The Permanent People’s Tribunals and indigenous people’s struggles in Mexico: between coloniality and epistemic justice?

Abstract

On 21 October 2011, hundreds of Mexican civil society organizations formally submitted a petition to the Lelio e Lisli Basso Foundation in Rome to justify the opening of a Mexican Chapter of the Permanent People’s Tribunals (PPT). The PPT was established in 1979 as the successor to the Russell Tribunals on Vietnam (1966–1967) and on the Latin American Dictatorships (1974–1976). The PPT is considered an ethical non-governmental tribunal and their sessions are described as a mechanism for raising awareness of national and international public opinion on rights violations. This article investigates the potential of the PPT for contributing to epistemic justice in Mexico, by focusing on indigenous people communities’ long-term struggle for legal pluralism and autonomy. In so doing, it offers an analysis about the coloniality of international human rights law operating in non-governmental mechanisms of popular litigation such as the PPT; a perspective that has remained absent in critical international and global studies. In particular, the article argues that the PPT in Mexico is imbricated with Eurocentric modes of legal production but that it nonetheless has the potential to contribute, in a relevant but fragile way, to epistemic justice. On the one hand, it is observed that PPT key documents and statements explaining different forms of violence in Mexico emphasize causal relationships based on the all-encompassing power or logic of capitalism. This perspective, it is argued, has the effect of epistemic erasure: notions and practices of justice that exceed this logic are silenced in the process of legal translation for the construction of “model cases”. On the other hand, the article highlights the coexistence of different notions of justice in one of the PPT thematic hearings on Violence against Corn, food sovereignty and autonomy hold in Oaxaca, Mexico, to argue for a re-thinking of the monocultural state-centric legal frames that ground PPT legal qualification. As the PPT classify social grievances in legal terms through the lens/gaze of international law, this legal qualification works as an activity of “translation”, in some cases of incommensurable notions of justice or absence of justice, violence or well-being. The article concludes with an emphasis on the potential contributions of the PPT to epistemic justice as the political visibility of the many ways in which justice is understood and experienced despite the many forms of violence and oppression in contemporary Mexico.

Routledge Handbook of Postcolonial Politics

“…To write as an I-we, to write as yosotras, not only questions dominant forms of representing and writing about the world, people and their struggles, but also highlights the fact that the ideas in this chapter, like any other knowledge, emerge from co-learning moments and encounters Icaza 2015a). I-we wrote in this specific form with the intention…”

“…Decolonial thinking has been recently contributed to an effort to understand social struggles in global politics (Icaza 2015b(Icaza , 2010Icaza and Vazquez 2013). Coloniality refers to: long-standing patterns of power that emerge in the context of colonialism, which redefine culture, labor, intersubjective relations, aspirations of the self, common sense, and knowledge production in ways that accredit the superiority of the colonizer.…”

“…Elsewhere, we have argued that the work of feminist philosopher, popular educator and decolonial thinker Maria Lugonés constitutes a powerful perspective for a critical re-thinking of social resistance to neoliberalism in global politics (Icaza 2010;Icaza and Vazquez 2016;Icaza 2017, forthcoming). Lugonés' decolonial feminism acknowledges 'gender' as a key analytical category, but is engaged with its coloniality.…”

“…For example, in global politics analyses dealing with transborder forms of resistance, the dominant impulse has been to explain whether these are sufficiently counterhegemonic or revolutionary, or not, and to what extent these contribute to the destabilizing of dominant discourses and representations (i.e. Icaza 2010;Icaza and Vazquez 2016).…”

Social Struggles and the Coloniality of Gender

“…Contrary to mainstream academic style that makes absent the person(s) who writes the text to such an extreme degree that her emotion-less and body-less knowledge appears to arise naturally from a distant/abstract space, this text starts with a positioning of the self that writes as a yosotras (I-we) 5 : 'I speak to "us" because from there I see the possibility of building worlds where life is born and grows without fear, with the possibility of recognizing our vulnerability and perseverance' (CarteArte 2016). To write as an I-we, to write as yosotras, not only questions dominant forms of representing and writing about the world, people and their struggles, but also highlights the fact that the ideas in this chapter, like any other knowledge, emerge from co-learning moments and encounters Icaza 2015a). I-we wrote in this specific form with the intention of generating a dialogue in the form of questions that generate even more questions: 'asking, we walk', said the Zapatistas.…”