Session 5: Evil: The Political Made Personal

Session 5: Evil – The Political Made Personal
Chair: Mena Mitrano

Interviewing the Embodiment of Political Evil
Alejandro Cervantes-Carson
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Mary Washington, Fredericksburg, Virginia, USA

In August of 2003 I conducted a three-hour long interview with former Mexican President Luis Echeverría. The central purpose of that interview was to explore the paradigmatic changes that so profoundly transformed population policies during his term 1970-1976 in office. While the central text was population policies, our interview was crisscrossed by multiple subtexts that linked our conversations with historical memory and biography, violence and authoritarianism, and of course politics, power, and democratization. These subtexts were all condensed under the metaphor of Tlatelolco: the Mexico City student massacre of October 2, 1968.
Canak and Swanson describe the events and its historical impact in the following way: “In 1968, a series of large-scale student demonstrations erupted in Mexico City to demand free and mass education. As the protest expanded to include workers, peasants and unions, ideas of democracy and redistribution of wealth were adopted. The student movement was significant for several reasons. First, participation in the demonstrations included approximately 400,000 people … Second, the student march to Tlatelolco Plaza in Mexico City, October 2, 1968 ended violently with Mexican police and army attacking the [unarmed and peaceful] group: 325 protesters were killed and thousands were injured … Third, a number of students involved in the 1968 student movement influenced or became leaders of the urban popular movements in the early 1970s”.
For many analysts this was a political watershed moment in Mexican contemporary history. “The student movement of 1968 and the brutal government repression that brought it to an abrupt end deeply disturbed the Mexican people. A political, social, and moral crisis ensued that has not yet been resolved”. Not only was the repressive state reaction excessive and unwarranted, but the systematic cover-up and official denial of the amount of people dead and injured came to signify the beginning of a political crisis of state legitimacy, that did not end until the elections of 2000 when the one-party system was defeated in the presidential elections.
More than three decades later this metaphor hung as a specter over our interview. Echeverría was being investigated by a special prosecutor for his alleged involvement in these crimes as Secretary of Government (Interior Minister) and later as President. My generation had grown up scarred by these events and thinking of him as the embodiment of political evil. In this paper, I would like to ethnographically reconstruct these subtexts, and offer some interpretations of their political and moral meaning.

This paper primarily seeks to demystify the hallowed position of the humanitarian mine clearance industry and demarcate its position in the humanitarian aid arena and to make clear the role of HMA organisations less as saints led by the martyr figure of the late Princess Diana, and more as sinners, tools of the western Military Industrial Complex, and as compliant forces deployed to areas of political volatility by western governments to do their bidding, including the routine gathering of military, political and economic information for use by intelligence services of donor countries.

Justinian of Byzantium (6th century CE) and Vaclav of Bohemia (10th century CE) each developed very different theories as responses to political situations they perceived as “evil.” Justinian followed a program of conquest, arguably to “liberate” the former Western territories of the Roman Empire from the disorder, chaos and confusion of non-Roman (i.e. non-Byzantine) rule; this chaos was seen as the precursor of the Antichrist’s reign and Justinian’s re-establishment of Roman order postponed the final advent of the Apocalypse. Vaclav of Bohemia, on the other hand, when confronted with the naked aggression of his brother in a dynastic dispute, voluntarily surrendered himself to assassination by knowingly walking into a trap so as to spare his country the otherwise inevitable civil war. Both responses – armed conflict and conquest, as well as pacifism and self-sacrifice – were lauded by Eastern Christian theologians and bishops; yet Eastern Christians developed a third response to political evil in the 20th century CE by appearing to cooperate with the aggressive, atheistic totalitarian Soviet regime in Russia.
These three differing paradigms of how to respond to evil, each endorsed by Eastern Christianity, suggest a variety of theologically “acceptable” ways to deal with political situations deemed wicked or evil: armed conflict, pacific non-resistance, apparent cooperation so as to subvert from within. What might these three paradigms suggest about the possibility of modern ways to respond to political evil in the world and how to distinguish when each response is appropriate?