TY - JOUR
AU1 - Kloppe-SantamarÍa, Gema
AB - This article examines the role of rumors in the collectivization of violence in twentieth-century Mexico. By focusing on a series of cases of lynching driven by rumors of child theft and the stealing of children’s bodily fluids and organs, the article reveals the hierarchies of credibility that make rumors an effective tool to trigger and escalate violence. The article’s main argument is that rumors become deadly or “weaponized” in the form of lynchings in contexts where anxieties and fears regarding processes of modernization and economic exploitation intersect with citizens’ perception of the state as unable or unwilling to provide security and justice. In twentieth-century Mexico, what made rumors vectors of lethal violence was not only a context of collective fear and economic uncertainty, but also their credibility vis-à-vis other forms of knowledge. Such credibility was grounded on citizens’ keen sense of distrust in state authorities and on people’s belief that without recourse to lynching, crimes would go unpunished. Adding to the credibility of these rumors was also the lynched victim’s actual or perceived condition as foreign or external to the community where the lynching took place, a condition that made them more likely to be the subject of rumors involving the extraction and exploitation of local resources. Child-theft rumors occupy a central place in Mexico’s contemporary context of insecurity. This article provides a historical reflection on the connections between hearsay, mob violence, and citizens’ long-term experiences of exploitation, state neglect, and impunity. On August 29, 2018, two men were lynched in the town of San Vicente de Oquerón in the municipality of Acatlán, in the state of Puebla in Mexico.1 The lynching followed the circulation of rumors that claimed the two men were responsible for having kidnapped at least two children from the community. The rumors added to hearsay circulating on social media two days earlier, which warned parents about the presence of strange men who were kidnapping children to extract and sell their organs. The two victims of the lynching, Alberto Flores Morales and Ricardo Flores Rodríguez, were driving a black SUV with plates from out of town and had been seen talking and drinking alcohol on the streets. After some neighbors identified them as the alleged child kidnappers or robachicos,2 a group of police officers took them to the police station in order to investigate the accusations. Once there, however, another rumor began to take shape. People in the town claimed that the two men would be released without any investigation. Within a short while, a group of neighbors rang the town’s church bells in order to alert others of the alleged release of the suspects, while over a hundred people marched towards the police station where they tried to break in the building armed with metal clubs and shovels. Perpetrators included mostly young men but also women and older villagers from San Vicente Oquerón, a town with less than 3,000 inhabitants that depends mostly on migrants’ remittances for its economic subsistence.3 In a video of the incident taken by one of the perpetrators a group of infuriated men and women appear shouting “Let them be burned!” and “We are going to kill you!” while a couple of police officers halfheartedly attempt to guard the doors. A man trying to force his way into the building appears on the same video telling a police officer “They are drugged, drunk, and they are stealing children,” while another one shouts “The children are cut open, without organs, without hearts, thrown into vacant lots.” After an hour and a half, the enraged group of men and women managed to break into the police station and drag the two men into the streets. The mob beat the two men badly and tied them up with a rope. They then poured gasoline over their bodies and set them on fire. The men were burned alive, and their bodies left abandoned outside the police station. According to family members and newspaper reports following the incident, the victims of the lynching were not actually in San Vicente de Oquerón to steal children. Rather they were merely passing through the town in order to buy some construction materials to build a fence. Like hundreds of cases reported over the last two decades in Mexico, the lynching of Alberto Flores Morales and Ricardo Flores Rodríguez remains unpunished.4 Newspapers framed this lynching as an expression of Mexico’s current security crisis, the result of increasing levels of crime coupled with a growing sense of frustration toward state authorities that are seen as unable or unwilling to protect citizens. Although this case may indeed express Mexico’s contemporary challenges of insecurity and criminal violence, the social and political dynamics underpinning this phenomenon are far from new. I have elsewhere examined the history of lynching in post-revolutionary Mexico and showed that, rather than signaling state absence, lynchings constitute collective responses to state authorities who are considered intrusive, illegitimate, and incapable of addressing citizens’ demands for justice.5 I have examined how lynchings have historically been driven by religious beliefs, accusations of witchcraft, and political differences within local communities.6 In this article, I will analyze a particular aspect of this phenomenon, namely, the role of rumors in the triggering and escalation of mob violence. The aim of this article is twofold. First, I seek to historicize and interpret the role of rumors in the collectivization of violence in twentieth-century Mexico. Second, I will reflect on the hierarchies of credibility that make rumors an effective tool to trigger and escalate violence. In order to do this, I will focus on a series of cases from the first and second half of the twentieth century. Like the lynching of the two men in San Vicente de Oquerón, these cases concern accusations of child theft and the stealing of children’s bodily fluids and organs. Child theft rumors have contributed to the organization of lynching in Mexico across different periods, and some of the most recent and publicized cases of lynching have revolved around similar rumors or hearsay.7 Furthermore, lynchings motivated by child-theft rumors are among the most frequently reported cases today next to cases driven by so-called robberies or cases of sexual assault.8 The relevance of child-theft rumors in the country’s contemporary context of insecurity, together with their persistence across apparently dissimilar and historically distant periods, makes them a particularly productive site to establish connections between hearsay and mob violence. In order to historicize and interpret the role of rumors in the organization of lynchings, I will examine cases taken place during the post-revolutionary period, specifically in the 1930s and 1940s, and during the last two decades of the twentieth century.9 The selection of these periods follows primarily from the distinct weight and visibility of child-theft rumors during these two moments, as indicated by relevant literature as well as by my own research on the history of lynching in Mexico.10 My temporal focus follows also from the social and economic characteristics shared by these periods, and their resulting comparability. Both periods represent moments of rapid change and modernization driven by a capitalistic model of development and by the country’s steady integration into the world economy. The post-revolutionary period witnessed increasing levels of urbanization, the promotion of large-scale mechanized production, and the modernization and incorporation of the countryside into the national economy. During the 1940s, in particular, Mexico developed stronger economic ties with the United States via foreign investment, tourism, and the bracero program established in 1942.11 The 1980s and 1990s marked the country’s transition to a market-oriented economy driven by privatization, deregulation of the economy, reduction of public expenditures, and the promotion of international trade, particularly with the United States. The signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) on January 1, 1994 represented the high-water mark of a series of neoliberal reforms that began with President Miguel de la Madrid (1982–1988), and were pushed further by President Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988–1994). Although the United States has been a constant presence and driving force behind Mexico’s modernization and economic integration throughout the twentieth century, the degree and scale of this presence was intensified greatly during these two periods. After reflecting on the concept of rumors in connection to lynching, I will discuss child-theft rumors and the ways they triggered either attempted or actual lynchings. My analysis will be for the most part centered on the post-revolutionary years, with the neoliberal period allowing me to illuminate important continuities regarding rumors and the hierarchies of credibility underpinning them. Such continuities include the presence of rumors of child theft and extraction of bodily organs and fluids, which articulated narratives of exploitation involving either powerful or foreign individuals. These continuities reveal the endurance of a hierarchy of credibility that posits rumors, often circulated and amplified by the press, as a reliable form of knowledge in the face of state authorities who are distrusted and seen as negligent or incapable of protecting citizens.12 The central argument bringing these two periods together is that rumors become deadly or “weaponized” in the form of lynchings in contexts where anxieties and fears regarding processes of modernization and economic exploitation intersect with citizens’ perception of the state as unable or unwilling to provide security and justice. As scholarly literature on child-theft rumors in other parts of Latin America has shown, not all rumors lead to lynching or acts of collective violence but may instead spark social critique or political mobilization.13 In twentieth-century Mexico, what made rumors vectors of lethal violence was not only a context of collective fear and economic uncertainty, but also their credibility vis-à-vis other forms of knowledge. Such credibility was grounded on citizens’ keen sense of distrust in state authorities and on people’s belief that without recourse to lynching, crimes would go unpunished. Adding to the credibility of these rumors as well as to their lethality was also the lynched victim’s actual or perceived condition as foreign or external to the community where the lynching took place, a condition that made them more likely to be the subject of rumors involving the extraction and exploitation of local resources.14 Literature on child theft rumors in Latin America has focused on the last decades of the twentieth century. In bringing this period into dialogue with the post-revolutionary decades, this article reveals the longer history of mob violence in Mexico and its connection to citizens’ long-term experiences of exploitation, extraction, state neglect, and impunity. On Rumors as Precursors of Lynching Rumors are central to the collectivization of violence.15 First uttered by one or more individuals who claim to have witnessed a given offense or misconduct, a rumor is often reiterated and shared by word of mouth among witnesses, passersby, and neighbors. As the rumor circulates, as James C. Scott has argued, its narrative is embellished and shaped to more closely correspond to the anxieties, expectations, and worldview of those who share it. 16 Although rumors leading to lynching are in the vast majority of cases unfounded and untrue, they are nonetheless credible versions of reality that are based upon, and contribute to, the criminalization and scapegoating of individuals who are already distrusted or perceived as dangerous by given communities. In this sense, far from being entirely random or irrational, rumors constitute a rational and plausible version of reality from the perspective of those who spread them.17 They represent a form of “cultural knowledge” that can be both historicized and interpreted by historians and social scientists alike.18 Lynchings are collective, public, and particularly cruel forms of punishment directed at individuals perceived as threatening or offensive to a given group or community. In contrast to the history of lynching in the United States, lynchings in Latin America are not primarily driven by racial conflicts or divisions but rather by citizens’ attempts to control criminal conduct or to exclude individuals considered dangerous or destabilizing to the dominant values of a community, be they witches, socialists, or Protestants.19 Although some lynchings do culminate in hanging by a noose, lynching may be nonfatal and can involve the burning, beating, mutilating, or shooting of the victim. Similar to lynching, rumors are collective phenomena that challenge individual attribution and enable anonymity as well as plausible deniability for perpetrators. Although this anonymity has arguably made rumor a preferable form of communication of the subordinate classes,20 this same characteristic is what makes rumors an optimal tool of social control that can be used against both the powerful and the powerless. Thus, even when uttered by “subordinate classes,” rumors can, like lynching, become a form of social control that allows individuals and communities to delineate the boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable conduct. In this context, rumors can be conceptualized as the verbal precursors of the physical and corporeal harm inflicted by lynching. Despite their potential fallacy or inaccuracy, rumors leading to lynching offer significant and meaningful narratives that can allow the historian to unravel shared assumptions of deviancy and danger at a given point of time. In this sense, rather than investigating the truthfulness of rumors, my analysis is focused on the beliefs and power dynamics that gave rumors sufficient weight and credibility so as to effectively incite collective forms of violence. In order to understand what made a rumor credible, I suggest we discern the “hierarchies of credibility” that gives shape to rumors’ narrative and content.21 That is to say, we ought to identify the competing accounts of reality that allow rumors to become condensed, amplified, and eventually “weaponized” in the form of lynching. In twentieth-century Mexico, state authorities, the press, and individual citizens and communities, constituted the primary actors articulating such accounts. In order to give rise to collective violence, a rumor had to have sufficient credibility in the eyes of perpetrators. Such credibility superseded and at times directly contested official accounts and was instead grounded on press reports and people’s own understanding of reality. This article relies heavily on press reports in order to examine child-theft rumors and their connection to lynching.22 The use of newspapers poses of course various challenges. Rumors reported by the press were usually refashioned in order to be made more attractive, palatable, or scandalous to a given readership. The visibility the press gave to child-theft rumors actually amplified the feelings of anxiety, despair, and anger that made lynchings seem a justifiable or even necessary means to deter or castigate these crimes. In this sense, newspapers were a key driver of rumors and of the collective fear and anger leading up to lynching. My analysis proceeds then by acknowledging the press’ propensity to distort and amplify rumors. It also recognizes that the narratives articulated by journalists and editorialists were, together with official reports on crimes, part of the competing accounts of reality that shaped people’s understanding of danger and deviancy.23 Rumors and Robachicos in Post-revolutionary Mexico (1930s–1940s) Anxieties and fears surrounding child theft have been present in Mexico from the very beginning of the twentieth century. In a series of prints entitled “Los Robachicos en acción” (c. 1907), José Guadalupe Posada, the famous Mexican printmaker and engraver, depicted the suffering of innocent children being kidnapped by dubious men wearing sombreros.24 One of these prints accompanied an article reporting that 49 children between the ages of two and twelve had mysteriously disappeared in October and November, 1907 in Mexico City. The text states that “infamous robbers” had abducted these children, most probably to exploit them and force them to work. It refers to the suffering and anguish experienced by mothers and fathers whose negligence was, nonetheless, to be blamed for the children’s disappearance. During the 1930s, anxieties surrounding the kidnapping of children in order to exploit their labor continued to surface in the form of press coverage of so-called robachicos who were either lynched or threatened with lynching. On February 3, 1931, for instance, the newspaper La Prensa reported that Leobardo Guerrero Olmos had tried to kidnap Roberto and Carmen Martínez, six and three years old, respectively.25 The two siblings were playing in the patio of their home when Guerrero Olmos lured them with candies and convinced them to meet him at the front door. Once the girl and boy approached him, the robachicos grabbed both children with the intention of kidnapping them. A group of neighbors heard the children crying and came to their rescue. Men and women beat Guerrero Olmos with fists and clubs, forcing the alleged robachicos to free his victims. When the police arrived, the man was taken to the Belén prison. According to the press, he denied trying to kidnap the two siblings and stated instead that he was just “very fond of children” and wanted to spend some time with them. A few days later, the same newspaper referred to “a measurable increase” in the number of cases of child theft in Mexico City.26 Referring to several instances overseen by the Ministerio Público (Public Prosecutors Office), the press suggested that, given the economic crisis the country was experiencing, the purpose of the kidnappings must be to exploit the children, either by turning them into beggars or by making them sing and dance in public squares in order to earn money for their exploiters. The same note referred to a lynching that had resulted from a man’s attempt to kidnap a boy. The case involved a man called Eulogio Ramos Calderón, who had tried to kidnap Erasmo Jiménez outside of a cinema in Mexico City. Following the mother’s cry for help, a group of neighbors and passersby rushed to help her and were able to locate the robachicos a few streets away. Once they had him surrounded, people slapped Ramos, beat him with clubs, and threatened to burn him alive. The police were able to prevent the killing and took the man to the Belén Prison. Similar to Leobardo Guerrero, Eulogio Ramos denied that he was trying to kidnap the child and claimed that he had just invited the boy to follow him around. As illustrated by these and similar cases reported at the time, accusations of child theft provoked feelings of indignation and anger among neighbors and witnesses, which could then lead to collective attacks against so-called offenders. Although in the cases mentioned above the accusations made against these robachicos do not seem to have followed from, or given rise to, more elaborate rumors, during the same years the press reported the existence of embellished narratives of child theft that contributed to the collectivization of violence. For instance, in April, 1930, Norwegian geologist Edgar Kullmmann was brutally lynched in the town of Amozoc, Puebla, in the context of rumors regarding the existence of a fat-stealing creature that was snatching children.27 According to these rumors several children had gone missing in various towns of Puebla due to the presence of a fantastic creature that beheaded them in order to extract their body fat and use it as oil to lubricate his airplane’s engine. The rumor that led to Kullmmann’s lynching shared several elements with the folkloric figure known as the pishtaco. With a particular presence in Peru and the Andean region, the pishtaco is also imagined as a tall, white man who, after beheading and dismembering his victims, uses their body fat to lubricate modern machines.28 Believing he incarnated the fantastic fat-stealing creature, thousands of women and men armed with stones and machetes attacked Kullmmann and dragged his body through the town. Although the press was quick to dismiss the rumor of the fat-stealing creature calling it a “fantastic legend,” local newspapers had been reporting the “mysterious” disappearance of children in previous days, thus adding seeming credibility to the child theft rumors.29 Rumors about children being kidnapped in order to extract and utilize their body fat were not uncommon in post-revolutionary Mexico. The credibility of these rumors and their connection to lynching reflected both collective fears of exploitation or extraction, as well as a deep sense of distrust in state authorities. During the second half of the 1930s, villagers and parents from different towns of Mexico spread rumors that claimed the federal government was kidnapping children in order to turn them into oil for planes and send them to the United States. These rumors circulated in the context of communities’ opposition to the new federal model of education, which declared public schools to be socialist and secular in orientation. In reference to villagers’ resistance to socialist education in Zacapoaxtla, Puebla, historian Mary Kay Vaughan has argued, that “in a region where forced military recruitment had perennially terrorized communities and the Devil turned men into animals or elements, such stories struck like lightning.”30 Less fantastic but equally effective were rumors about children being perverted by teachers who, in order to teach them sexual education, would ask girls and boys to take their clothes off in front of one another.31 Informed by such rumors and motivated by political, religious, and economic reasons, villagers from towns in Puebla, Michoacán, Jalisco, Veracruz, and Aguascalientes assailed and lynched dozens of male and female federal teachers who imparted socialist education. By July of 1938, the Secretaría de Educación Pública estimated that one socialist teacher was killed every ten days in Mexico.32 The irruption of the federal government through modernization projects was also at the center of rumors that emerged in San Juan Chamula, Chiapas during the 1940s. 33 In the context of federal projects aimed at constructing roads and bridges, villagers circulated a series of rumors that claimed the existence of giants that roamed the region with the intention of snatching Indians and turning their bodies into grease that could then be used to lubricate road-building machinery. In yet another example, federal doctors were subject to rumors spread by village doctors and townsfolk that asserted the former were snatching children in order to extract their body fat and “grease cars, airplanes and other machines.”34 As should be clear by now, these rumors shared a similar structure or basic plot. Namely, state representatives or foreign forces abduct children in order to capture their bodily fluids, either to send overseas or to use as fuel for modern machinery. To be sure, not all rumors about child theft involved narratives about wicked creatures or the extraction of bodily fluids. In other cases, child-theft rumors described children who, after being kidnapped, were forced to beg in the streets or to work in brothels where they were sexually exploited.35 For instance, on June 11, 1940, the newspaper Excélsior reported that Guillermo Mora was nearly lynched by a group of neighbors and passersby who accused him of trying to kidnap two girls.36 The man was saved thanks to the intervention of two policemen who heard the multitude “roaring” down the streets while they tried to seize the so-called robachicos. Other cases reported by La Prensa during the following years followed a similar sequence. One or more individuals, including at times the mother of the child, alerted neighbors or passersby about the presence of a robachicos. Neighbors and bystanders would next surround the wrongdoer in order to rescue the child and punish the suspected criminal. In each instance, beatings, clubbing, and threats of burning would follow unless the police intervened and prevented the lynching.37 Despite the presence of more “ordinary” accusations, between the months of October and November, 1945 the press reported a series of more elaborate rumors, which were nonetheless considered credible enough to spark calls—from the press and the public at large—to punish the alleged kidnappers through lynching or other extralegal means. Such rumors referred to the existence of gangs of robachicos that kidnapped Mexican children in order to sell them in the United States. Reported by both mainstream and more sensationalist newspapers, these rumors gained notoriety in the context of the kidnapping of Fernando Bohigas on October of 1945 in Mexico City. As Susana Sosenski has argued, the case received an unprecedented level of attention due to the fact that Bohigas was a light-skinned boy from a middle-class family.38 After a six-month search, the boy was found. The kidnapper turned out to be a middle-class Mexican woman who, unable to have children, had allegedly abducted the boy to fulfill her “desire to be a mother.” In the months before the case was solved, however, the press entertained a number of rumors, some of which pointed to the involvement of foreign individuals. One such rumor claimed Chinese men were kidnapping children, deforming their bodies, and blinding them, all in order to exploit them and force them to beg in the streets.39 Another rumor blamed American women who, unable to bear their own children, decided to buy them in Mexico. The latter rumor and similar variations involving American citizens snatching Mexican children echoes the basic plot of the more fantastic rumors leading to lynchings described above. On November 10, 1945, the mainstream newspaper El Nacional published an extensive article concerning an increasing number of child-theft cases that had reached “epidemic proportions” in the country.40 In the opening paragraphs the article referred to “extra-official reports” obtained by journalists from “reliable sources” that pointed to the existence of gangs of robachicos who trafficked children into the United States. The purpose of those kidnappings, the press reported, was to sell the abducted children to “American persons who have not been able to have offspring.” A related note published the same day referred to the need to stop the “trafficking of Mexican children to the United States.”41 The note claimed that female widows or American divorcées, who were formerly married to American soldiers, were using these children in order to claim pensions as single mothers. Similar to portrayals of American women or gringas accused of child theft in late-twentieth-century Guatemala, these women were construed as infertile, exploitative, and prone to abducting children in order to be able to become mothers.42 Although the press did not provide any evidence for this rumor, it nonetheless presented it as a truthful claim, so much so that it called for the application of an exemplary punishment for child kidnappers, one that would match the penalty for this type of crime in the United States, namely, the death penalty. Given the transnational character of the crime, the press also urged the Interior Minister, in coordination with the Secretaries of Customs, Transports, and Communications, to provide security along roads and borders in order to promote “energetic and swift actions” in response to crimes that had generated a great deal of alarm among all social classes.43 These rumors did not involve any fantastic creature or machine, but they did present a narrative of exploitation or extraction that involved outsiders or foreign individuals. As in the cases analyzed above, the credibility of these rumors did not rely on official reports but on press accounts as well as on people’s understanding of deviancy and danger. In this case, children were being kidnapped and trafficked to the United States, either to allow American women to become mothers, or to enable widowed and divorced women to access economic benefits they would otherwise be unable to obtain. In either case, the crime involved an unfair and immoral practice that concerned the victimization of innocent children. Echoing the myth-like narratives of fat-stealing creatures or rumors about children being snatched to be turned into oil, these rumors depicted the exploitation of children by individuals who were portrayed as greedy, deviant, and foreign. The prominence of the United States in these narratives is indicative of a dynamic of exploitation in which “resources” were extracted and sent to the northern country. The fact that Mexico was indeed sending resources, human labor in particular, to the United States through the bracero program was surely part of the context for these narratives, as was the greater presence of American tourists in Mexico City and the various beach resorts supported by the government throughout the 1930s and 1940s.44 In this sense, these rumors gained greater weight and credibility in light of the actual transfer of resources from “south” to “north” and of people’s sense of vulnerability in the face of these economic transformations. The sense of alarm and urgency generated by these rumors continued during the weeks and months following the kidnapping of Fernando Bohigas, despite the efforts of state authorities to downplay or deny the existence of a child-theft epidemic in the country. Mexico City’s Attorney General, for instance, claimed that of the many reports received by the police, several did in fact not correspond to child-theft offenses. Instead, he claimed, there were cases involving a divorced or separated parent who had taken the child into her or his custody, or cases in which children had run away due to the mistreatment they experienced at home.45 Echoing this opinion, the Chief of the Judicial Federal Police told reporters that it was necessary to acknowledge that not all cases of missing children involved the actual kidnapping of children, much less the actions of well-organized criminal groups. Referring to cases where children had been taken by one of the parents or to incidents of runaway children escaping abusive parents, the Chief of the Federal Judicial Police lamented the existence of “many mothers who believe that their only duty towards their children is to give birth to them, [and who] as soon as they [the children] are able to walk abandoned them in their homes… .”46 The latter statement not only downplayed the existence of a child-theft epidemic, but in fact blamed mothers (not fathers) for being unable to look after their children. The tendency of authorities to dismiss rumors of a child-theft epidemic did not seem to change people’s perception of the great dangers children faced in Mexican cities. The ongoing sense of alarm, as well as reports on lynching or attempts of lynching against so-called robachicos, show that rumors about the kidnapping of children by well-organized criminal groups were more credible than the version offered by authorities. For instance, an article in El Nacional reported that parents shared a “firm desire to take matters into their own hands” either through lynching or any other form of torment that would secure the life and wellbeing of their children and their families.47 In this and similar articles, the press rationalized and even justified people’s eagerness to lynch those individuals who were threatening the safety and integrity of Mexican families. Reporting on two attempts of lynching that had been prevented by the police the day before, La Prensa called for the effective organization of society and warned readers about being dissuaded by criminals who, caught in flagrante, denied their actions. Impunity based on sentimentality, the press argued, would be fatal.48 Despite reproducing the statements of authorities, the press articulated and suggested its own interpretations about “the truth” behind the kidnapping of children in Mexico. For instance, La Prensa stated “…it is impossible to believe that the systemic kidnapping, the mysterious disappearance, probably involving the export of innocent little bodies, is the work of some isolated wrongdoers. Who are the brains that direct this despicable traffic? We need to discover them!”49 A related note denounced the many deficiencies of the police, the lack of proper illumination in the streets, as well as the lack of public security that impacted not only children, but also every citizen. 50 It called next for the organization of youth brigades that could protect younger children in schools and encouraged neighbors to use whistles, alarms, or any other method to alert others of the presence of a robachicos. It further stated that, given the “terror” that society was experiencing due to these criminals, parents justifiably saw a robachico in every individual that came close to their children thus leading to more than a few “scandals” (namely, attempted lynchings).51 As has been discussed thus far, child-theft rumors proliferated in the context of disruptions created by rapid processes of modernization that involved either the federal state’s encroachment into local communities or the country’s increasing integration with the US economy during the post-revolutionary period. These rumors reflected an understanding of children as susceptible to the exploitation and greed of foreign or unscrupulous individuals. They also revealed people’s perceptions of deviancy and danger as well as their targeting of people who were considered foreign or external to the community. A lack of confidence in state authorities further amplified rumors and solidified their credibility, as police and other state officials were either not trusted or plainly seen as responsible for the vulnerability of children. Child-theft Rumors in the Neoliberal Era (1980s–1990s) In the latter decades of the twentieth century, child-theft rumors surfaced again in connection with the social tensions generated by Mexico’s swift incorporation into a globalized economy and the government’s promotion of structural reforms aimed a privatizing several sectors of the economy. In this case, rumors pointed primarily to the existence of criminal organizations that kidnapped children in order to sell their organs in the United States. Shared by word of mouth, these rumors were similarly reproduced and amplified by the press, creating a sense of urgency and fear that led people to take matters into their own hands, at times with fatal consequences. On May 17, 1986, the magazine Proceso published a letter to the editors signed by María Berenice Esquivel García. In the letter, María Berenice described what she characterized as a “family tragedy, a particularly painful one, that makes evident the corruption of some of our official institutions, which are involved in the trafficking of human organs.”52 She went on to describe how her twenty-one-year-old son had died as a result of a car accident in their city of residence, Guadalajara. She did not find out about her son’s death until several hours later, after having contacted first friends and family, and next several public institutions, including public hospitals, emergency rooms, the municipal police, the judicial police, and lastly forensic services. When she finally located her son’s body with forensic services, she was denied the right to identify her son. And when she was finally able to see her son’s body, she noticed something strange in his face. After summoning three different private doctors, she confirmed her initial suspicion: her son’s eyes had been removed. María Berenice concluded her letter by denouncing the fact that every lawyer in Guadalajara had refused to take on her case because they all knew or suspected the involvement of politicians and public officials in the business of organ trafficking. Although this story did not involve the trafficking of children, the case is representative of the type of rumors about child theft and organ trafficking circulating at the time. Such rumors involved the perceived presence of foreign or greedy individuals who “extracted” or “consumed” local resources. Like rumors about sacaojos or eye-snatches that became prevalent around the same years in Peru, the story also reflects the sense of despair created by state authorities who were considered negligent or harmful.53 For instance, on November of 1992, the same magazine published a piece that denounced the seeming increase in the number of children kidnapped and then sold in the United States to extract their organs.54 The Mexican government had recently denied media allegations regarding the existence of organ trafficking networks in the country, but the magazine reminded its readers (as well as authorities) that several government officials had acknowledged the problem just a few years earlier.55 Child-theft allegations were studied and documented by journalist José Manuel Martín Medem during the 1980s and 1990s in Mexico. His analysis of child-theft cases offers a counterpoint to the authorities’ dismissal of such allegations, and provides also a useful reference to assess the veracity of rumors that led up to lynching.56 The cases included the kidnapping of two children from Michoacán who were to be sold in Texas, an attempt of child theft perpetrated by a nurse who worked in a public hospital in Guadalajara and who confessed to be part of an organization that sold newborns in New Jersey, as well as the detention of two women in Michoacán who confessed they were going to sell five Mexican children in Chicago. Similar to rumors about robachicos in post-revolutionary Mexico, these cases concerned the abduction of children in order to satisfy the demands of foreign individuals or buyers, particularly from the United States. Rumors circulating at the time claimed that children from the poorest areas of the country were disappearing and reappearing days later with scars on their bodies, suggesting they had undergone some surgical procedure.57 In reference to this and similar rumors, The New Republic published an article characterizing these allegations as unfounded and untrue.58 The author of the piece recounted how, since his arrival in Mexico City, he had taken notice of a “scattering of bizarre stories in the respectable press. It was reported that Mexican children routinely were being kidnapped, spirited across the U.S. border, and murdered for their vital organs, which were then transplanted into sick American children with rich parents.” He described having heard the same story with some variations in different states. In one version, parents had been warned by teachers to watch their children, unless they wanted them to end up in pieces across the border. A more elaborate narrative referred to a traveling salesman who had a leaky suitcase that contained “children’s eyes and kidneys, wrapped in plastic and chilled with melting ice.” The author lamented that, despite Mexican and U.S. governments’ efforts to dispel these rumors, several Mexican newspapers continued to feed this “hate-monger” story that had the United States as the villain. He concluded by referring to the fact that the costly and sophisticated process involved in organ trafficking and organ transplant made such illicit transactions “impossible.” For medical anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes, who investigated the phenomenon of organ theft and organ transplant for more than two decades in Latin America and other regions, the illicit traffic of organs is not only possible but also remarkably profitable and underpinned by global dynamics of exploitation. During the 1980s and 1990s, Scheper-Hugues traced the existence of an illicit, unethical, and extensive organ trade that involved the selling of kidneys from the urban poor to affluent patients willing to violate medical regulations. 59 In her view, it was the very existence of this highly profitable and exploitative organ trade that provided the basis for rumors of body snatching and organ theft in several countries, including Brazil, Guatemala, Mexico, and South Africa.60 One version of these rumors claimed that Japanese and American doctors were “seeking a fresh supply of human organs for transplant surgeries in the First World” and that “large blue-and-yellow combi-vans [were] scouring poor neighborhoods in search of stray youngsters. The children would be nabbed and shoved into the trunk of the van, and their discarded and eviscerated bodies…would turn up later by the roadside, between rows of sugarcane, or in hospital dumpsters.” Another version claimed that in Mexico, Honduras, and Guatemala newborns were put into houses, called “baby farms” or “fattening farms,” waiting to be transported into the United States in order to be sold to people in search of organ donors.61 In Mexico, rumors of children being snatched in order to have their organs removed were accompanied by hearsay regarding the existence of criminal networks that were smuggling children into the United States to be sold and adopted illegally by U.S. parents who were unable to bear children.62 These rumors resembled the stories of infertile and exploitative American women that circulated in post-revolutionary Mexico. In the latest iteration of these rumors, children were allegedly taken without the consent of parents or given away by impoverished and desperate families who were lured into believing their children would have a brighter future in the United States.63 Although both the Mexican and the U.S. governments tried to downplay such rumors, claiming such criminal networks of smuggling and adoption did not exist or that the transplant of organs was simply too complex to be done through this illicit and transnational markets, a series of cases reported by the press indicated the rumors were not groundless.64 One case pertained a criminal group that operated in Chiapas selling children for $10,000 dollars to couples in the United States and Canada, while another one referred to a man who sold babies to U.S. couples in Ciudad Juarez.65 In 1994, the World Organization Against Torture called for the investigation of 17 private clinics that offered organ transplants in Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez, cities where several children had gone missing.66 According to the same organization, rich North American, Swiss, German, and Italian buyers were getting “sophisticated transplants of kidneys and corneal tissues” in these clinics.67 More so, in 1999, U.S. federal prosecutors tried two women from Long Island who participated in a “baby-smuggling ring” that resulted in the illegal sale and adoption of at least 17 Mexican infants.68 All of these reports helped bolster the credibility of rumors as well as their potential to become vectors of lethal violence. In a context in which people were both fearful of being exploited by outsiders and alert to being lied to by state authorities, these rumors had the potential to escalate and become deadly. Echoing the dynamics examined in the post-revolutionary period, rumors about children being snatched for illegal adoption or for organ trafficking fueled accusations and lynchings against so-called robachicos. In March 1993, for instance, two men from Veracruz were brutally lynched in Tepatlaxco, Puebla.69 The men had been seen taking pictures of children outside of an elementary school. After rumors began circulating about the men being “the ones that steal children and rip them open,” villagers rang the town’ church bells. A few minutes later, a large group of people armed with stones and clubs surrounded the two men. The men took refuge in the police station but were dragged to the town’s main plaza where their hands were tied, and their bodies doused with gasoline. The police were able to rescue them from being burned alive, but their injuries kept them in comas for more than two weeks.70 A number of similar cases took place in different states of Mexico during the 1990s. These cases were also driven by rumors that targeted foreign or strange individuals and that articulated narratives of exploitation or economic extraction. Their credibility was, once again, grounded on people’s distrust of the state as well as by their perceived vulnerability in the face of foreign individuals. This included the lynching of two “strangers” accused of stealing children in Naucalpan, Estado de México, in October 1994 as well as the lynching of two other men, also accused of kidnapping children, in Huejutla Hidalgo on March 1998.71 In the latter case, the two men had been taken to the police station after two girls had told their parents the men had tried to kidnap them. Rumors circulated claiming that the men were part of a criminal ring that trafficked children’s organs.72 Some villagers even claimed that the men had several livers in their truck and that, as journalist Sam Quiñones documented, “the men weren’t salesmen at all but foot soldiers in a Texas-based ring of child kidnappers… .”73 When a group of parents heard on a local radio station that the men were going to be released after paying a bail, a crowd of approximately 300 residents broke into the office of the local court, held the judge and his staff inside, then forcibly moved the two men outside of the police station.74 Armed with machetes and clubs, they dragged the men to the town’s plaza where they lynched them. The two men turned out to be traveling salesmen who sold children stamps. There are important continuities between the narratives shaping child theft rumors in the neoliberal era and those that emerged during Mexico’s post-revolutionary period. Although allegations of transnational organ trafficking only appeared in the latter decades, as did the more complex stories of medical professionals acting in complicity with state actors and private individuals in both the United States and Mexico, continuities between the narratives of child theft articulated in both periods are significant. The most obvious continuity refers to the presence of rumors about the illicit adoption of Mexican infants by American parents who cannot bear their own. In these narratives, Mexican individuals and their families either lose or give away their offspring to wealthy families north of the border, under a form of exchange that appears inherently unequal and exploitative. Equally relevant is the endurance of narratives that refer to the extraction of bodily fluids or organs by powerful individuals, including state actors, foreigners, and wealthy persons. Although in the latter period references to organ trafficking do not appear directly associated with mythical narratives involving devilish or wicked creatures, the basic plot refers in both periods to children being snatched and used by greedy individuals who are either foreigners or perceived as external to the communities where these lethal rumors circulate. Conclusion Rumors about child theft and organ trafficking have not withered away, and neither has the connection between these rumors and the collectivization of violence in present-day Mexico.75 Although rumors leading to lynching are generally untrue, they provide a rational and credible version of reality. In Mexico, rumors leading to lynching are informed by narratives of distrust and suspicion articulated against the state’s perceived incapacity or unwillingness to deal with crime. Thus, as illustrated by the lynching of Alberto Flores Morales and Ricardo Flores Rodríguez described in the opening paragraphs, the state’s efforts to call rumors of child theft into question are often met with suspicion if not outright rejection by citizens who are suspicious towards the state’s own account of events. References to the United States in the child-theft rumors that surfaced in the post-revolutionary period and in the last two decades of the twentieth century are not accidental. In the latter decades, Mexico had begun a process of accelerated economic integration with its northern neighbor through the promotion of foreign investment and the launch of a free trade agreement, NAFTA, aimed at encouraging the production, circulation, and selling of goods between both countries. Although migration was not formally integrated into NAFTA, the flow of people from Mexico to the United States also increased during this period. This process of economic integration and greater circulation of goods and persons echoes the political and economic dynamics of Mexico’s bilateral relation to the United States during the 1940s. Through foreign investment, the promotion of the tourist industry, and the bracero program, the presence of the United States in Mexico (and vice versa) became more prominent. It should come as no surprise, then, that in both periods the United States in general and American citizens in particular appeared at the center of child-theft rumors that entailed economic exchange, border crossing, and the unequal flow of resources from south to north. Rumors thrive especially in contexts where information is uncertain or unreliable.76 In the context of twentieth-century Mexico, where the truth about crimes as told by authorities was seen as unreliable and even false,77 rumors provided a more plausible version of reality. Rumors were crafted by neighbors, passersby, parents, and were then amplified by the press through articles that many times provided evidence that added to their credibility. The fact that during both periods, journalists and press editorialists published their own investigations on child-theft and organ trafficking, appeared to lend veracity to these rumors and to contradict the government’s dismissal of them as unsubstantiated or fantastic. Whereas scholars have for the most part focused on child-theft rumors that surfaced during the 1980s and 1990s in Latin America, this article has sought to trace the longer history of these rumors as of the anxieties and fears that have made these rumors effective vectors of lynching across different periods. In both post-revolutionary and late-twentieth-century Mexico, processes of modernization and economic integration have generated feelings of vulnerability towards external or foreign individuals, particularly from the “north.” In both periods, the state’s perceived negligence or complicity in cases of child theft or organ trafficking added to the sense of despair and eventual frustration and anger among villagers and neighbors. Individuals who appeared to be strangers or foreigners became the scapegoats, the ideal targets, of rumors that turned into lethal forms of violence. In twentieth-century Mexico, rumors constituted credible versions of reality that reflected actual processes of exploitation and economic extraction involving powerful or foreign individuals, particularly from the United States. Rumors, like lynching, represent forms of social control that allow communities to manage situations that would otherwise seem overwhelming. Despite the tendency to read rumors as a form of resistance or as a weapon of the weak, the cases examined in this article cannot be easily read this way. Rather, these are stories of social control and scapegoating, in which rumors become “weaponized” by the powerless against the powerless without defeating or undermining the dynamics of exploitation they allegedly seek to redress. I would like to thank the editors of this special issue as well as the JSH’s anonymous reviewer for their generous comments and suggestions. Endnotes 1 The retelling of this lynching is based on the following news coverage of the incident: “Linchan a presuntos robachicos en Acatlán de Osorio, Puebla; los quemaron vivos,” Regeneración, August 29, 2018, available at: https://regeneracion.mx/linchan-a-presuntos-robachicos-en-acatlan-de-osorio-puebla-los-quemaron-vivos/, last retrieved October 1, 2019; “Pobladores queman vivos a sujetos acusados de robar niños en Puebla,”Excélsior, August 29, 2018, available at: https://www.excelsior.com.mx/nacional/pobladores-queman-vivos-a-sujetos-acusados-de-robar-ninos-en-puebla/1261665, last retrieved October 1, 2019; Gabriela Hernández, “En Acatlán, linchamiento difundido en tiempo real,” Proceso, September 19, 2018, available at: https://www.proceso.com.mx/551515/en-acatlan-linchamiento-difundido-en-tiempo-real, last retrieved October 1, 2019; “Linchados en Acatlán eran campesinos y no robachicos: familiares,” El Sol de Puebla, August 30, 2018. Available at: https://www.elsoldepuebla.com.mx/local/estado/linchados-en-acatlan-eran-campesinos-y-no-robachicos-familiares-puebla-1954988.html, last retrieved: October 1, 2019. 2 The term “robachicos” was introduced in Mexico at the beginning of the twentieth century to refer to people that kidnapped children. See: Susana Sosenski, “Robachicos”, in Susana Sosenski and Gabriela Pulido (eds.) Hampones, pelados y pecatrices. Sujetos peligrosos en la ciudad de México, 1940-1960 (México, 2019), 163. The term is also used in contemporary Guatemala, see: Daniel Wilkinson, Silence on the Mountain: Stories of Terror, Betrayal, and Forgetting in Guatemala (New York, 2012), 29–31. 3 Marcos Martínez, “Fake news en México,” BBC News, November 12th, 2018, available at: https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-america-latina-46178633, last accessed January 2, 2020. 4 According to a recent report by the National Commission of Human Rights in Mexico (CNDH) the number of lynchings in the year 2018 alone reached a total of 174 cases, three times the number reported the prior year. Puebla and Estado de México are amongst the states with highest incidences of lynching in the country. The impunity surrounding cases of lynching reflects the general levels of impunity in Mexico, which according to recent statistics involves up to 93.2% of unreported or uninvestigated crimes. See: CNDH, “Informe especial sobre los linchamientos en el territorio nacional,” May 22 of 2019, available at: https://www.cndh.org.mx/sites/all/doc/Informes/Especiales/IE_2019-Linchamientos.pdf, last retrieved September 15, 2019. For other estimates on the number of lynchings in contemporary Mexico, see: Raúl Rodríguez Guillén and Norma Ilse Veloz Ávila, “Linchamientos en México: Recuento de un periodo largo (1988-2014).” El Cotidiano, no. 187 (2014): 51–58; Leandro A. Gamallo, “Crimen, castigo y violencia colectiva: Los linchamientos en México en el Siglo XXI” Unpublished Master dissertation, FLACSO, 2012. 5 Gema Kloppe-Santamaría, “Lynching and the Politics of State Formation in Post-Revolutionary Puebla (1930s-1950s),” Journal of Latin American Studies 51: 3 (2019): 499–521. 6 Gema Kloppe-Santamaría, In the Vortex of Violence: Lynching, Extralegal Justice and the State in Post-Revolutionary Mexico (Oakland, 2020). 7 One of these cases refers to the lynching of three police officers accused of child theft in Tláhuac, Mexico City, on November 23, 2004. An equally publicized case was the lynching of brothers José Abraham and Rey David Copado on October 19 of 2015 in Ajalpan, Puebla. The brothers were also accused of child theft. For an examination of the former case, see: Leigh Binford, and Nancy Churchill, “Lynching and States of Fear in Urban Mexico.” Anthropologica 51:2 (2009): 301–12. 8 Certainly, rumors leading to lynchings are not limited to such accusations. Rumors are equally central to cases of lynching propelled by allegations that involve other social and criminal transgressions. However, what makes this type of cases useful and relevant for my analysis here is their seeming pervasiveness throughout Mexico’s twentieth century. In light of the continuity of these rumors across different periods, I can both historicize and examine shifts in the narrations that give them sense and meaning. 9 The latter period has been the focus of most analyses on lynching in Mexico. See: Churchill, “Lynching and States of Fear in Urban Mexico,” 2; Antonio Fuentes Díaz, “El Estado y la furia,” El Cotidiano, 2005, 20: 131; Leigh Binford, “A failure of normalization: transnational migration, crime, and popular justice in the contemporary neoliberal Mexican social formation,” Social Justice, 1999, 26:3. 10 For the post-revolutionary period, see Sosenski, “Robachicos”; for more contemporary cases see: Robert Shadow and María Rodríguez Shadow, “Los robachicos,” México indígena 23 (1991); Sam Quiñones, True Tales from Another Mexico: The Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino, and the Bronx (Albuquerque, 2015). 11 The bracero program (1942–1964) was a labor agreement between the United States and Mexico that facilitated the entrance of Mexican men to work temporarily in the U.S. agricultural fields. For an analysis of the program, see: Deborah Cohen, Braceros: Migrant Citizens and Transnational Subjects in the Postwar United States and Mexico (Chapel Hill, 2011). 12 For a similar analysis on how distrust in state authorities may contribute to the circulation and violent escalation of child theft rumors, see: Arlette Farge and Jacques Revel, The Vanishing Children of Paris: Rumor and Politics before the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1993). 13 See, for instance, Laura Briggs, “Adopción transnacional: robo de criaturas, familias homoparentales y neoliberalismo,” Debate feminista, 33 (April 2006): 46–68; David Samper, “Cannibalizing Kids: Rumor and Resistance in Latin America,” Journal of Folklore Research, 39:1 (2002): 21–24. 14 As argued by sociologist Roberta Senechal de la Roche, the likelihood of collective violence increases directly with the degree of relational and cultural distance that exists between potential victims and perpetrators. In the cases examined in this article, most lynchings were directed at strangers, foreigners, or public officials from outside the communities, or at people that, even living in the same neighborhoods, were perceived as deviant. See: Roberta Senechal de la Roche, “Collective Violence as Social Control,” Sociological Forum, 11:1 (1996): 97–128. 15 Senechal de la Roche, “Collective Violence as Social Control.” 16 James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, 1992), 145. 17 Anne Stoler, “In Cold Blood: Hierarchies of Credibility and the Politics of Colonial Narratives,” Representations, No. 37 (1992); Samper, “Cannibalizing Kids: Rumor and Resistance in Latin America.” 18 Stoler, “In Cold Blood.’ 19 Kloppe-Santamaría, In the Vortex of Violence, 3-4. 20 Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, 140, 151. 21 On the notion of ‘hierarchies of credibility,” see: Stoler, “‘In Cold Blood.’” 22 Periodicals used by this article include both mainstream newspapers (e.g. El Nacional, La Opinión, Excélsior and the more recent La Jornada and Proceso) as well as dailies centered on crime news, such as La Prensa. Methodologically speaking, I revised articles dealing with child theft rumors that led to lynching, attempted lynchings, or that pointed at people’s eagerness to punish robachicos outside the law. It was through the revision of these articles that I identified both the narratives of economic exploitation and distrust in the government that shaped the content of these rumors as well as their credibility. In other words, those narratives were inferred from the articles rather than used as criteria to select which cases I would analyze. 23 Given the uncertainty of the information provided by the police and by justice institutions in Mexico, the press was a central actor in the formulation of the “truth” about crime. See: Pablo Piccato, A History of Infamy. Crime, Truth, and Justice in Mexico (Oakland, 2017), 6. 24 “Los roba-chicos en México. Desaparación misteriosa de 49 niños, en el tiempo transcurrido del 24 de septiembre al 24 de noviembre del año actual,” Posada (1907), in Ron Tyler (ed.), Posada’s Mexico, Washington, Library of Congress, 1979, 228. 25 “Robachicos a punto de ser linchado ayer,” La Prensa, February 3, 1931. 26 “Iba a ser quemado vivo un robachicos en las calles de Dr. Balmis,” La Prensa, February 12, 1931. 27 “La leyenda de los degolladores motiva un horripilante asesinato,” April 25th of 1930, La Opinión; “Todo el peso de la ley caerá sobre los asesinos de Van Edgard Kullman,” April 26th 1930, La Opinión; “A través de la semana,” April 27th 1930, La Opinión. 28 See: Anthony Oliver-Smith, “The Pishtaco: Institutionalized Fear in Highland Peru,” The Journal of American Folklore 82 (1969): 363. https://doi.org/10.2307/539781, 363; Mary Weismantel, Cholas and Pishtacos: Stories of Race and Sex in the Andes (Chicago, 2001), 8–9. 29 “Misteriosa despararición de varios niños y adultos,” April 18th of 1930, La Opinión; “Ha despertado temor entre los timoratos una fábula,” April 23 of 1930, La Opinión. 30 Kay Vaughan, Cultural politics, 122. 31 Kay Vaughan, Cultural politics, 122. 32 “Un maestro es asesinado cada diez días en el país,” El Diario de Puebla, July 19, 1938. 33 Wendy Waters, “Remapping Identities: Road Construction and Nation Building in Postrevolutionary Mexico,” 225– 226. 34 Smith, “Towards a typology of rural responses to healthcare in Mexico, 1920-1960,” 44. 35 Susana Sosenski, “El caso Bohigas: Reacciones al secuestro infantil en el México de los años cuarenta,” Hispanic American Historical Review, 99:1, 69. 36 “Amargo rato de un robachicos,” Excélsior, June 11, 1940 37 See: “‘Robachicos’ a punto de ser linchado,” La Prensa, June 27, 1945; “Por poco era linchado un robachicos,” La Prensa, July 2, 1945. 38 Sosenski, “El caso Bohigas,” 71–72. 39 These rumors and accusations were underpinned by xenophobic views that portrayed Americans, Chinese, gypsies, and even indigenous populations as prone to deviant behavior. Sosenski, “El caso Bohigas,” 74–75. 40 “Los robos de niños en esta capital tienen proporciones de epidemia,” El Nacional, November 10, 1945. 41 “Intensa campaña para atajar la racha de robos de niños,” El Nacional, November 10, 1945. 42 Abigail A. Adams, “Gringas, Ghouls and Guatemala: the 1994 attacks on North American women accused of body organ trafficking,” Journal of Latin American Anthropology 4:11, 122. 43 “Intensa campaña para atajar la racha de robos de niños,” El Nacional, November 10, 1945; “Se ordenó a migración que impida la salida subrepticia de niños del país,” El Nacional, November 11, 1945. 44 On this, see Dina Berger, The Development of Mexico's Tourism Industry: Pyramids by Day, Martinis by Night (New York, 2006). 45 Se ordenó a migración que impida la salida subrepticia de niños del país,” El Nacional, November 11, 1945. 46 “La sociedad bajo el terror de los bandidos,” La Prensa, November 13, 1945. 47 “Se ordenó a migración que impida la salida subrepticia de niños del país,” El Nacional, November 11, 1945. 48 “Dos robachicos a punto de ser linchados ayer,” La Prensa, November 13, 1945. 49 “Dos robachicos a punto de ser linchados ayer,” La Prensa, November 13, 1945. See also: “¡A salvar a los niños,!” La Prensa, November 10, 1945. 50 “La sociedad bajo el terror de los bandidos,” La Prensa, November 13, 1945. 51 A case in point had actually occurred just days before, when a father who was believed to be a robachicos was nearly lynched by a crowd. “Por confusión un padre iba a ser linchado: Porque lloraba su hijo la gente creó que era un vulgar ‘Roba-chicos,’” El Nacional, November 11, 1945. 52 “Le robaron los ojos,” Proceso, May 17, 1986. Available at: https://www.proceso.com.mx/143624/le-robaron-los-ojos, last retrieved August 1, 2019. 53 See: Gareth Williams, The Other Side of the Popular: Neoliberalism and Subalternity in Latin America (Durham, 2002), 249–50. 54 “El documento misterioso,” Proceso, November 14, 1992. Available at: https://www.proceso.com.mx/160481/el-documento-misterioso, last retrieved April 25, 2019. 55 The magazine quoted the President of the Health Commission of Mexico City’s Legislative Assembly, who stated on May of 1990, that “in the hospitals between Tijuana and Rosario, several surgeries are carried out in connection to organ transplants.” It also referred to the statement made by a representative of Mexico City’s Attorney General Office, to the effect that “the disappearance of children over the last months in the Federal District might be linked to the trafficking of human organs taking place in the northern border of the country.” 56 José Manuel Martín Medem, Niños de repuesto: tráfico de menores y comercio de órganos, (Madrid, 1994), 54. 57 Briggs, “Adopción transnacional: robo de criaturas, familias homoparentales y neoliberalismo,” 60–61. 58 David Shrieberg, “Dead Babies,” The New Republic, 1990. 59 Nancy Scheper-Hughes, “Biopiracy and the Global Quest for Human Organs.” Report, March–April 2006. 60 Nancy Scheper-Hughes, “The Global Traffic in Human Organs,” Current Anthropology, 41:2 (April 2000): 202–03. 61 Nancy Scheper-Hughes, “Organ Stealing: Fact, Fantasy, Conspiracy, or Urban Legend?” available at: http://pascalfroissart.free.fr/3-cache/1996-scheperhughes.pdf, last retrieved October 1, 2019. 62 During the 1990s there were also rumors about the existence of a bloodsucking creature known as chupacabras. These rumors, which coincided with Mexico’s entry to NAFTA, served to articulate anxieties regarding processes of economic exploitation, extraction, and U.S. imperialistic power. See: Derby, “Vampiros del imperio o porqué el chupacabras acecha a las Américas.”. 63 Briggs, “Adopción transnacional,” 59. 64 For instance, the U.S. Information Agency in Washington stated these rumors were simply an “urban legend” spread and exploited by the Soviet disinformation apparatus to the detriment of the United States. See William Booth, Witch Hunt, The Washington Post, May 17, 1994. Available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1994/05/17/witch-hunt/d2663dda-139e-4e3d-8e81-eb48b09f02be/, last retrieved September 15, 2019. See also: “Con impunidad actúan mafias nacionales e internacionales,” Proceso, January 23, 1993. Available at: https://www.proceso.com.mx/160958/con-impunidad-actuan-mafias-nacionales-e-internacionales, last retrieved October 1, 2019. 65 Briggs, “Adopción transnacional,” 59. 66 “Eric Sottas exige a la CNDH investigar a 17 clínicas de trasplantes en Ciudad Juárez y Tijuana,” Proceso, March 19, 1994, available at: https://www.proceso.com.mx/164845/eric-sottas-exige-a-la-cndh-investigar-a-17-clinicas-de-trasplantes-en-ciudad-juarez-y-tijuana, last retrieved October 1, 2019. 67 Victor Perrera, “Behind the Kidnaping of Children for Their Organs, Los Angeles Times, May 1, 1994, available at: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-05-01-op-52449-story.html, last retrieved September 15, 2019. 68 David M. Halbfinger, “U.S. Accuses 3 of Smuggling Mexican Babies,” New York Times, May 28, 1999. 69 ¿Quienes intentaron linchar a fotógrafos y profesores?:¡Tepatlaxco señor!, March 17, 1993; La Jornada de Oriente; “Ustedes destripan niños nos gritaba la gente,” March 31 1993, La Jornada de Oriente'; see also Fuentes Díaz, “El Estado y la furia…” 7–8 70 A few years earlier, newspapers referred to a similar case that had taking place in Cholula against three men that were selling candies outside of a school. “Linchó una multitud a tres vendedores de dulces en Coapa e incineró un cadáver”, June 18th, 1985, El Sol de Puebla. 71 Quiñones, True Tales form Another Mexico, 33–34. 72 “Todo el pueblo estuvo presente, ¿por qué solo nosotros estamos presos?,” Proceso, May 16, 1998, available at: https://www.proceso.com.mx/178116/todo-el-pueblo-estuvo-presente-por-que-solo-nosotros-estamos-presos, last retrieved August 1, 2019. 73 Quiñones, True Tales form Another Mexico, 33. 74 “Por radio incitaron a sacarlos de la cárcel; desoyeron al gobernador,” March 27, 1998; La Jornada. 75 See, for instance: “Indignación por homicidio de niños,” El Sol de Morelia, June 10, 2012; Patricia Mayorga, “Pánico en Chihuahua por supuesto robo de niños para tráfico de órganos,” Proceso, October 23, 2013; “Habitantes linchan a dos encuestadores en Ajalpan, Puebla,” Animal Político, October 20, 2015. 76 Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, 144. 77 Piccato, A History of Infamy, 5. © The Author(s) 2021. 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TI - Deadly Rumors: Lynching, Hearsay, and Hierarchies of Credibility in MexicoSpecial Section: Interpretative Challenges in the Archive: Rumor, Forgery, and Denunciation in Latin America and the Caribbean
JF - Journal of Social History
DO - 10.1093/jsh/shab037
DA - 2021-09-06
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