From the Borderlands: State Impunity and Cross-Border Collective Action

Jeannine Relly and Celeste González de Bustamante have woven together multiple literatures in theoretically informed scholarship to analyze one of the most important challenges for the contemporary global world: the human rights and security of those involved in disseminating news analyses, so essential to democratic accountability. Given their binational perspectives, I respond with grassroots borderlands perspectives on the challenges and on an essential but understudied element in our globalized world, that of cross-border collective action among nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Alas, all too little research exists in this area, so the authors are to be commended for their complex analysis that moves understanding and action forward. In this essay, I unpack the United States, Mexico, and the in-between spaces in the borderlands, and changing contexts. I highlight the ways that the United States and its policies share some responsibility for the problems that the authors outline, particularly the longest running war ever, the War on Drugs, which incentivizes suppliers and their collaborators to behave brutally to gain enormous profits from the huge U.S. market and suppress news about their dastardly deeds. The monograph is useful to students, scholars, and activists not only for its deep knowledge of Mexico but also for possible replication elsewhere in other parts of the world. Using a comprehensive and a highly credible, in-depth mixed-methods approach, the authors interviewed a purposive sample of 33 people from five different types of relevant organizations. Having methodically analyzed the stages associated with human organizing for concrete change, their findings about ambivalent outcomes can only leave readers wondering about the ability and willingness of the Mexican government to implement its “Protection Measures” for journalists facing threats. While the murders and disappearances of journalists have gone down since new instruments were put into place, the number of reports of threats and assaults is increasing. Perhaps an even bigger framework is in order, one that draws in the United States and U.S. policies, as well as people active in cross-border solidarity.