Official masks and shadow powers: Towards an anthropology of the dark side of the state

Despite a degree of 'democratic opening,' optimistic assessments of political change in Mexico must be tempered by noting the effects of the militarization of internal security and the intimate relations between political power and involvement in illegal activities. Starting from a discussion of wider literature on the relationships between economic globalization and the rise of Shadow States, ethnographic material and press reports from Mexico are used to carry forward a critique of the 'New Barbarism' theorists' treatment of these developments as pathologies of the periphery, rooted in state crisis or partial exclusion from global networks. It is argued that while the Shadow State is not an entirely new phenomenon in Mexican history, contemporary developments reflect the emergence of new forms of state power and governmentality that are connected in important ways to the continuing regulatory powers of Northern governments and the interventions of transnational capital. Although the fact that their field of accumulation is the global economy problematizes the position of Shadow State actors, their capacity to build and rebuild clienteles and political networks in societies shattered by neoliberalism throws doubt on the capacity of an untainted 'civil society' to enforce political reform and accountability.