Territories of Violence

State, Marginal Youth, and Public Security in Honduras

Lirio Gutiérrez Rivera

• Editorial: Palgrave Macmillan
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137027955
• Categoría: Scienze sociali
• Categoría: Criminologia

This book examines the persistence of social violence and public insecurity in Honduras. Using a spatial perspective, the author looks at the Honduran state's security polices - known as Mano Dura - and the challenges authorities face. She points to the state's historical difficulty producing and ordering political territory and space.

Chapter 1

State, Space, and Territory

Introduction

I recall an event when I was living in Honduras in the eighties that stirred the country. Ramón Matta, a Honduran, had been flown by force to the United States, where he would undergo trial for crimes committed. I had no idea who Ramón Matta was. From the news report, I found out that, like many Hondurans, Matta was a drug trafficker who had close ties with the Colombian cartels. His involvement in drug trafficking and organized crime had made him a millionaire. According to the news reports, Matta had enough money to cover Honduras’s foreign debt. Matta was extradited to the United States not because of his activity in drug trafficking but because of his attachment in the murder of a US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) officer in the seventies.

Hondurans harshly criticized the incident despite Matta’s criminal résumé. For many, allowing US enforcement authorities to imprison a Honduran on national soil was not only an act of treason from the Honduran government but also a violation of national sovereignty. Extradition was—and still is—against the Honduran constitution. Ramón Matta’s extradition unleashed anger and protests in various parts of the capital, Tegucigalpa. Many law students and supporters protested in front of the American embassy, which was set on fire, as well as the downtown area and the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Honduras (National University of Honduras). The Honduran government had to cover the costs of the damages the protesters caused.

Looking back at this incident, I ask myself, what really angered Hondurans? Matta was far from being an ideal Honduran citizen. Aside from a reputation of being a sort of “Robin Hood” helping and giving to the poor, he was involved in the murder of the DEA agent. Furthermore, Matta was a drug trafficker and contributed to establishing the drug routes from South America that are in use today. The protests, violence, and anger were not about Matta; rather, they were about the Honduran government’s lack of authority symbolized in the extradition. Many were tired at the permissiveness of the Honduran state to always submit to foreigners’ needs. The extradition of Ramón Matta occurred at a moment when the Honduran state’s sovereignty, particularly its control over national territory, was highly questioned. In the eighties, during the Central American revolutionary wars and the US counterinsurgency policies, the Honduran government allowed foreign armies and organizations to use national territory in order to “fight” the insurgents in the neighboring countries. For instance, the Salvadorian army was allowed to train with US army forces on Honduran soil, just as the Nicaraguan Contras (an anti-Sandinista armed group) were allowed to camp and train in southern Honduras.

Honduras’s history of yielding national territory to foreigners does not start in the eighties. The history of allowing foreigners to use national territory can be traced to the mid-nineteenth century with the concessions to the British for resource extraction. In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, Honduras witnessed the emergence of the banana enclave in the Caribbean coast region or the North Coast, an area dominated by foreign companies. There are other moments throughout the twentieth century in which the Honduran state yields sovereignty of national territory to foreign forces. These events raise questions regarding not only sovereignty in Honduras but also national territory—that is, how a state controls and exercises authority over its political territory. It is generally assumed that a state constructs, controls, and exercises authority over its national territory and space. States that fail to do so are labeled “weak” or “fragile.”

From this perspective, the Honduran state is “weak,” as it has demonstrated that controlling and exercising authority over national territory has been a challenge. Yet what underlies this difficulty of controlling national territory? One central issue in this book is understanding the relationship of the state with its political territories—that is, understanding the territorial logic of the Honduran state and how it not only establishes a particular relationship (and construction) of national territory but also is linked to the difficulty of controlling social violence and providing public security to Hondurans. In what follows in this chapter, I discuss the concepts of territory and space and their relationships with the state. Also in this chapter, I discuss how a spatial perspective is useful for understanding the challenges of the Honduran state with controlling widespread social violence and public insecurity.

State Spatiality

It is assumed that a state dominates and exercises authority over an area usually known as national territory. In other words, states construct and control national territories as well as the resources and peoples within this political territory—states are inevitably bounded to territory. But what does territory mean? How does a state construct and control a territory? Does a state always construct and control its territory? These questions emerged when I started this research. I wondered about the case of Honduras, where the state, as I mentioned in the introduction, demonstrates challenges in both controlling and establishing itself as the ultimate authority within its territory—unless there is something else behind the territorial logic of this state.

The state’s boundedness to territory emerges within specific historical processes occurring mainly in western Europe. The treaty of Westphalia in 1648 is generally perceived as the birth of the “modern sovereign state” and interstate system of perfect territorial units (Brenner et al. 2003, 2–3). Political territories mutually exclude each other and are geographically fixed, but the state is also the ultimate authority and the legitimate dominion “entitled to exercise [power] within its own domain and is entitled to exercise it without external influence” (Brenner et al. 2003, 2). From this perspective, the world is geopolitically and ideally perceived as an interstate system with perfectly bounded, fixed political territories. Teschke questions this historical turning point, arguing that the Westphalian system was actually characterized by “non-modern relations between dynastic and pre-modern political communities” that lasted in Europe well until the nineteenth century (Teschke 2002, 6).

Nevertheless, this perspective has dominated both international relations and political science theories. Political geographers first started questioning the naturalization of the interstate system as well as the geographical assumption that territories—particularly political territories such as national territory—are fixed (Agnew 1994; Gottmann 1973). Since the eighties and especially the nineties, there has been emerging literature in the fields of political science and international relations that look more critically at the Westphalian state system as well as the relationship between the state and territory.

One central issue in understanding the nexus of the state and territory is framing the construction of political territory within historical processes. As scholars have rightly pointed out, there is a tendency to perceive political territory and the state as ahistorical or frozen in time, when indeed their emergence is a result of historical processes that are not linear (Brenner 1999; Harvey 1990; Lefebvre 1991; Axtmann 2004; Agnew 1994). By result I do not mean that these processes led to some final end of the road with an expected outcome. Historical processes mean that whatever is achieved—for instance, national territory, a centralized state, the establishment of institutions, and so on—is only temporary and will always meet resistance by different actors; thus it is always subject to modifications. This means that the state is constantly constructing and maintaining political territory, just as political territory is always met with some form of resistance that the state must deal with. This is also the case of sovereignty; it too is met with resistance by different actors of the polity that the state must confront. Like political territory, state sovereignty is not fixed; rather, it is maintained, transformed, and embedded in historical processes.

It seems that with what I have written so far, I understand the state-territory and the state-sovereignty nexuses only in relation to geographical territory. Furthermore, a state-centric approach apparently predominates. I am aware of the dangers of state-centrism—its narrowing perspective and the tendency of freezing the social, political, and economic processes. The state’s relationship toward space and territory is much more complex; geographical territory is only one aspect or dimension of state spatiality.

Neil Brenner uses the term “space spatiality” when referring to the complex relationship of the state with space and territory. As I pointed out earlier, not only does the state’s relationship with space emerge within specific contexts, but also state space and territories are a result of social, economic, and political processes within particular moments in time. In other words, state space is a historical and ongoing process: “State space is conceptualized (a) as an ongoing process of change rather than a static thing, container, or platform; (b) as having a polymorphic rather than a merely territorial geographical form; and (c) as having a multiscalar rather than merely a national organization structure” (Brenner 2004, 74; italics original in text).

Brenner’s definition of state space—aside from framing the state’s relationship to territory and space within social, economic, and historical processes—also identifies three dimensions of state spatiality: state space in the narrow sense, state space in the integral sense, and state space in the representational sense. These dimensions, though separated by Brenner, do not mean that state space operates only on one of these dimensions—that is, the state’s relationship toward space and territory is not to be identified, perceived, or fixed in one of these dimensions. It involves all three dimensions. The three dimensions are a conceptual proposal to grasp the elaboration of state space.

The first dimension, state in the narrow sense, refers to how the state territorializes political power, generally through juridical-political institutions, in a specific (political) territory. State territorialization assumes that, in establishing political power, the state emerges as an authority in a specific territory, which is a territory it encloses and on which it establishes mutually exclusive boundaries. State space here is linked to the predominant interstate system, which spatially organizes the world in a geopolitical order of mutually exclusive political territories, generally known as national territories. Brenner observes that this form of state space emerged within a historical process in western Europe—the treaty of Westphalia in 1648—which “formally instituted the principle of state sovereignty [and] territorial borders” (Brenner et al. 2003, 8). As I mentioned earlier, various scholars have pointed out that there is a tendency of fixing and freezing enclosed territory when, in fact, it is constantly changing, being maintained by the state, and challenged by other actors. Furthermore, it is assumed that political power necessarily goes hand in hand with a territorialization process when it is possible to exercise political power without a fixed territory.1 When political power is accompanied by a territorialization process, it is generally reduced to the predominant interstate system, overlooking that it is part of a historical process.2

State in the narrow sense involves a geographic dimension, mainly national territory and its borders and boundaries. National territories and the role of borders have traditionally been perceived as fixed entities instead as the result of a dialectical process; that is, national territories and borders not only emerge within specific contexts and historical processes but also are constantly changing. This dimension of state space is also too state-centric, as the state appears as a “power container” (Taylor 2003), a centralized place of political power when political territory is “actively produced and transformed through regulatory projects and sociopolitical struggles articulated in diverse institutional sites and at a range of geographical scales” (Brenner 2004, 76).

With this in mind, this book looks at the geographic dimension of the Honduran state—though not exclusively; it also looks at the other dimensions of state space. It looks at the emergence of Honduran national territory as a dialectical process in order to understand historically how the Honduran state has territorialized (or not) political power within national territory as well as how national territory was constructed. Either state space of the Honduran state has been neglected in scholarship, or this geographic dimension is studied assuming the outcomes—for instance, the emergence of national territory or the territorialization of the Honduran state. Thus I look at this dimension aiming to understand the territorial logic of the Honduran state.

State space is not simply this state in the narrow sense. Aside from the geographic dimension, there are two other dimensions of state space that I briefly mentioned earlier that need to be considered when looking at the relationships of the Honduran state with territory and space. These are state space in the integral sense and state space in the representational sense.

State space in the integral sense refers to the attempts of the state to influence and regulate the socioeconomic activities within state territory. The state influences and regulates by controlling the social relations of production as well as resources and peoples within political territory (Poulantzas 1978; Lefebvre 1991). Both Nicos Poulantzas and Henri Lefebvre observe that the state influences and regulates space by imposing itself and dominating space, a process that requires the state to fragment and homogenize space. Lefebvre points out that the production of state space, particularly national territory, is a violent process, since the state imposes its logic—or rationality—as well as authority within a specific area called national territory. Poulantzas perceives state territory as a “spatial matrix” in which the state, also in the attempt of influencing, dominating, and imposing itself, “materializes the spatial matrix in its various apparatuses (e.g., army, school, centralized bureaucracy, prison system), patterning in turn the subjects over whom it exercises power” (Poulantzas 2003, 72). For Poulantzas, the materialization of state apparatuses over the spatial matrix involves homogenizing and unifying space, which in turn, is linked to national processes, particularly in the nineteenth century with the emergence of the nations. The state plays a role in constructing the nation as well as binding it both to political territory and to the state:

[The] State plays a role in forging national unity. Frontiers and national territory do not exist prior to the unification of that which they structure: there is no original something-inside that has later to be unified. The capitalist State does not confine itself t perfecting national unity, but sets itself up in constructing this unity—that is, in forging the modern nation. The State marks out the frontiers of this serial space in the very process of unifying and homogenizing what these frontiers enclose. It is in this way that the territory becomes national, tending to merge with the nation-State. (Poulantzas 2003, 73; italics in original text)

State space in the integral sense not only involves national processes as well as the attempts of the state in mobilizing its institutions in order to regulate social and economic relations within national territory; this dimension of state space also involves establishing spatial hierarchies that enable the state to regulate socioeconomic relations more effectively. Lefebvre points out that the state seeks to regulate and dominate space by homogenizing, fracturing or fragmenting (which I have just mentioned), and hierarchizing space. Homogenizing means that all places are equivalent, exchangeable, and interchangeable. The fracturing or fragmenting of space refers to the breaking down of space into what Lefebvre identifies as “parcels,” which are territorial units that are exchangeable because they are homogenized (Lefebvre 2003, 88). Finally, because the exchanges between spaces are unequal and because the state arranges space unequally (i.e., establishing a powerful center, most commonly a center-periphery relation), space emerges hierarchized. As in state space in the narrow sense, the state’s efforts for dominating and regulating the modes of production within national territory as well as the processes of homogenizing, fracturing, and hierarchizing space emerge within historical processes.

State space in the representational sense involves an abstract/symbolic level of state space referring to competing spatial imaginaries and focusing on “(a) The power/knowledge relations involved in the construction of state territorial divisions; (b) The ways in which state spatial practices shape and reshape subjectivities in everyday life; and (c) The ways in which social alliances are formed and mobilized on a territorial basis, leading to a variety of scale and place specific political strategies intended to defend and/or promote particular interests grounded within already established, emerging, or potential state spaces” (Brenner et al. 2003, 10).

This dimension of state space seeks to not only denaturalize the state’s control and regulation but also explain the resistances and struggles that occur within state space, such as in new social movements or marginal groups like—a case of resistance this book looks at—youth gangs or maras. The Honduran state’s imaginary discourse and representation of space, particularly in the context of violence and public insecurity, is challenged by the youth gangs or maras when the state attempts to impose itself or influence certain urban areas (i.e., crime-infested or gang-controlled neighborhoods).

The three dimensions of state space are not dealt with separately. Indeed, the three dimensions are interrelated, indicating the complexity underlying the production of state space, which is constructed within specific historical processes. State space is never a finished process; it is maintained and constantly changing. Furthermore, other actors within state territory can contest it leading to modifications of its use and representation. As I mentioned at the beginning of this section, state space is an ongoing process and involves not only the state (i.e., institutions, laws, actors) but also nonstate actors who are attempting to mobilize their own resources, who are attempting to achieve recognition, or who have specific demands. State territory (or any kind of territory for that matter) is not a thing or a container that is filled, but an arena of sociopolitical struggles and negotiation (Brenner 2004).

In this book, I look at the challenges the Honduran state faces with controlling social violence (particularly delinquency and crime), which has taken control over certain regions and urban areas, as well as the Honduran state’s difficulties in influencing both these violent, crime-infested, urban areas or regions and certain groups (e.g., maras or organized crime) by analyzing the territorial logic of the Honduran state and its struggles with certain actors within political territory. The purpose of “bringing the state back in” is to understand how the political and social processes of this particular state have affected and patterned relationships with social groups (Skocpol 1985, 3). This includes not only “difficult” groups such as organized crime and the maras but also the relations the state establishes with other groups such as communities in neighborhoods or local government actors.

I suggest that the Honduran state authorities encounter various troubles in controlling and influencing certain areas and groups within national territory because of the territorial logic of the Honduran state—namely, the ways in which the state organizes, regulates, fragments, and hierarchizes territory. The Honduran state’s attempt to end social violence by regulating certain groups and areas instead results in producing more spaces of violence within national territory. Although most of the analyses center on the responses of the maras (i.e., Mara Salvatrucha [MS] and 18th Street Gang [M-18]), under security policies, the book also looks at other challenges posed by organized cr...