More than three years after the murder and kidnapping of students of the Normal Rural School Isidro Burgos of Ayotzinapa on 26 September 2014, a coherent and truthful explanation of what happened still needs to be determined. The logistics and decision-making processes put in place before, during, and after the attack raise questions about the nature of the Mexican state, its institutions, and its order/execution chain, as well as the character of the actors involved. Starting from this paradigmatic case, the aim of this article is to examine the current increase in violence in Mexico. The analysis takes into account the dispersed ‘clusters of power’—actual war machines—that have been developing in a situation of social and political decomposition brought about by a new cycle of capitalist expansion and accumulation.
Alessandro Zagato is a Research Fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen. He has published articles in English, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, and the results of his research have been presented at international congresses and conferences. He recently edited a volume titled The Event of Charlie Hebdo: Imaginaries of Freedom and Control (2015). The research for this article was supported by the ERC Advanced Grant project “Egalitarianism: Forms, Processes, Comparisons” (project code 340673), running from 2014 to 2019 and led by Bruce Kapferer at the University of Bergen. E-mail: alessandro.zagato@gmail.com