Considerations on violence, crime and elections in Puebla. A reflection on the 2018 elections

Abstract

The main purpose of this work is to highlight the new modalities of political violence in Mexico and speciffically in Puebla. It does not seek to review the theoretical approaches of some authors, but to highlight those that may be useful to interpret the reality of violence in the electoral context in Mexico and particularly in Puebla, which has put the conception of the State as an expresión in tensión of the monopoly of the exercise of legitimate violence and also to the exceptional nature of the state of exception and bare life. The reality of political violence in recent elections in Mexico shows that the different levels of the State are confused with organized crime and this is is confused with the state level. The appearance of blurred borders between the nomic and the anomic, betwen the legal and the ilegal, between the legitimate and the illegitimate, potentiate the heuristic value of the notion of gray área and its modalities in Criminal Governance, Hybrid Governance, Crime-legality. We conceive ofi it as the social space where the distinctions between political actors, citizens and actors perpetrating violence are blurred. We maintain that in local áreas of Mexico there are acts of political violence in electoral processes that can be interpreted based on the previously mentioned notions.