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Criminality in urban areas in Mexico has been a long-term unsolved problem, owing not just to ineffective policies, but to police corruption and criminal complicity but also the failure of public authorities to build the rule of law. Both conditions create a culture of impunity.
Failure to confront and reduce chronic violence has increased the fragility of the (city)-state, reduced the legitimacy of authorities, and eroded the capacity of urban communities to build rule of law. This is critical topic for Mexico today, both in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic and in the national context of increasing violence and the failure of State-Security programs and actions at all levels of government, federal, state, and municipal.
Mexico City, with so many resources, with the presence of powerful economic and political actors, with several participatory organizations and practices, and with the largest surveillance infrastructure and policing, is in heavy dispute and has the highest criminal records. However, new practices offer some hints on how to solve this long-term challenge.
In this conversation, we explore government and citizen relations in Mexico City during the Covid-19 pandemic, an event that produced a profound economic and social crisis and had a strong impact in citizens’ survival strategies and in their relations with authorities, particularly police. We explore what changed during this period in police-community relations and the series of reforms and new strategies of policing that authorities implemented to accommodate citizens’ needs, reduce police abusive practices, and control crime.
Speaker: Arturo Alvarado, Professor-Researcher, Center for Sociological Studies (Centro de Estudios Sociológicos), El Colegio de México
Moderated by Diane Davis, Charles Dyer Norton Professor of Regional Planning and Urbanism, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University
Arturo Alvarado is a Professor-Researcher in the Center for Sociological Studies (Centro de Estudios Sociológicos) at El Colegio de México. Alvarado’s research expertise is on justice, human rights, security, and urban democratic governance in Latin America. Alvarado has been a consultant for international organizations such as UN Women, Mexico; UNDP, UNDOC, and the World Bank. He has also been a visiting professor and scholar at the Paris Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University, the University of São Paulo (USP/NEV), Brown University, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, among others. Alvarado holds a Ph.D. in sociology from El Colegio de México, as well as a Mid-Career Fellowship from the Special Program of Urban and Regional Studies (SPURS-DUSP) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Diane E. Davis is the Charles Dyer Norton Professor of Regional Planning and Urbanism and former Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD). She also is the director of the Mexican Cities Initiative at the GSD, and faculty chair of the committee on Mexico at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard. Before moving to Harvard in 2012, Davis served as the head of the International Development Group in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, where she also was Associate Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning. Trained as a sociologist with an interest in cities in Latin America (BA in Geography, Northwestern University; Ph.D. in sociology, UCLA), Davis’s research interests include the relations between urbanization and national development, urban governance, urban social movements, and informality, with a special emphasis on Mexico.
Presented in collaboration with the Mexican Cities Initiative [MCI]