Politicians, Narcos, Missing Students, and Mexico’s Crisis (SWP 47)

Taking the September 2014 disappearance of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Normal School in rural Guerrero State as its point of departure, this paper explores the interlinking experiences of government corruption, narco-trafficking, and elite privilege as they have played out through the larger social crisis that followed the disappearances. I argue that the fissures within Mexican responses to Ayotzinapa reveal a great deal about the ways that racial and class privilege continue to characterize civil-society movements in Mexico. Broad, civil-society coalitions to combat political corruption, impunity and violence have been difficult to sustain here, a problem that has been particularly striking given the spectacular nature of the recent waves of violence in Mexico. This paper argues that it is the entrenched nature of middle-class and elite dependence on class and racial privilege that ultimately makes those alliances unthinkable