Reviews

Will Noah

On Claudio Lomnitz

Georgina Quintana, Un Resquicio Habitable . 1985, mixed media on canvas. 80 3/10 × 63 4/5 × 1 1/5". Courtesy of the artist and MASA. Photograph by Gustavo García Villa.

Claudio Lomnitz. Sovereignty and Extortion: A New State Form in Mexico. Duke University Press, 2024.

Fue el estado —the state did it. A decade ago, this slogan became indelibly linked in Mexico to the disappearance of forty-three students enrolled at a teacher’s college in Ayotzinapa, in the state of Guerrero, who were kidnapped on the night of September 26, 2014. Only three students’ remains have been identified; the rest number among the more than 125,000 disappeared people in Mexico. Since the start of President Felipe Calderón’s “war on drugs” in late 2006, mass graves and missing-persons posters have become part of everyday life.

Amid this incalculable suffering, the Ayotzinapa victims became symbols of a larger culture of official impunity.…