"Necropolitics" in "Warlike" Border Zones
For vulnerable populations in border regions that come to resemble war zones, innocuous everyday activities can result in harm, and traveling migrants may witness violence or even death.
Necropolitics becomes part of the everyday. Achille Mbembe defines necropolitics as “death-worlds, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead” (2003, p. 40).Border zones that are afflicted with violence can suffer great loss of life and hardship. For example, what became known in Ciudad Juarez as juvenicidio (murder of youth) surfaced as a consequence of globalization. The homicide rates of youth between 15 and 29 increased from 201 in 2007 to 1,647 in 2009 (Enriquez 2011; Quintana 2011 as cited in Staudt and Mendez 2015, p. 76). Neoliberal policies stressing privatization and low taxes to court international corporations eviscerated public sector social services and agencies dedicated to the protection of women and the poor. There were few safeguards to protect children and youth, so they became victims to the drug war as innocent bystanders, as the children of people involved in the drug industry, or even as drug users or cartel assassins.
Government responses to global economic trends - seen poignantly in Mexico's privatization of peasant lands, which lead to northward migration to the USA after the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) - have a direct impact on youth as did the equally impactful Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) policy that displaced Central American coffee farmers unable to survive in their homelands. Similarly, the rise of marijuana and cocoa production as a response to the export-oriented and mono-crop production in the Mexican countryside has fueled a drug war that has dominated USA-Mexico relations for several decades. As families left the countryside, youth had to survive on the streets of Mexican metropolises making them vulnerable to crimes. For instance, some news accounts claimed that over 10,000 children were orphaned by the war on drugs in Juarez (La Jornada 2010).
Vulnerable people are left to suffer the decisions that national governments make. The people fleeing violent neighborhoods and poverty as forced migrants find themselves at the US border greeted by reinforced steel walls and surveillance cameras - whose architects demand more funding, more agent hires, and more technology to apprehend and deport migrants. Gilberto Rosas calls this border policing machine a “kind of warfare that collapses the distinctions between the police and the military, between regulating life and killing it” (2012, p. 7).
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