DEMANDING JUSTICE ana SECURITY Indigenous Women and Legal Pluralities in Latin AmericaVoices within Silences Indigenous Women, Security, and Rights in the Mountain Region of Guerrero MARIANA MORA They grabbed six kids... . We made them turn on the lights of their police truck. . . . | said that they were all my nephews. They weren’t, but you have to defend the town’s youths as if they were your own. ... The police arrived wearing ski masks. . .. We're Indians, but even though we're poor, we still have rights... . They act just like hitmen, with their faces covered, pointing their weapons. They don’t identify themselves and grab anyone they find on their way... . They took them away... . So we had to take one of them in exchange for the kids. . .. We threw rocks at them. ... We've reached our limit. We're desperate. .. . The only thing left for us is to pick up rocks to throw at them. A smatt group of women in Atlixcala, a Nahua community in the municipality of Tlapa de Comonfort, in the Mountain region of the state of Guerrero, Mexico, describe the violence they experience in their communities, the role of state institutions, and community responses.! They are participating in a focus group organized by the human rights project, the Civilian Police Monitor (Mocipol by its Spanish acronym), based in the city of Tlapa, the region’s political and administrative center. In 2013, together with the head of the municipal govern- ment’s Office of Indigenous Matters (DA, by its Spanish acronym), the Mocipol assessed conditions of violence and insecurity in the region as experienced by local indigenous communities. Those testimonies in Atlixcala centered on police violence. As the epigraph illustrates, the women’s defiant tone impels and even oversteps a testimonial sequence that linearly describes their efforts to rescue the youths detained by the municipal police. As the coordinator of the focus198 MARIANA MORA, group, | try to follow their description, but I realize that, more than a strict narration of facts, it is the conveyance of affective tones, which vacillate {rom nervousness to a rebellious pride, that shape their collective testimony. While 1 attempt to distinguish the content of the voices speaking simultaneously, the community comisionado, a middle-age male authority, who had been listening seat, looks directly at us, and, with a firm voice, interrupts, “All right, 'm going to explain what happened. It was on February 2ath of this year. The municipal police entered our community. They went through town looking for a young man, but since no one told them where he was, they grabbed any youth they found walking on the street. The people organized, They stopped the pickup truck al the entrance of town. We detained one of the policemen in exchange for the young men. They did release them, but I won't lie to you, we damaged their truck with all the rocks we threw.” The comisionado emphasizes the “I” at the beginning of the sentence, together with the precise date of the event, in order to provide a coherent structure to the in a corner of the building, rises from his women’s apparently disorderly testimony. His intervention is that of one male authority addressing another, in this case the head of the DAI, with a narrative that attempts to order and legitimize women’s voices from his village ‘This chapter focuses on small act the voices of Nahua women from the Mountain region, along with their experi- such as these that filter and displace ences of violence and claims for justice. Through thes acts of displacement, gendered theorizations of violence are silenced, theorizations emerging not only from dramatic events such as those narrated by the women from Atlixcala, but froma dense intertwining of acts of dispossession together with an increase in acts of physical violence, which reveal, as Feldman, Geisler, and Menon argue, an accumulation of insecurities in everyday life (2011). ‘This accumula- tion, whether through violence inflicted against their bodies, the extraction of productive vital and work force, or the destruction of the natural resources of indigenous territories, organizes life through alienation. It is a form of gendered alienation surfacing after thirty years of neoliberal development policies in Mexico, whose impacts, in conjunction with today’s security policies, are expe- rienced as a profound crisis of the social reproduction capacity of rural popu- lations, particularly indigenous populations in states like Guerrero. From this vantage point, police and criminal violence, rather than the principal expres- sion of violence, form part of a continuum of insecurities experienced through the precariousness of everyday life, the devastation of the environment, and dispossession of a collective capacity to live with dignity. ‘The actions of two types of local actors oftentimes marginalize such female interpretations of violence: the first being male community actions, as the comisario’s intervention illustrates, the second human rights actors, whose need to adhere to juridical frameworks runs the risk of reproducing domi- nant narratives of who is considered a victim and what type of violent actions VOICES WITHIN SILENCES 199 substantiate grievances. In differing ways, both these actors filter and displace the indigenous women’s interpreted experiences of insecurity. In doing so, they run the risk of reproducing current hegemonic narratives centered on highlighting dramatic acts of physical violence, largely in public spheres. Since the administration of President Felipe Calderén (2006-2012), mass media and social networks in Mexico have focused on spectacular scenes of violence and death, along with a constant display of body counts. Images circulate widely of hypermasculinized actors, including the armed forces and the federal police, presumed members of organized crime, and even community police, disputing sovereign power through territorial control? In contrast, | demonstrate that en intersectional gender analysis unsettles and dislodges dominant representations of insecurity, thus allowing the voices and experiences of indigenous Nahua women to surface. I focus on everyday events, on matters that some consider minor or secondary, such as police harassment, arbitrary detentions, extortions, or the destruction of collec- tive property; events that often go unnoticed, except for the individuals who experience them. And yet such critical events (Das 1985) for victims represent moments that unsettle and inject new meanings to their life conditions as well as affect understandings of their social geography. ‘The cuntent of this chapter is based on both everyday life and events peripheral to collectively organized experiences. While in the Mountain region indigenous actors, such as the Community Police-CRAC and OPIM, discussed in chapter 4 by Teresa Sierra and in chapter 1 by Aida Hernandez, have embarked on important long-term social struggles that modify the local sociopolitical landscape, the subregion where I conducted research had, until the time | com- pleted research in 2013, a high degree of social fragmentation, with resistance largely limited to community actions and collective memories that remain in hidden transcripts (Scott 1990). In the municipality of Tlapa, the most visible political actors in the past two decades have been the Tlachinollan Human Rights Center, the dissident teacher's union and bilingual teachers, citizen police, and the self-protection forces.3 In this context, human rights work becomes a central terrain of political struggle, as it boosts local actors’ ability to name acts of violence. For that reason my research focuses on the various human rights activities of local organizations The chapter is divided into four sections. The first examines the regional context in which human rights work develops. The second section analyzes the processes whereby cases of human rights violations are recorded and documented, in particular the distinction between direct and indirect victim and the ways this distinction renders invisible the grievances of a consider- able number of indigenous women involved in cases of police violence. The third section focuses on the different constructions of (in)security in com- munities that belong to the municipality of Tlapa. Finally, 1 examine several