Bootstrap Justice: The Search for Mexico's Disappeared

by Janice K. Gallagher

Since 2006, more than 85,000 people have disappeared in Mexico. These disappearances remain largely unsolved: disappeared people are rarely found, and the Mexican state almost never investigates or prosecutes those responsible. Despite this, people not only continue to report disappearances, but many devote their lives to answering the question, where are they? Given the risks and institutional barriers, why and how do people mobilize for justice in states with rampant impunity and weak rule of law?

In Bootstrap Justice, Janice Gallagher leverages over a decade of ethnographic research to explain what enables the sustained mobilization of family members of the disappeared and analyze how configurations of political power between state and criminal actors shape what is possible for them to achieve. She follows three families from before the disappearance of their loved ones through their transformations into sophisticated and strategic victim advocates and activists. Gallagher supplements these individual narratives with an analysis of the evolving political opportunities for mobilization within Mexico.

By centering the perspectives of people whose lives have been upended by the disappearance of their loved ones, Bootstrap Justice offers a unique window into how citizens respond to weak and corrupt institutions. Gallagher focuses on the overlooked role of informal relationships and dynamics in shaping substantive legal and human rights outcomes and highlights how pioneering independent and creative work-arounds can compensate for state inaction. While top-down efforts, such as judicial reforms, technical assistance, and changes in political leadership are important parts of addressing impunity, policymakers and scholars alike have much to learn from the bottom-up--and by following the path that citizens themselves have worn within the labyrinth of state judicial bureaucracies.

296 pages, Hardcover

Published November 22, 2022

Reviews

[Robin Kirk · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the result of a 10-year investigation and is based on a doctoral dissertation. This topic is quite dangerous (one of Gallagher's sources was assassinated). Gallagher practices “engaged scholarship,” working with human rights organizations as well as conducting research. I thought she asked a very potent question related to Hannah Arendt’s idea that citizenship confers “the right to have rights.” Arendt was writing about stateless people, but in this case they are citizens. As Gallagher points out, in deeply dysfunctional societies where there is no state protection or effective legal recourse, what does that mean for citizenship? Her writing is quite approachable and even compelling. She argues that it is in the process of making persistent, grassroots claims on the state that victims make themselves into citizens. While a moving point, this is, in my view, no different from any human rights campaign and seems obvious to a fault. Governments have rarely been willing or equipped to honor human rights claims without pressure. That power has always been, rightly or wrongly, in the hands of citizens to insist on. I’m thinking of Amartya Sen’s Elements of a Theory of Human Rights, where one of the six key ideas is “influencability,” or the grassroots making claims that eventually can result in human rights protections. Some of Gallagher's theoretical analysis seems weak (that legal institutions in democracy are designed to be separate from politics and provide access to the powerless -- that you be news to Black and Indigenous Americans for most of US history). This serves her argument since she can then claim that victims exert pressure that makes legal institutions do the right thing. I don’t think that’s the case. The drug war is a huge challenge to classic human rights ideas because these are largely criminal, extranational networks deeply embedded in corrupt government institutions. Certainly, the state has the obligation to protect and enforce the law; but when cartels do the killing, that in and of itself isn’t a human rights violation. It depends on corruption, but this seems, at the least, a much more complex argument. Gallagher seems to me to want to minimize complications albeit in a laudable effort to support victims and human rights in Mexico. I guess I was a little disappointed that she seemed to want to elide these complexities to fit a more straightforward analysis that didn’t seem, to me, all that revealing or interesting (activism results in governments changing but not enough).