or restriction? This doubly other woman thus emerges on the scene as the place of production and signification of the last form of totalitarian territorial control – of bodies and land, of bodies as part of land – through the act of their humiliation and suppression. We thus find ourselves faced with the limitlessness of both economies – symbolic and material. Predation and Feminist Studies, Florianópolis, 13(2): 265-285, May-August/2005 283 Machine Translated by Google RITA LAURA SEGATO The plundering of the environment and labor go hand in hand with systematic and corporate rape. Let us not forget that rapina, in Portuguese, shares its root with rape, rape in English. If this is so, we can not only affirm that an understanding of the economic context on a large scale helps us to illuminate the events in Ciudad Juárez, but also that the humble deaths of Juárez, based on the small scale of their situation and location, awaken us and lead us to a more lucid rereading of the transformations that are going through the world in our days, as it becomes, with each passing moment, more inhospitable and terrifying. Bibliographic references bibliographic references AMIR, Menacher. Patterns in Forcible Rape. Chicago and Londres: The University of Chicago Press, 1971. ARENDT, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Routledge, 1998. ATENCIO, Graciela. “The circuit of death”. La Jornada, n. 61, Sept. 2003. Triple Day – feminist supplement of the newspaper La Jornada. DERRIDA, Jacques. Margins of Philosophy. Paris: Minuit, 1972. FOUCAULT, Michel. “Lecture of March 17, 1976”. In: course at the ______. In defense of society: Collège de France (1975–1976). São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 1999. GONZALEZ RODRIGUEZ, Sergio. Bones in the Desert. Barcelona: Anagrama, 2002. KOYRÉ, Alexandre. “The Political Function of the Modern Lie.” Contemporary Jewish Record, jun. 1945. PATTERSON, David. Literature and Spirit. Essays on Bakhtin and his Contemporaries. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1988. RADFORD, Jill, and RUSSELL, Diana E. H. Femicide: The Politics of Woman Killing. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992. SEGATO, Rita Laura: The Elementary Structures of Violence: Essays on Gender between Anthropology, Psychoanalysis and Human Rights. Buenos Aires: Universidad Nacional de Quilmes/Prometeo 3010, 2003. WASHINGTON VALDEZ, Diana. Harvest of Women. Mexico City: Editorial Océano, 2005. [Received March 2005 and accepted for publication May 2005] 284 Feminist Studies, Florianópolis, 13(2): 265-285, May-August/2005 Machine Translated by Google TERRITORY, SOVEREIGNTY AND SECOND STATE CRIMES... Territory, Sovereignty and Second State Crimes: the Writing on the Bodies of the Assassinated Women of Ciudad Juarez Abstract: Abstract The essay examines the case of the feminicides that rendered at least three hundred women murdered during the last twelve years in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, at the Northern Mexican border. In all these years, the authorities presented only a few suspects, without ever getting to convince public opinion of their culpability. Impunity and protection for the murderers are evident to local public opinion and to international observers. I argue that what is written on the body of the brutally murdered women is the signature of a local and regional power counting also with national connections. These acts of apparently irrational violence state beyond doubt the discretionary power of their perpetrators and the control they exert over the people and resources of their territory, thus sealing and reinforcing a pact of fraternity. ordsExpressive violence, gender violence, mafias, masculinity, territoriality. Key Words: Translated by Anand Dacier Feminist Studies, Florianópolis, 13(2): 265-285, May-August/2005 285