Ella McPherson (University of Cambridge, UK)
The Public Framing of the 2006 Atenco Conflict in Mexico and Implications for Justice
In early May 2006, a violent confrontation between flower vendors in San Salvador de Atenco and the police, who were attempting to evict the vendors from their long-tenured but illegal street stalls,led to casualties on both sides. The flower sellers and their supporters in the area, who had remained mobilized following their successful battle in 2002 against the state’s plan to expropriate their land to build an international airport, blocked roads and armed themselves with harvesting machetes in the face of a state that seemed closed to negotiation via the usual channels. From an academic perspective, the 2006 Atenco conflict could be considered a case of popular justice addressing state failure on two counts: the state was both the perpetrator and the ignorer of the perceived injustice. Yet this framework did not dominate in publicinterpretations of this situation.Rather, the Atenco confrontation was initiallyframed as a riot instigated by subversives – but its lasting portrayal has been ofa grave instance of human rights violations, including torture and sexual assault, committed by the state in post-transition Mexico.
In this paper, I explain how each of these frameworks gained ascendancy in the Mexicanpublic sphere as approximated by media coverage; namely, their trajectory was due to the clash of authoritarian cultures, which linger post-transition in Mexican newsrooms, with market imperatives and journalistic norms. Iconclude by exploring the potential effects of the lasting human rights framework on the Atenco situation. While acknowledging the severity of human rights violations in this case and applauding the visibility of the human rights community in seeking a solution, I nevertheless argue that the human rights framework has been detrimental to justice on two fronts. First, it eclipses discussion about and resolution of the original injustice – that of the flower sellers’ forced displacement. Second, it channels redress of the police’s abuses of power through the relatively ineffectual human rights mechanisms of the National Human Rights Commission, which is unable to issue binding rulings. This Commission’s recommendations provide a veneer of justice that distracts from the ongoing legal impunity of the police accused of violations.
In this paper, I explain how each of these frameworks gained ascendancy in the Mexicanpublic sphere as approximated by media coverage; namely, their trajectory was due to the clash of authoritarian cultures, which linger post-transition in Mexican newsrooms, with market imperatives and journalistic norms. Iconclude by exploring the potential effects of the lasting human rights framework on the Atenco situation. While acknowledging the severity of human rights violations in this case and applauding the visibility of the human rights community in seeking a solution, I nevertheless argue that the human rights framework has been detrimental to justice on two fronts. First, it eclipses discussion about and resolution of the original injustice – that of the flower sellers’ forced displacement. Second, it channels redress of the police’s abuses of power through the relatively ineffectual human rights mechanisms of the National Human Rights Commission, which is unable to issue binding rulings. This Commission’s recommendations provide a veneer of justice that distracts from the ongoing legal impunity of the police accused of violations.
