Philip Luke Johnson

Updates on research, teaching, writing.

    • Mexico has a new president

      On October 1, Claudia Sheinbaum was sworn in as president of Mexico. She is the first woman head of state and first Jewish head of state for the country. She’s also a climate scientist, academic, and former mayor of Mexico City. Basically, she’s a big deal and her election is a big deal.

      I wrote a short piece about Sheinbaum’s presidency for The Conversation. Presidents in Mexico only have one six-year term, but wield considerable power during that period. Sheinbaum comes in with more power than most, given the dominant position of her political party. At the same time, however, it’s possible that the policies of her predecessor will undermine that power, particularly in the way he weakened some parts of the state while empowering the military.

      In the background of this article is something I’m going to be thinking about a lot in the next few months (and maybe years). Sheinbaum’s predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has so dominated Mexican politics for the past six years – and he’s been active and influential for decades before this – that it’s been hard to think about the future without getting caught up on him.

      My ongoing research project in the Yucatán Peninsula was shaped by López Obrador’s policies, but the project will unfold almost entirely across Sheinbaum’s presidency. Although I’m interested in López Obrador’s legacy, he’s not going to be the main actor over the next six years. I need to make sure I’m not getting caught in the past, and limiting the current president by thinking about her only in terms of the previous president. A lot of journos and scholars are going to have the same challenge.

      My first big research project focused on the presidency of Felipe Calderón, 2006 to 2012. I’m excited to have my second project under way, focusing on the presidency of Claudia Sheinbaum, 2024 to 2030.

    • Revolution and racketeering

      Last week, I was invited to write a short article for The Conversation (Aus edition). The brief picked up on the racist discourse about Haitian immigrants in the United States, and looked at this in a longer, historical perspective. Haiti is by no means my particular area of expertise, and I think this makes me guilty — along with many others — of not giving due attention to the country’s really important place in the history of race and revolution. The finished article is here (the title for this post comes from the draft version of the article).

      This invitation gave me a chance to braid together a few different threads of my research and teaching. First, I’ve been paying closer attention to Haiti lately because of the public profiles that gangs and gang leaders have cultivated over the last few years. My doctoral work and now book project looks at public communication by criminal actors, and in the last few years some particularly entrepreneurial gang leaders in Haiti have been publishing videos or speaking directly the press about insecurity in the country (including their role within it).

      A second thread focuses on the US naval base at Guantánamo Bay — just across the water from Haiti, and a site of mass detention of Haitian refugees. I became interested in Guantánamo because of the cruel offshore detention program of my own country, Australia. Since then, I’ve studied and written about Guantánamo, primarily in terms of the War on Terror prison camps there (which were built on the model of the earlier Haitian camps).

      Finally, the topic of US intervention in the Caribbean ties in with some of my recent teaching, especially an undergraduate class on US foreign policy (which will be back in 2025!). One of the emerging themes of the class is the disjuncture between what the United States says it does in the world, and what it actually does in its own neighborhood. I use examples from Latin America to, for example, highlight that US isolationism was never absolutely isolationist, and always came with a fair amount of regional intervention. Haiti is such an important case for picking up on some of these contradictions.

      Stay tuned! I hope to have another piece up at The Conversation soon. This time talking about the upcoming presidential inauguration in Mexico.

    • The arrest of “El Mayo” Zambada

      July saw potentially major news about organized crime in Mexico. One of the most powerful but also reclusive crime bosses, Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada was arrested in the United States, along with Joaquín Guzmán López, also an important figure but better known as the son of the infamous Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera. Zambada and Guzmán flew into Texas on a private plane, where they were promptly apprehended by US security agents. How and why Zambada ended up in Texas was unclear, particularly because US officials and agencies seemed unable to agree on a story.

      I spoke to SBS Australia about what happened and what it could mean for Mexico. I also wrote a quick response for Latin America Advisor, which I’ll reproduce below.

      My comments were partly inspired by an essay by Cristina Rivera Garza in Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country, where she talks about Zambada’s only real public appearance and what is says about Mexico’s war on narcotrafficking.

      Less than a month after Zambada’s arrest, another important event received far less press coverage. Another major figure in organized crime, Osiel Cárdenas, completed his 21 year sentence and was released from prison in the United States. He’ll almost certainly be returned to Mexico to face further charges. He was able to exercise leadership from behind bars in Mexico before, so it remains to be seen what his return could mean.

      My comments to Latin America Advisor:

      This is a blow to the Sinaloa Cartel in terms of its status rather than in an operational sense. The so-called cartel is a broad federation of criminal factions, decentralized but resilient enough to tolerate a level of conflict among these factions, while continuing to traffic large quantities of illicit drugs. Zambada has long planned for his death or arrest, so whether or not he knew much about this arrest, contingencies were already in place. The arrest will have no impact on the flow of fentanyl into the United States – despite US authorities talking up Zambada’s alleged involvement in fentanyl production and trafficking. However, the arrest could be a blow to the cartel’s standing. In addition to being one of the oldest and most powerful criminal organizations in Mexico, the Sinaloa Cartel cultivates an image of being more traditional and honorable than other upstart cartels. In a rare interview, Zambada described himself as a family patriarch, a farmer, a man of the mountains. With his capture, that old school generation is largely out of the picture. The newer leaders, like the sons of “Chapo” Guzmán, do not have the same standing within or beyond the federation. They are already more likely to act like the other upstart cartels, and that is without the dark suspicion that the Guzmáns betrayed Zambada.

      In terms of security collaboration, US authorities seem unable to even get their own story straight, whereas Mexican officials are quite consistent about being in the dark about the operation. This looks like an operation that advantaged some people within US security, who got to claim that they got their guy (while skipping over how that got him), as well as a PR opportunity for the US government to claim that something is being done about fentanyl availability. I’m not sure this will affect the approach to security or intelligence of the incoming Sheinbaum administration. It is hard to discern a clear security policy of the incoming (or outgoing) government. What the policy looks like will be determined more by party and electoral dynamics in Mexico.

    • Preliminary research on the Tren Maya

      Back in June, I made a short research trip to the Yucatán Peninsula, continuing my investigation of the Tren Maya. The Tren Maya is an infrastructure megaproject, spanning five states and seven rail lines. It connects major cities and tourist centers, like Cancún, with remote towns and archaeological sites, like Calakmul, deep in the wilderness. The project encompasses airports, hotels, military sites, and articulates with ports, local industry, and transnational business.

      This trip was the second of two preliminary research trips. I call them preliminary, because the Tren Maya is seen as a signature project of current president of López Obrador, and I’m particulary interested in what happens to the train after the end of his tenure (in October 2024). These preliminary trips are largely about getting a sense of the area before the trains are up and running.

      I see this as a long term project, running over the sexenio or six-year term of the next president, Claudia Sheinbaum. This is another reason to consider my trips so far as preliminary; I’ve largely been thinking about the post-López Obrador future, but without much clarity about exactly what Sheinbaum’s term will actually look like.

      My previous trip devoted more time to Yucatán state, beginning and ending with time in Mérida. For this second trip, I wanted to focus on some other parts of the Peninsula, particularly Quintana Roo state. While the train is now operating along some lines, construction continues in southern Quintana Roo and inland Campeche.

      The trip was shaped heavily by the weather. I arrived expecting the same baking heat of my previous trip. Instead, this trip was characterized by heavy rain. I avoided visiting Chetumal, where some neighborhoods had flooded. I spent three days in Felipe Carrillo Puerto, but could barely meet anyone or do anything, as driving rain inundated the streets and forced people to seek shelter. One my last night, staying in Tulum, wind thrashed the coastline. A few days after I left, Hurricane Beryl made landfall in the region, but thankfully weakened substantially by the time it did.

    • From cuaz to cuate: Training camps for organized crime

      For years now – more or less the entire duration of my doctoral studies – I have been intrigued by the fact that some organized crime groups in Mexico operate training camps. In one form or another, I worked this in to most of my course papers. Once I was done with coursework and working on turning these papers into a journal article, the camps became a recurrent feature of the various articulations of my argument.

      My intuition was that the camps represent a very different paradigm of organized crime, and that they are vital to understanding otherwise baffling displays of violence, such as the mass killing of unarmed migrants. The camps were first associated with the Zetas, a group that started out as a group of elite military defectors, and became notorious for using horrific violence. The camps suggested that these founding members of the Zetas didn’t only bring their counterinsurgency training with them, but they passed it on to further recruits. The tactics of war and state terror were being repurposed for crime in Mexico.

      In reading up for the latest version of this argument, I found an interesting link between counterinsurgency during the Guatemalan civil war, and crime on the US-Mexico border. Reports have long circulated that the Zetas recruited soldiers from the Guatemala’s Kaibiles counterinsurgency force – which perpetrated some of the worst violence of the civil war and genocide – to fight and train in Mexico. Here was an odd little piece of evidence.

      In Dan Slater’s Wolf Boys, a young Zeta recruit describes a training camp. He recalls that the boys in the camp were paired up with a cuas, which he takes to be a version of cuate, common slang in Mexico for mate or bro. The pair of cuates were responsible and accountable to each other; if one messed up, both could be punished.

      Then, in Jean Franco’s Cruel Modernity, I found a description of counterinsurgency training in Guatemala. Trainees for the Kaibiles were paired up with a cuaz, which is an indigenous Mayan term for brother. The pair of brothers was responsible and accountable to each other; if one messed up, both could be punished.

      The words kaibil and cuaz are examples of the appropriation of indigenous language and culture by the forces that repressed and exterminated Mayan people in Guatemala. The young Zeta recruit was unaware that the training procedures of his camp – down to the very names and terms used – were part of a long legacy of violent training that extends back to the counterinsurgency campaigns of the late twentieth century.

      This discovery became a brief illustration in a manuscript that is now, finally, scheduled for publication before the end of the year. The argument made in the article is simple: that the elite counterinsurgency training provided to Latin American militaries by the U.S. facilitated state terror, and has now been repurposed by criminal groups that again terrorize vulnerable groups. Violence has long legacies, and people shaped into killers by these training programs cannot unlearn this vocation.