Dispute for sovereignty. Organized crime and community defense as indirect private governments in Mexico

Abstract

This article aims to analyze the dispute for sovereign power during the last decades in Mexico, with the purpose of contribuing to the understanding of the current national situation char- acterized by the armed conflict between different political and social actors. In particular, a contextual study of this type of conflicts is carried out in the states of Guerrero, Michoacan and Chiapas, where there has been an important presence of the Armed Forces, the ter- ritorial control of organized crime and the emergence of diverse expressions of community defense. For this purpose, the concepts of sovereignty and indirect private government of Achille Mbembe are taken up in this paper, since they are very useful theoretical tools to study the situation of peripheral states immersed in the logic of globalization. Based on the informa- tion analyzed, it is concluded that the dispute for sovereign power through the emergence of private governments in Mexico is a phenomenon with a predisposition to become more recurrent, since it occurs as a consequence of a scenario of dilution of statehood as a regulator of social relations, a process that began at the end of the 20th century and continues to date.