Philip Luke Johnson

Updates on research, teaching, writing.

    • 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.

    • Swimming in the ruins

      On my last couple of trips to Mexico, one of my first orders of business has been to find a swimming pool. In New York I am spoiled by the availability of free outdoor pools during the summer, and almost free indoor pools for the rest of the year. In Mexico, the best I have been able to do (without presenting three original birth certificates and fifteen certificates of health) is joining a gym with a pool.

      In Cuernavaca, I found a pool inside a gym inside a mall. In the early afternoon, with the lanes virtually to myself, I turned laps in the cloudy water, gasping for breath in the humid, high-altitude air. The empty pool was refreshing, but the mostly empty gym and mall felt a little off. I thought perhaps that they were newly constructed and opened, but one of the trainers told me that the gym had been open for about five years – and the mall for longer than that. It wasn’t that the mall felt new, then, but rather that it felt not-quite-finished. Most of the indoor shop fronts were unused. Most of the outdoor cafes had only one table of customers at a time.

      When I got out of the pool and on with my research, I kept hearing about the devastation of public space in Cuernavaca. The historic city center is choking on traffic. The shady ravines that divide up the town are filling with garbage. Time and again, people traced this devastation back to the demolition of the Casino de la Selva.

      The casino was built in the 30s, but for most of its history was a casino in name only. It is mentioned in Under the Volcano, the novel that first drew me to Cuernavaca back in 2011. The locals that spoke of the site remembered it as a sprawling complex of hotel facilities, murals, gardens, and swimming pools. Locals could pay for access to many of the facilities, and the swimming pools and other parts of the complex were central gathering and socializing spots, a kind of public space on private ground.

      The facilities began to fall into disrepair, as they changed hands and were eventually seized by the government. Then in 2001, the complex was sold to Costco and a local supermarket chain. Protests against the planned demolition of the site were aggressively put down, with some protestors sent to prison. The site was leveled, although some of the murals were removed and preserved.

      It didn’t take much investigation for me to realize that I had been swimming in the ruins of the Casino de la Selva. The demolition of the complex provided enough space for an oversized Costco, and an oversized Mega supermarket, and a never-quite-finished mall. The demolition also deprived the city of a place rich in history and memory, replacing these with utterly generic, utterly anonymous consumer space. A few rusted relics of the casino stand behind a gate on the side of the highway that plows between the supermarkets and the mall.

      I came to Cuernavaca to investigate the impact of crime and insecurity on public life, but the sense of loss of public life – not just of loss, but of the life of the city being sold off by the government – predates the surge in violence associated with organized crime in the city.

      And in my swimming trips, I found myself in a place that was completely at odds with getting to know the city and its people. Where once families had mingled and splashed in outdoor pools, now solitary figures turned laps, one swimmer to a lane, in a cloudy indoor pool in a gym in a mall.