The arterial border: negotiating economies of risk and violence in Mexico's security regime

Abstract

This article examines the material and ideological dimensions of what I conceptualise as Mexico's 'arterial border'. Since the late 1980s, transit routes in Mexico's interior have increasingly become sites of a diffused migration enforcement strategy. Based on long-term ethnographic research along Central American transit routes, I examine how the arterial border has developed historically and is experienced by migrants in local contexts. I pay particular attention to the disjuncture between violent encounters with the state and discourses of security, human rights and humanitarianism that serve to legitimise bordering practices. Such an analysis moves beyond understandings of borders as spatially fixed entities to reimagine them as constantly shifting and dynamic sites of state violence, individual agency and contestation.

Es cosa suya: entanglements of border externalization and African transit migration in northern Costa Rica

“…More specifically, by expanding migration information and management across a range of governmental and non-governmental institutions, the Costa Rican state solidified a security approach to migration throughout its territory (Fouratt, 2014, pp. 169-170), resembling Vogt's (2017) arterial border. The state not only made access to health care into an 'internal control measure' (Voorend, 2014, p. 202).…”

“…We now turn to the Central American context, which has rarely been included in border externalization literature (Kron, 2013) yet is heavily influenced by US border externalization via Mexico. Besides externalization targeted at Mexican migrants trying to cross the border into the United States, there has recently been an increase in efforts to further 'secure the south' of Mexico itself, against Central American and other migrants (Vogt, 2017, p. 196, see also Menjívar, 2014. The development of collaborations and contestations related to border externalization between the United States and Mexico, and beyond, sets the stage for the complexity of migrant trajectories and Central American transit zones today.…”

“…Successive border externalization interventions, with names such as 'Operation Hold-the-Line' and 'Smart Borders Initiative' , ensure a gradual extension and melting together of the United States and Mexico's southern borders but do not constitute a straightforward process. Instead, it is infused with power hierarchies and conflicting interests, and consists of many different back-and-forth phases of migration, externalization and other geopolitical dynamics (as described in, amongst others, Dominguez & Iñiguez Ramos, 2016;Fernández-Kelly & Massey, 2007;Frelick et al, 2016;Frenzen, 2010;Menjívar, 2014;Podkul & Kysel, 2015;Varela Huerta, 2015;Vogt, 2017;Zaiotti, 2016).…”

“…Based on these empirical explorations and building on theoretical notions of mobility regimes (Papadopoulos et al, 2008), transit (Phillips & Missbach, 2017) and arterial borders (Vogt, 2017), the article finds that Costa Rica's identity as a 'humanitarian transit country'as enacted in the centreboth challenges and reproduces border externalization. On the one hand, Costa Rica juxtaposes its own, supposedly humane treatment of transit migrants with the neglect of these migrants elsewhere in the region.…”

Haciendo-lugar vía huellas y apegos: las personas migrantes africanas y sus experiencias de movilidad, inmovilidad e inserción local en América Latina. Introducción al dossier temático REMHU 56

“…México, aparte de ser el origen de muchas personas migrantes en los Estados Unidos, también es un país clave de tránsito (y cada vez más de destino), en primer lugar, para personas de Centroamérica, pero también de Sudamérica y de otros continentes. Sin embargo, México tiene la dudosa fama de ser un país muy violento para las personas migrantes en tránsito, desde las extorciones de organizaciones criminales y la impunidad hasta la externalización de fronteras, exigida por los Estados Unidos, la cual lleva a estas personas a tomar rutas cada vez más peligrosas (Aikin, Anaya Muñoz, 2013;Álvarez Velazco, 2016;Casillas, 2008;Vogt, 2017;Winters, Mora Izaguirre, 2019). Se podría imaginar que la relativa visibilidad de las personas africanas y su desconocimiento de la región les hace un blanco aún más fácil para vivir violencia en camino (FLACSO, 2011, p. 6;véase De León, 2015, p. 130).…”