Violence, urban space and everyday life in the Mexican War on Drugs: Tijuana as a case Study

Abstract

The following paper explores the spatiality of Mexico’s war on drugs by developing an analytical frame to examine urban space in Tijuana, a Mexican northern border city. Tijuana has been signified and construed as an unsafe and violent place within the context of the Mexican antinarcotics strategy. Its construction as a dangerous space coincides with its urban and demographic expansion, as well as its connection with the global circuits of drug distribution and the implementation of the war on drugs within the city. By representing it as an unsafe space, it has been authorized the exertion of unlimited violence upon its users and inhabitants by both state and private agents producing forms of extreme citizen vulnerability. As a consequence, both the political life of the city and its citizens´ rights have been reduced to their bare minimum. Building on the analysis of Tijuana´s symbolic, demographic and urban configuration, the consequences these processes have had upon the production of the city´s residents’ political identities are explored. By delving into the microphysics of the geographical imaginations on criminality and drugs in Tijuana, this paper contributes to the analysis on the ways in which the exertion of violence within the war on drugs is linked to the variegated forms urban space is interpreted by both citizens and authorities.