From narcotrafficking to alternative governance: An ethnographic study on Los Caballeros Templarios and the mutation of organized crime in Michoacán, Mexico Falko Ernst A thesis submitted for the degree of Ph.D. Department of Sociology University of Essex April 2015 Abstract In this thesis, I unpack the mutation of Mexican organized crime by providing insights of unprecedented depth into one of the field’s principal actors of the past decade, Los Caballeros Templarios (The Knights Templar, LCT). My elaborations are based on firsthand qualitative data. During a year of fieldwork, I conducted ethnographic research in LCT’s core operational territory of Tierra Caliente, Michoacán, including interviews with LCT’s leaders and local civilians. Drawing on these data, I situate LCT as a phenomenon deeply engrained in the liquefaction and reshuffling of social order, governance, and sovereignty in Mexico and other parts of the ‘global south’. In this setting, the problem of survival is as eminent for non-state armed actors as it is for state actors. Upon revisiting historical transformations of Michoacán organized crime, I analyze how LCT sought to secure permanence through a hybrid form of criminal agency that defies default approaches to organized crime. The group perceived a minimum degree of legitimacy as crucial to control over locally rooted resources and thus survival. I argue that this drove the construction of a project of alternative governance; in essence a ceremonially enacted narrative portraying LCT as a guardian of social order. By contrasting ‘official’ claims with the lived experiences of civilians, I examine the latter’s performance and impact on local communities and lives. Furthermore, and as opposed to the predominant reduction of state-organized crime- interactions (in Mexico) to violent antagonism, LCT did not pursue its project of alternative governance against or without the state per se. Rather, I contend, higher-level state actors and LCT converged in the production of a trans-legal order. The state’s symbolic-legal façade is here carried by actors standing on either side of the binary licit-illicit-divide, which acts as a veil for shared access to resources stereotypically exclusive to ‘the’ state. ii In profound gratitude to the late Karl-Heinz Sekatsch-Winkelmann. Without your inspiration, fascination, and belief, neither this work nor all that it entailed would have been. iii CONTENTS Chapter 1: Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 1 Basic themes, research questions, and aims ......................................................................................... 3 The seeming paradox of a phenomenon out in the open .............................................................................. 3 What it takes to stay afloat: Survival in the world of Mexican organized crime ................................. 5 LCT’s project of alternative governance as (perceived) condition to survival .................................... 9 Basic methodological remarks ................................................................................................................ 11 The role of concepts – an eclectic approach to a hybrid phenomenon ................................................ 11 Organized crime: a phenomenon out of sight and reach? .......................................................................... 12 Methodological overview ......................................................................................................................................... 15 Paradigmatic depictions of organized crime vis-à-vis Los Caballeros Templarios ............... 18 The search for a unitary definition and identity ............................................................................................ 18 Criminal organizations as rational profit-maximizing machines ........................................................... 22 Legitimacy as an organizational goal .................................................................................................................. 24 Overview of core empirical chapters ..................................................................................................... 26 Chapter 4: An on-the-ground history of Michoacán organized crime .................................................. 26 Chapter 5: LCT’s project of alternative governance as enacted narrative .......................................... 29 Chapter 6: State-organized crime-interactions .............................................................................................. 31 Chapter 2: Literature Review ........................................................................................................ 36 Default imagery of state and state making ....................................................................................................... 37 The loss of state centrality? ..................................................................................................................................... 39 On the liquefaction of social order and the privatization of violence ................................................... 43 Non-state armed actors and the structural underpinnings of alternative governance ................ 45 On state failure .............................................................................................................................................................. 50 Complicating binaries ................................................................................................................................................ 52 Critical accounts of state formation ..................................................................................................................... 54 The convergence of state and non-state and legal and illegal in the making of (dis)order ......... 55 On parallel states ......................................................................................................................................................... 59 The historical normality of alternative governance ..................................................................................... 64 Expanding the conceptual boundaries of state ............................................................................................... 65 Questioning sovereignty ........................................................................................................................................... 71 LCT vis-à-vis ‘classical’ organized criminal groups ....................................................................................... 73 Chapter 3: Methodology: Close-proximity fieldwork on (Michoacán) organized crime between possibility and constraint ............................................................................................. 76 The field from afar ....................................................................................................................................... 76 Outside representations of Tierra Caliente ...................................................................................................... 76 A conservative research design as a response to representations of impossibility ....................... 78 Gaining geographical access: Frustrated attempts and a way in ............................................................ 80 Inside Tierra Caliente ................................................................................................................................. 81 Flexibility, uncertainty, and the illusion of control ....................................................................................... 81 Negotiating permanence in the field with Los Caballeros Templarios ................................................ 84 Discussion of data and methodological adaptions ............................................................................ 88 LCT as a source ............................................................................................................................................................. 88 Triangulation ................................................................................................................................................................. 91 Local civilians as a source ........................................................................................................................................ 92 Being around and participant observation ....................................................................................................... 94 Representativeness ..................................................................................................................................................... 95 Generalizability ............................................................................................................................................................. 97 Gatekeeper centrality ................................................................................................................................................. 98 iv Dealing with risks known and unknown ......................................................................................................... 101 Chapter 4: Revisiting the history of Michoacán organized crime ................................... 104 What rises falls from its own weight .................................................................................................