The Politics of Death and Asylum Discourse

Abstract

In 2006, Mexico’s then-president Felipe Calderón declared war on drug trafficking. The human toll included the loss of over 95,000 lives, the forced disappearance of more than 27,000 people, and the displacement of 2 percent of the Mexican population. This article offers an explanation of how persecution and exile are specific effects of the governmentalization of the Mexican state. This governmentalization includes the shared use, by criminals and authorities, of techniques for dominating the population and controlling the conduct of citizens through the practices of death, that is, by necropolitics. The article goes on to discuss how the objectives, rationality, and governmentalization of the state serve to dislocate concepts of the legal discourse of asylum in such a way that its truth politics exclude Mexican asylum seekers, thereby constituting American migration biopolitics from the periphery.