Drug violence and human rights in Mexico

Mónica Serrano (El Colegio de Mexico) - This talk will examine the changing nature of drug-related violence in Mexico with a view to providing an analytical framework to account for the country´s human rights crisis. The presentation traces the main trends observed in drug-trafficking and drug-related violence against the backdrop of transition to democracy.

Three points are especially salient. First, while there can be no doubt that President Calderón declared a war on drugs and drug-trafficking, the militarization of drug policy long preceded his administration. Secondly, while drug-related violence had already erupted during the first transition Fox government, it definitely accelerated under the Calderón administration. And third, the context in which human rights violations take place, and international human rights law and international humanitarian law operate, in practice matters. By looking at the character and changing nature of the violence since transition to democracy, the presentation outlines the case for a more contextual understanding of Mexico´s human rights crisis.

Mónica Serrano is Professor of International Relations at El Colegio de México, Senior Research Associate at the Centre for International Studies at the University of Oxford, and a Senior Fellow at the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies. She was the founding Executive Director of the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect (2008-2011), Research and Honorary Fellow at the Institute of Latin American Studies, University of London (1990-97), Research Associate at the IISS (1996) and a MacArthur Research Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Centre for International Studies (1999-2002). She has published extensively on international security and Latin America, with particular reference to international institutions, security, human rights, transnational crime and civil-military relations. Her recent books include: Human Rights Regimes in the Americas (2009); After Oppression: Transitional Justice in Latin America and Eastern Europe (2012); Mexico’s Security Failure: Collapse into Criminal Violence (2012); The International Politics of Human Rights. Rallying to the R2P Cause? (2014). She is a member of the International Advisory Board of the FRAME Project ‘Fostering Human Rights Among European (External and Internal) Policies’, co-editor of Global Governance and member of the editorial board of Global Responsibility to Protect and Conflict, Security and Development.

This event is organised in collaboration with the UCL Global Governance Institute: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/global-governance/