Luminos is the open access monograph publishing program from UC Press. Luminos provides a framework for preserving and reinvigorating monograph publishing for the future and increases the reach and visibility of important scholarly work. Titles published in the UC Press Luminos model are published with the same high standards for selection, peer review, production, and marketing as those in our traditional program. www.luminosoa.org Making Things Stick Making Things Stick Surveillance Technologies and Mexico’s War on Crime Keith Guzik university of california press University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Oakland, California © 2016 by The Regents of the University of California This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND license. To view a copy of the license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses. Suggested citation: Guzik, Keith. Making Things Stick: Surveillance Technologies and Mexico’s War on Crime Oakland: University of California Press, 2016. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/luminos.12 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Guzik, Keith, author. Title: Making things stick : surveillance technologies and Mexico’s war on crime / Keith Guzik. Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2016] | “2016 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015040252| ISBN 9780520284043 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780520959705 (electronic) Subjects: LCSH: Crime prevention—Mexico. | Social control—Government policy—Mexico. | Electronic surveillance—Mexico. | Security systems—Mexico. Classification: LCC HV7434.M6 G89 2016 | DDC 363.2/32—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015040252 Manufactured in the United States of America 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (r 2002) ( Permanence of Paper ). Анечке Contents List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi 1. Surveillance Technologies and States of Security 1 2. Taming the Tiger 26 3. Prohesion 56 4. Ni con goma 99 5. Statecraft 141 6. Grasping Surveillance 177 Notes 207 Bibliography 225 Index 247 figures 1. Hernando Cortés, 1485–1547, Spanish conquistador / 35 2. Mixity: Of Spain and India, eighteenth century / 39 3. Map of railway expansion during the Porfiriato / 43 4. Workers operating machines in the construction of a roadway, c. 1925 / 46 5. Ciudad Administrativa in Zacatecas, 2013 / 58 6. REPUVE registration site in Zacatecas, 2011 / 59 7. REPUVE RFID tag / 60 8. Initial review of documents during REPUVE registration / 61 9. Photographing vehicle during REPUVE registration / 61 10. Locating VIN number during REPUVE registration / 61 11. Recording VIN number during REPUVE registration / 62 12. Transferring VIN number during REPUVE registration / 62 13. Inputting driver and vehicle data during REPUVE registration / 62 14. Adhering RFID tag during REPUVE registration / 63 15. Verifying RFID tag during REPUVE registration / 63 16. Cosmic Thing, 2002, by Damián Ortega / 69 ix Illustrations x | Illustrations 17. Arquitectura rústica para carros inseguros, 2003, by Betsabeé Romero / 69 18. Yellow Bug, 2004, by Margarita Cabrera / 70 19. El vochol, 2010, by eight anonymous Huichol artists / 70 20. Conceptual design of the REPUVE database / 87 21. Organizational structure of the REPUVE / 88 22. Governing automobility in Mexico / 93 23. REPUVE registration site in Sonora / 156 24. Video screen displaying REPUVE camera feeds at a REPUVE national assembly in Tlaxcala / 160 25. REPUVE toll lane in Sonora / 169 26. Values at stake in surveillance politics / 201 xi This book is made possible only through the generous support of nu- merous organizations and individuals. First among these is the National Science Foundation, which funded my research with a grant (no. 1024469) co-awarded through its Science, Technology, and Society and Law and Social Science programs. No less central were state institutions and employees in Mexico, including administrators and frontline work- ers with the Public Registry of Vehicles in Zacatecas and Sonora and their federal counterparts in the Mexico City offices of the Executive Secretary of the National System for Public Security. Their cooperation was remarkable, and this work would not have been completed without it. I owe my thanks as well to the car companies in Mexico that made their representatives available for interviews. The institutions of higher education where I have worked over the past decade were essential to this work too. The administration and faculty at Bloomfield College supported my research through a study leave in spring 2011 that enabled me to complete the majority of my fieldwork, and they also invited me to present preliminary findings at faculty forums. Beyond being supportive friends, the faculty at the col- lege were an enduring example of striking the proper balance between research, teaching, and service in the academy. The University of Col- orado, Denver, meanwhile, provided both a nurturing work environ- ment that facilitated writing this book and funding to help publish it as an open access book. The CU Denver Department of Sociology gave Acknowledgments xii | Acknowledgments generous funding as well for a research assistant, who was critical in helping me clear the final hurdles of the research process. And my new colleagues in the department and the College of Liberal Arts and Sci- ences were wonderfully supportive in welcoming me to my new home in the Rocky Mountains. I also want to thank the University of California Press, and Maura Roessner and Jack Young in particular. Maura is an excellent editor to work with. And she made navigating the uncharted terrain of open access publishing an exciting and enjoyable experience. I am indebted as well to Julie Van Pelt, my copyeditor, who did wonderful work in improving the book’s readability. Outside the organizations that supported this work, a number of people deserve acknowledgment. In Mexico, Daiset Ruiz-Sarquis, Armando López Muñoz, and Carmen Cebreros Urzaiz provided critical insight into the endlessly rich history and culture of the country that would have been impossible for me to uncover on my own. But more than this, they offered immeasurable warmth and a good dose of mad- ness that helped carry me through the drudgiest days of field research. I owe thanks as well to Damián Ortega, Betsabeé Romero, Margarita Cabrera, Kurimanzutto, and the Asociación de Amigos del Museo del Arte Popular for allowing me to use images of their artwork in this book. Two research assistants contributed immensely to this project. At Bloomfield College, I was lucky to cross paths with Nora López Matta, who skillfully transcribed interviews and coded survey data while bal- ancing the financial and familial demands of pursuing her American dream. At the University of Colorado, Denver, Heather Worrell gener- ously offered the help of her Spread the Word language services com- pany to help edit transcriptions and create a nimble digital bibliography from the messy mass of sources that I used to put this book together. The ideas that eventually resulted from this research were improved through the kind, critical feedback of colleagues. Special recognition is owed to those who were able to trudge through earlier versions of the manuscript at the request of UC Press—Diane Davis, Katja Franko Aas, and other anonymous reviewers. I am indebted as well to Gary T. Marx and Robert Buffington, who selflessly offered insightful comments on the whole manuscript. I also owe thanks to those who provided me venues for presenting preliminary findings at professional conferences, including Nicholas Rowland and Jan-Hendrick Passoth and their work group on science and technology studies (STS) and the state; and Karen Acknowledgments | xiii Levy and Aaron Smyth and their research network on the intersections of STS and sociolegal studies. A number of others—Jon Gilliom, Mary Mitchell, William Rose, Margaret Hu, Bryce Newell, Diana Mincyte, and Andrzej Nowak—provided helpful comments on conference papers and presentations that form the basis of this book’s chapters. Finally, I want to especially thank Anna Maria Marshall and Evan Stark. Their areas of specialization may lie outside this work, but their continued mentorship well past the time when one should require it is a gift I will always appreciate. 1.1 Bunker Mentality Mexico’s Federal Police Intelligence Center (CIPF) was inaugurated on November 24, 2009, in a ceremony attended by President Felipe Calde- rón and Secretary of Public Security Genaro García Luna. The CIPF, a subterranean structure colloquially known as El Bunker, serves as the command center for the federal government’s War on Crime. a It houses Plataforma México, a network of advanced telecommunication and information technologies receiving data from over six hundred state and municipal offices; 169 federal police stations; the national registries of people, vehicles, criminal records, fingerprints, and ballistics; and video cameras located throughout the country, including those at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, dedicated to the Virgin of Guada- lupe, the patron saint of Mexico. 1 To visualize the data, El Bunker fea- tures four video walls, each measuring 65 by 10 feet, displaying eighty rear-screen projectors arranged in four 2 by 10 configurations. 2 In his remarks, President Calderón claimed that the center would serve as a chapter 1 Surveillance Technologies and States of Security a. The federal government’s security campaign has carried various monikers—la Guerra contra el Narco (the War against the Narcos), la Lucha contra la Inseguridad (the Fight against Insecurity), la Guerra contra el Crimen (the War against Crime or the War on Crime), among others. Of these, the War against the Narcos and the War on Crime were the most common during the Calderón administration. I use the term “War on Crime” because it captures the fact that the government is targeting forms of illicit behavior beyond drug trafficking. 2 | Surveillance Technologies and States of Security “computer brain” to keep the federal police “a step ahead of crime.” It would allow Mexico to win its War on Crime, he explained, since “wars are won with this, with technology, information, intelligence, planning, and force.” 3 With these words, the Mexican leader gave voice to his administration’s faith in the power of technology to defeat crime. Situated off the southwest corner of Chapultepec Park, Mexico City’s verdant oasis, El Bunker’s proximity to the park’s other iconic buildings—Chapultepec Castle and Los Pinos—provides a commentary on the evolving relationship between governors and the governed in Mexico. Chapultepec Castle, located at the highest point of the park, is a regal structure that was commissioned by Viceroy Bernardo de Gálvez in 1775 and given its current appearance by the Austrian-born Emperor Maximilian I of Mexico in 1864. Behind the castle in the south-central section of the park, the more austere Los Pinos was constructed on the order of President Venustiano Carranza in 1917 and has been the primary home for Mexico’s heads of state since 1934, when President Lázaro Cárdenas moved the presidential residence out of Chapultepec Castle. El Bunker, meanwhile, with its central conference room that seats the president and his security cabinet in the event of a national emergency, is a two-story underground structure powered by an inde- pendent energy source. If Chapultepec Castle pronounced the pres- ence of a royal authority through its privileged position above Mexico City, and if Los Pinos symbolized the progressive ideals of Mexico’s postrevolutionary government to level the distance between the coun- try’s most and least powerful sectors, El Bunker embodies the security anxieties of the contemporary government, which would secure society by placing its administrative center outside the grasp of the general population while maintaining oversight through advanced surveillance technologies. A solid five years into the intelligence center’s existence, its value remains in doubt. Although homicides, robberies, and extortions are down in recent years, violent crime remains high throughout the coun- try. 4 And the government’s limited capacity to combat criminal wrong- doing has been underscored by dramatic events such as the massacre of forty-three students of the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers’ College of Ayotzinapa in September 2014 and the escape of Joaquín “El Chapo” (Shorty) Guzmán from a maximum security prison in July 2015. These high-profile crimes, like most delinquency in Mexico, remain unsolved. As regards the center itself, it has been dogged by numerous prob- lems, including unmanageable historical data, unreliable interagency Surveillance Technologies and States of Security | 3 communications, the reluctance of state agencies to share data, and manual processes of information keeping at the local level that slow data processing and accuracy. 5 These challenges have not diminished the government’s faith in technology. “It is a matter of time,” officials assert, when asked about the center’s impact on crime. 6 And additional police bunkers have been constructed in Mexico since. 7 But in Mexico’s War on Crime, one wonders whether time and technology will be enough. 1.2 Living in the Surveillance Society This is a book about surveillance technologies and their impact on the relationship between authorities and those they govern. Surveillance, defined as “any collection or processing of personal data, whether iden- tifiable or not, for the purposes of influencing or managing those whose data have been garnered,” 8 has become a topic of growing popular and scholarly interest the last twenty years. This is reflected in the attention paid to it by Hollywood (in films such as The Truman Show, Gattaca, Lost Highway, Minority Report, Panic Room ) and academia (in the journal Surveillance and Society, as well as a number of recent books). This growing popularity does not owe to the novelty of surveillance, since surveillance is not new. Political authorities have always kept track of people, just as parents have always looked after their children, teachers tracked their students, doctors monitored their patients, and bosses watched over their workers. But how we watch has changed, thanks to the proliferation of com- puters, mobile devices, CCTV cameras, RFID chips, and other gadgets in society today. “Traditional surveillance,” the seminal surveillance scholar Gary T. Marx notes, was characterized by “close observation, especially of a suspected person.” “New surveillance,” however, is per- formed “through the use of technical means to extract or create per- sonal or group data, whether from individuals or contexts.” 9 And on a daily basis, we come into contact with a host of technologies whose surveillant capacities are transforming the contours of social life. “Heli- copter parents” wield “electronic leashes” to remain ever present in the lives of their children, classrooms are turned “inside out” or made into “MOOCs” to accommodate greater numbers of students, doctors connect to patients in “eICUs,” and “job spill” and “workweek creep” befall greater numbers of workers. At the level of national security, networks of computers armed with powerful processors and sophisticated software scoop up data