The process of selective extermination of social activists in Mexico (January 2017-April 2019)

Abstract

This exploratory research seeks to reveal the characteristics of the process of selective extermination perpetrated in Mexico towards social activists, to make it visible because it is subsumed in the growing mass process of violence that has existed since at least 2006, when the policy of the «war on drug trafficking» was established. We reviewed studies on violence in Mexico which revealed the simultaneity of a double process in the country -a greater democratic openness and selective extermination-, we consider violence as an inherent dimension of the social order for the realization of a domain, which is mediated by bodies and selective extermination as a systematic elimination of certain social identities, in opposition to the regime, among which are social activists. Their bodies are social territorialities, subject to registration. Hence, the methodological strategy has designed a database on the serious casualties received by activists: death, disappearance and injuries, rape, and torture, from January 2017 to April 2019. The hemerographic record of the 99 actions found, was processed in the Statistic Program for Social Sciences (SPSS) and analyzed from the adopted theoretical approach, considering the relationships between their temporality, spatiality, the intensity of the different types of violence, the social identity of the activists and that of their aggressors until revealing, by way of conclusion, the network of relations of selective extermination.