Armados, enrejados, desconfiados... Tres breves lecturas sobre la cultura policial mexicana

Abstract

This article reviews an investigation about that other rostrum of the collapse of the Mexican Public Security System: the decomposition of the Mexican police and the implication of the agents in the criminal police framework. An obscure zone of the national reality that the political power, when trying to «arrange» it —meaning any federal, state or municipal corporation – always uncovers an institution that has a double ascription. There, the simultaneous and illegal structure is mounted over the legal structure of the force and the knowledge for the purpose of illegality, and is mounted again over the legal knowledge. Therefore, the police crimes turn out to be the most visible trace of the police ascription to a double institutional frame. In this article, we explore the point from this frame of relationships, functions, activities, ways of behavior, beliefs and norms that govern the police life and that build the actual police culture. Inside this culture, we study the discrimination, marginality, subordination and inequality that are also experienced within the police forces and that converge in this extreme rupture that supposes their participation in crime.