ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to understand political and state violence in Mexico from the late 1950s until today. We posit the need for an analytical approach that emphasizes plurality, in order to distinguish between the different expressions of state violence directed against different political enemies. We propose a periodisation of these violences during the last seven decades. During the first period, from the late 1950s through the late 1960s, violence was organised and deployed so as to ensure the working of government mechanisms (coercion, negotiation) based on positions of superior force, and involving mass killings, selective assassinations and political imprisonment. The second period was marked by the deployment of the type of violence associated with counterinsurgency, of which an example are the clandestine methods of enforced disappearance used during the 1970s and 1980s as part of the efforts of the authoritarian regime to regain legitimacy and ideological hegemony. Throughout the third period, towards the 1990s, state violence began to take another direction, this time against popular demands caused by economic crises and the loss of rights. Finally, a new phase of generalised violence developed during the mid-2000s, marked by the emergence of non-state actors such as groups of organised crime.
