2014/2015 Janey Annual Workshop: Luis A. Herrán
Friday October 31st, 10am, History Conference Room 529
Janey Fellow Luis A. Herrán will present his most recent work based on the 2014/2015 Janey Summer Fellowship he was awarded. See title and abstract below:
Bandits, Rebels and Outlaws: Anti-Communism and the Criminalization of the Enemy in Mexico and Colombia during the Cold War
Situated in the context of the Cold War anti-communist crusades in Mexico and Colombia, this paper analyzes how the anti-communist imaginary constructed its purported enemy (the communist) in the sphere of legal and political discourse through the early development of what legal scholars have referred to as “enemy criminal law.” More specifically, I analyze both the mechanisms and context of deployment of the law of social dissolution in Mexico, and of emergency criminal legislation in Colombia. I argue that these legal-political artifacts portrayed communism as a radical enemy in two important dimensions: first, in its association with crime, lawlessness and disorder; and second, in its connection with Soviet imperialism and its oppressive, atheist and totalitarian order. I also posit that these modes of imagining the enemy fostered the conflation of political dissidence with criminality and informed and legitimized various forms of legal and illegal, state and non-state practices of repression in both countries.