LAUSR

This article contends that in Mexico’s necropolitical governmentality (the policies designed for the administration of death), human rights discourses have become a technology used to regulate and normalize the sociopolitical consequences of criminal and state violence, while administrating mass-produced death. Based on the postcolonial notion of necropolitics (specifically, Achille Mbembe’s critique of Michel Foucault’s biopolitics), this article argues that Mexican necropolitical governmentality instrumentalizes human rights discourses through what I refer to as the “apparatus for the management of suffering.” This apparatus is comprised of four strategies based on human rights technologies intended to sustain necropower: the legalization of social demands; an institutional complex that regulates the time and space of subjects for the control of their political agency; the construction of passive and active objects; and the allocation of resources that commodify and reify justice. The article concludes that human rights discourse has become a strategy for the management of death in Mexico.