Making Things Stick: Surveillance Technologies and Mexico’s War on Crime

Front matter

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Making Things Stick

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments 1. Surveillance Technologies and States of Security 2. Taming the Tiger 3. Prohesion 4. Ni con goma 5. Statecraft 6. Grasping Surveillance Notes Bibliography Index

Illustrations

Chapter I 1.1 Bunker Mentality

Mexico’s Federal Police Intelligence Center (CIPF) was inaugurated on November 24, 2009, in a ceremony attended by President Felipe Calderón and Secretary of Public Security Genaro Garcia Luna. The CIPF, a subterranean structure colloquially known as El Bunker, serves as the command center for the federal government's War on Crime.” It houses Plataforma México, a network of advanced telecommunication and information technologies receiving data from over six hundred state and municipal offices; 169 federal police stations; the national registries of people, vehicles, criminal records, fingerprints, and ballistics; and video cameras located throughout the country, including those at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, dedicated to the Virgin of Guadalupe, the patron saint of Mexico. To visualize the data, El Bunker features four video walls, each measuring 65 by to feet, displaying eighty rear-screen projectors arranged in four 2 by 10 configurations. In his remarks, President Calderón claimed that the center would serve as a a. The federal government’s security campaign has carried various monikers—la Guerra contra el Narco (the War against the Narcos), la Lucha contra la Inseguridad (the Fight against Insecurity), la Guerra contra el Crimen (the War against Crime or the War on Crime), among others. Of these, the War against the Narcos and the War on Crime were the most common during the Calderón administration. I use the term “War on Crime” because it captures the fact that the government is targeting forms of illicit behavior beyond drug trafficking.

“computer brain” to keep the federal police “a step ahead of crime.” It would allow Mexico to win its War on Crime, he explained, since “wars are won with this, with technology, information, intelligence, planning, and force.”? With these words, the Mexican leader gave voice to his administration’s faith in the power of technology to defeat crime.

Situated off the southwest corner of Chapultepec Park, Mexico City’s verdant oasis, El Bunker’s proximity to the park’s other iconic buildings—Chapultepec Castle and Los Pinos—provides a commentary on the evolving relationship between governors and the governed in Mexico. Chapultepec Castle, located at the highest point of the park, is a regal structure that was commissioned by Viceroy Bernardo de Galvez in 1775 and given its current appearance by the Austrian-born Emperor Maximilian I of Mexico in 1864. Behind the castle in the south-central section of the park, the more austere Los Pinos was constructed on the order of President Venustiano Carranza in 1917 and has been the primary home for Mexico's heads of state since 1934, when President Lázaro Cárdenas moved the presidential residence out of Chapultepec Castle. El Bunker, meanwhile, with its central conference room that seats the president and his security cabinet in the event of a national emergency, is a two-story underground structure powered by an independent energy source. If Chapultepec Castle pronounced the presence of a royal authority through its privileged position above Mexico City, and if Los Pinos symbolized the progressive ideals of Mexico's postrevolutionary government to level the distance between the country’s most and least powerful sectors, El Bunker embodies the security anxieties of the contemporary government, which would secure society by placing its administrative center outside the grasp of the general population while maintaining oversight through advanced surveillance technologies.

A solid five years into the intelligence center’s existence, its value remains in doubt. Although homicides, robberies, and extortions are down in recent years, violent crime remains high throughout the country.’ And the government’s limited capacity to combat criminal wrongdoing has been underscored by dramatic events such as the massacre of forty-three students of the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers’ College of Ayotzinapa in September 2014 and the escape of Joaquin “El Chapo” (Shorty) Guzman from a maximum security prison in July 2015. These high-profile crimes, like most delinquency in Mexico, remain unsolved. As regards the center itself, it has been dogged by numerous problems, including unmanageable historical data, unreliable interagency communications, the reluctance of state agencies to share data, and manual processes of information keeping at the local level that slow data processing and accuracy.” These challenges have not diminished the government’s faith in technology. “It is a matter of time,” officials assert, when asked about the center’s impact on crime.” And additional police bunkers have been constructed in Mexico since.’ But in Mexico’s War on Crime, one wonders whether time and technology will be enough.

I.2 LIVING IN THE SURVEILLANCE SOCIETY

This is a book about surveillance technologies and their impact on the relationship between authorities and those they govern. Surveillance, defined as “any collection or processing of personal data, whether identifiable or not, for the purposes of influencing or managing those whose data have been garnered,”” has become a topic of growing popular and scholarly interest the last twenty years. This is reflected in the attention paid to it by Hollywood (in films such as The Truman Show, Gattaca, Lost Highway, Minority Report, Panic Room) and academia (in the journal Surveillance and Society, as well as a number of recent books). This growing popularity does not owe to the novelty of surveillance, since surveillance is not new. Political authorities have always kept track of people, just as parents have always looked after their children, teachers tracked their students, doctors monitored their patients, and bosses watched over their workers.

But how we watch has changed, thanks to the proliferation of computers, mobile devices, CCTV cameras, RFID chips, and other gadgets in society today. “Traditional surveillance,” the seminal surveillance scholar Gary T. Marx notes, was characterized by “close observation, especially of a suspected person.” “New surveillance,” however, is performed “through the use of technical means to extract or create personal or group data, whether from individuals or contexts.”” And on a daily basis, we come into contact with a host of technologies whose surveillant capacities are transforming the contours of social life. “Helicopter parents” wield “electronic leashes” to remain ever present in the lives of their children, classrooms are turned “inside out” or made into “MOOCs” to accommodate greater numbers of students, doctors connect to patients in “elCUs,” and “job spill” and “workweek creep” befall greater numbers of workers.

At the level of national security, networks of computers armed with powerful processors and sophisticated software scoop up data transmitted across the Internet and allow governments to track and store the content of people's digital communications. Backscatter X-ray imaging devices enable security officers at airports to effortlessly photograph travelers through their clothes. The advent of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) armed with missiles that can be guided by video operators has simplified the assassination of suspected terrorists overseas. Closed-circuit television (CCTV) and Internet-protocol television cameras allow dummy police officers to monitor public spaces. Biometric technologies such as fingerprinting and iris scans make possible the identification of billions of people across the globe. And tracking cars and people would be many times more difficult without the radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips or global positioning system (GPS) devices that can attach to them.

The ubiquity of surveillance technologies might make us yearn for earlier times, when our lives were not shackled by such objects. But we should resist such knee-jerk reactions. The sense that privacy is under assault today is not imagined. The unsolicited email or phone call speaks to the capacity of information systems to link diverse databases. The ability of online vendors such as Amazon or Netflix to predict our reading, listening, or viewing preferences evidences how those watching know more about us than we do ourselves.” And the requirement that we possess a driver’s license in order to board an airplane speaks to the propensity of technologies to not only “creep””” but “surge” ’” into applications beyond their original design. But we must weigh these concerns against considerations of how privacy and personal data are not so much invaded by surveillance technologies as willingly offered up by people as “tokens of trust””* necessary for social exchanges in today’s world. We share the details of our lives on Facebook or with online vendors so that we can move more freely and buy more cheaply than if constrained to our immediate community. Loss of privacy thus equates with greater freedom of movement and other privileges. In addition, technologies such as cell phones and encryption programs enhance privacy by providing greater anonymity than in the past.” Online purchasing is more or less secure. And encryption and anonymization programs such as GnuPG and Tor have proven to be effective enough that the US government purposefully retains encrypted or anonymous data in the hopes of cracking their codes.”

Privacy concerns connect with identity as well. The digital identities that people construct on Facebook (or have constructed for them based on the digital trails they leave online) serve as “data doubles,”””

“dividuals,” or “electronic doppelgángers.”'” At the same time, biometric technologies such as iris scans and genetic fingerprinting assign identity by anchoring it to one’s body.” In both instances, technologies threaten the self,” as people find their ability to define who they are reduced and the line between the self and other fades.” The ubiquity of surveillance technologies affects group identity too. CCTV cameras installed in housing developments disrupt forms of community as people cut the amount of time spent in open areas where community engagement traditionally occurs.” That said, biometric technologies such as those utilized in India’s population registry hold the possibility of guaranteeing personal identity and the civic rights and privileges that citizenship entails.’ Likewise, DNA testing has revolutionized the criminal justice system in the United States,’ helping identify scores of individuals wrongfully incarcerated for crimes they did not commit and thus bringing some measure of justice to individuals and communities wrongfully targeted by law enforcement.

DNA tests bring to mind the reliability of technical methods of seeing and their potential to predict crime” and realize “front end control.”” There is evidence that the innovative use of crime statistics in programs such as COMPSTAT is effective in reducing property crime.” And government officials cite the efficacy of surveillance in stopping terrorist attacks.” But it is of course impossible to know that such malicious plans would not have been thwarted by more conventional law-enforcement tactics. What is more, these technologies were unable to preempt the Boston Marathon bombers, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, even though surveillance programs “discriminate by design” against foreign nationals.” Also, with relation to ordinary street crime, organizational variables impinge on the performance of COMPSTAT’ —police departments continue to define policing as patrol work and do not undertake the institutional reorganization called for under the program. Surveillance technologies are additionally challenged by the uncertain nature of the phenomena they look to control. The spelling of names” and the features of faces”? change over time, and data can be coded in incompatible formats,” duplicate places,” or stripped of meaning in the coding process.”

The uneven performance record of surveillance technologies in providing security might give public officials pause in adopting them. But this has clearly not been the case.” At the time of writing, local, state, and federal law-enforcement agencies and local legislatures in the United States are exploring the adoption of UAVs or drones to fight crime” and combat illegal immigration.” This disconnect between actions and outcomes speaks to, on the one hand, the influence of “security cultures,” or “prevailing understandings of threats and appropriate responses to them,” on public policy in the United States.“ TV shows, movies, and news reports disproportionately focus on terrorism and glamorize the ability of sophisticated technologies and muscular men using extralegal means (James Bond, Ethan Hunt, Jack Bauer) to stop terrorism.* The September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States also intensified existing trends of “governing through crime,”* where authorities use crime prevention as a rationale for expanding techniques and technologies of social control. The disconnect between the government's increasing adoption of technologies and the lack of evidence for their efficacy also speaks to, on the other hand, the influence of the private sector over public life. Private companies produce and operate many of these technologies. Companies lobby governments to adopt their wares” and advertise so that individual citizens adopt them to make themselves safe. In the United Kingdom, private CCTV operators gradually assume discretionary power from police officers in deciding whom to place under watch.” In this sense, instead of Big Brother, it makes more sense today to speak of the increasing number of Little Brothers who exercise authority over ordinary people.”

The growing influence exercised by private actors gives the impression that fundamental processes affecting the nature of political life in our democratic societies are increasingly out of our hands. Programs of surveillance and secret prisons for terrorist suspects operate outside the US court system and beyond public oversight.” At the theoretical level, many scholars have observed that surveillance technologies are part of an alteration in the nature of power in society underscored by “social sorting.”* At national borders, programs like US VISIT sort between safe/legitimate and dangerous/illegitimate travelers.” On city streets, CCTV operators differentiate between desirables and undesirables, and intelligent transportation systems (ITS) implement “throughput rationality” to prioritize certain mobilities (motor vehicles) over others (pedestrians). In correctional facilities, good risks for rehabilitation are separated from bad risks.” Slowly, political philosophies enshrining universal rights are yielding to utilitarian technocratic practices dividing us between good and bad risks.

For many, this ongoing advance of surveillance technologies engenders a breakdown in “institutional trust” and invites resistance.” Resistance can run from the momentous to the mundane. Concerned individuals, such as Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, with knowledge of or access to secret government communications and programs have leaked information to the public. Concerned organizations, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) or Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), have brought lawsuits against the US government and communication companies for violating privacy laws and civil liberties.” Meanwhile, individuals confronting drug testing at work might either directly refuse to participate in testing, avoid it by hiding or not attending work, switch clean for tainted samples, distort the test by consuming substances to neutralize the evaluation, and so on.” Those collecting welfare benefits will engage in paid labor in violation of state regulations.” And people under the watch of CCTV monitoring take to playing for the camera” or defy the authority of watchers by displaying a middle finger.”

I.3 SURVEILLANCE TECHNOLOGIES IN AN INSECURE WORLD

But how would we react to surveillance if we found ourselves elsewhere? Globally, authorities are exercising novel means for monitoring people in the name of security. France operates a massive secret telecommunications surveillance program designed to identify security threats.” Before the United States and France, the government of Nigeria was suspected of operating a program to monitor Internet communications.” India is creating a national registry of people based on the fingerprints and iris scans of its over one billion citizens.” Thailand has begun installing video cameras into the life-sized, fiberglass decoy police officers that dot the country in order to combat street crime.” Brazil has created an electronic vehicle registration program that will be able to track motor vehicles by attaching RFID chips to them.” And the list goes on.

If there are now “eyes everywhere”” and surveillance technologies are an essential aspect of globalization, this does not mean that they always see in the same way. Local, national, and regional contexts shape their distribution and intensity. * In Rio de Janeiro, video cameras are employed by competing police forces from different levels of government and by private citizens in pursuit of security against organized crime, while in Tokyo they are embraced by civic community groups in a highly bureaucratized fashion that is indicative of a “surveillance society.” Within Latin America, countries such as Brazil, Mexico, and

Venezuela are outpacing others in their turn to surveillance technologies to ensure public security...

The consideration of surveillance technologies in the Global South is timely. In Latin America, violence and security have become dominant themes over the last decade, following the processes of democratization from military and authoritative regimes during the 1 990s. While organized crime exists in the Global North, with gang violence affecting quality of life in neglected urban areas, its scale and intensity are dramatically higher in Latin America. Levels of delinquency have surged in many countries, especially Brazil, Mexico, Venezuela, and much of Central America.” Not only have governments been unable to deal with the violence, but organized crime now comprises the sociopolitical order.” States may use extralegal (or criminal) force against unions, gangs, or political opponents, while in other instances elements of the state may use organized crime to enrich themselves. Crime syndicates may buy off state actors in order to protect their operations, while in other instances violence is used as a means of conflict resolution where more formal legal channels are not available.” These “violent multiplicities””” highlight how the transition to democracy in Latin America has not brought a strong rule of law or civilian control of military forces, basic elements of democratic rule.”

Mexico is very much part of this story. The country has undergone a number of profound changes in recent decades. It experienced a progressive opening of its political system, highlighted in 2000 by the election of a president (Vicente Fox) from a party (the PAN, or National Action Party) other than the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party), which had dominated political life since the end of the Mexican Revolution in the late 1920s. The democratization of Mexico follows two decades of economic liberalization begun by President Miguel de la Madrid in the 1980s and reinforced with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994, clear moves away from the protectionist, import-substitution economic model embraced by the PRI since the Great Depression. The political and economic transformations have been accompanied by cultural changes as well, as consumerism and globalization have reshaped national identity in the world’s second most populous Catholic country. While the consequences of these processes are subject to debate, Mexico’s entry into the twenty-first century promised a break from its more immediate past.

The massive violence of the last decade has cast a shadow over these developments, however. Much of the insecurity is of course driven by illicit drug trafficking contested by organized crime syndicates. Sharing a long terrestrial border with the United States, Mexico has been the preferred point of transit for cocaine shipments from South America since increased policing of the Caribbean Sea diminished the lucrativeness of water transits.” Since 1997, when Amado Carrillo Fuentes, leader of the Juárez cartel, died following plastic surgery intended to hide his identity, different cartels have been battling for control of the Juárez plaza (territory and supply route). This competition intensified in 2007 when Joaquin “El Chapo” (Shorty) Guzman, leader of the Sinaloa cartel, allegedly was unable to come to an agreement with a rival cartel about access to Juárez.“ The battles between the cartels have resulted in an increasing number of drug-related murders.”

However, drugs comprise just a portion of the crime problem in Mexico. While official crime statistics are unreliable, given the large amount of unreported crime (cifra negra), kidnappings, extortions, and street robberies have been on the rise.” Elevated crime also reflects the inefficacy of Mexican federal, state, and local governments to respond to delinquency. The country ranks high in international measures of impunity,” with national surveys indicating that over 93 percent of all crimes are either not reported or not investigated by authorities.” And half of the cases that are investigated do not result in further legal action.” As a result of insecurity and the state’s inability to confront it, Mexicans report low levels of confidence in their police and public leaders.”

Upon assuming office in December 2006, President Felipe Calderón launched a War on Crime to counter this insecurity. Dropping past administrations’ de facto policy of passivity and complicity toward the drug cartels, Calderón moved to disrupt their operations by reinventing public institutions and crime-fighting strategies. National legislation was passed to increase punishments against criminals and to authorize the use of the military in fighting crime,” police forces were created and reorganized to reduce corruption and increase effectiveness,” international agreements were struck with neighboring countries to coordinate anticrime strategies, * national agreements were reached with the country’s media to manage the content and tone of news reports, ` and public relations campaigns were launched to increase public confidence and participation in crime reporting.

Surveillance technologies have figured centrally in Mexico’s crime fight. The Mérida Initiative signed by President Calderón and US president George W. Bush in October 2007 provided Mexico $1 billion to | Surveillance Technologies and States of Security for the purchase of advanced military and surveillance equipment.” Fusion centers have been established at different spots in the country to centralize and synthesize the analysis of crime data... And a trio of innovative programs were set up during the Calderón sexenio (six-year term) with the intention of monitoring people and the things commonly used in the commission of crime: the National Registry of Mobile Telephone Users (RENAUT), a governmental database of cell phone lines and their subscribers, which would aid authorities in responding to kidnappings and extortion calls; the Citizen Identity Card (CEDI), a national identity card featuring biometric data such as fingerprints and iris scans, which would increase people’s security from identity theft and fraud; and the Public Registry of Vehicles (REPUVE), a centralized federal registry of every vehicle in the country, along with attached RFID tags, which would combat car thefts, kidnappings, and drug trafficking.

The embrace of surveillance technologies to fight organized crime in Mexico invites a variety of questions. Have the surveillance technologies reduced insecurity? How have the technologies affected the government's ability to combat organized crime? How do people react to them? And what does the use of surveillance technologies tell us about the types of government we can expect in the future, both in Mexico and beyond?

1.4 SURVEILLANCE TECHNOLOGIES IN MEXICO’S WAR ON CRIME: A METHODOLOGICAL OVERVIEW

The pages that follow are an effort to answer these questions using a case-study methodology—studying particular instances of a phenomenon (in this case, governments’ use of surveillance technologies against insecurity) in order to understand it in depth and in context. I examine the three surveillance programs mentioned above: the RENAUT, CEDI, and REPUVE, with particular emphasis on the last program. I had originally planned to study the REPUVE exclusively, which appealed to my interest in cars, governance, and Latin America. Inclusion of the RENAUT and CEDI was motivated by what became a central theme for the book: the difficulties that authorities encounter in trying to implement monitoring programs. Arriving in Mexico in summer 2010 to begin preliminary research on the REPUVE, I was surprised to find, given the fanfare that had accompanied the program’s launch in 2009, that few of my friends and acquaintances in Mexico City had heard of it.

Concerned that a fledgling program might fail to generate an adequate amount of data, I elected to research the other two programs as well.

To examine the programs, I relied on a triangulation of qualitative and quantitative methods and collected data over a four-year period, from 2010 to 2013. The first source of data were newspaper reports and government documents on the three programs that I collected primarily through the Google Alerts service for gathering Web content. The majority of this material came from national newspapers in Mexico, such as El Universal, Milenio, and La Jornada, and local papers from the areas where the programs were being implemented. I maintained a separate electronic file for each program. Altogether, these files comprised over three hundred thousand words. I used content analysis to identify key facts and themes.

A second source of data were observations I completed at two REPUVE registration sites in the states of Zacatecas and Sonora. During these field visits, I spent time with the staff responsible for inspecting vehicles and registering vehicular data in the REPUVE database and focused my attention on how the technologies worked in practice. These visits also enabled me to converse with staff and local program administrators to learn their opinions of the program and the successes and challenges they experienced. I also interviewed drivers who were registering their vehicles in order to understand their impressions of the REPUVE. These interviews usually lasted between five and fifteen minutes, and I interviewed thirty-five drivers in all.

I also interviewed eight national-level REPUVE administrators working at the offices of the Executive Secretariat of the National System of Public Security (SESNSP) in Mexico City. During separate visits to the SESNSP, I was able to speak with officials working in each of the REPUVE’s four directorates: the State and Federal Operations Implementation Directorate charged with supervising the program’s adoption by states (entidades federativas) and federal agencies (autoridades federales); the Relations with Obligated Subjects Directorate responsible for ensuring the compliance of private-sector businesses (sujetos obligados); the Procedures and Citizenry Directorate responsible for managing the public’s contact with the program; and the Oversight and Verification Directorate charged with technical aspects of vehicle inspections. I usually conducted these interviews in small groups, organized by directorate, which facilitated scheduling.

The REPUVE directors at the SESNSP also arranged meetings for me with representatives from two automobile companies, which I refer to as Sucaro and the Veloz Motor Company (VMC).” I met with the Sucaro representatives at the SESNSP’s Mexico City offices and with VMC staffers at the company’s car plant. I also toured the VMC facility to better understand its process for complying with the REPUVE.

In Mexico City, I also visited ten auto dealerships to collect their impressions of the REPUVE program. These interviews, like the interviews with drivers, lasted between five and fifteen minutes. In addition, I attended a security technology trade show to gather observations and discuss the three programs with retailers. I followed this with an interview with a representative from a company that had unsuccessfully competed for the contract to supply RFID tags to the REPUVE. I conducted all interviews in Spanish, with the exception of that with the RFID company representative. Two undergraduate research assistants later transcribed the audio files, and I analyzed the transcripts by hand to identify key themes.

Finally, to better understand the public’s reaction to the three programs, I created a sixty-item survey on the programs and insecurity in Mexico more generally. The survey provided respondents a description of each program culled from newspaper accounts and asked their opinions of them. Friends in Mexico helped me refine the instrument to improve readability. To gather data, I used snowball sampling with acquaintances in Mexico via Qualtrics and employed a data-collection company, Indagaciones y Soluciones Avanzadas, to distribute the survey in two sites that I could not access on my own—a working-class neighborhood in Mexico City and a rural community in Zacatecas. This purposive availability sample consisted of ninety-eight people. The data was coded into a SPSS file with the assistance of my research assistants.

These methods are not without their problems. An initial concern is the selection of Mexico as a site for studying surveillance technologies in the first place. Readers, especially Mexico scholars, might object that the country’s unique historical and political development—for instance, the Spanish conquest and the lingering inequalities between European, mestizo, and indigenous populations; the Mexican Revolution’s legacy of dislocating the country’s elite and remaking the armed forces; and b. Throughout, I use pseudonyms for the individuals and car companies I interviewed or observed. Providing research participants anonymity facilitated their participation and protected them from any possible reprisals their critical assessments of the programs or the government might risk. For individuals and companies mentioned in publicly available news reports, I used their true names.

the revolutionary state’s corporatist framework and land redistribution program—limit its value as a case from which larger trends concerning surveillance technologies can be generalized. But a similar argument could be made about nearly any country—the peculiar longevity of the US Constitution, the history of slavery and racial inequality, the political and cultural legacy of the Civil War, the experience of westward expansion, and the unique geopolitical consequences of serving as a superpower have not prevented scholars from conducting research in the United States that informs social science more generally. What is more, as noted earlier, the insecurity and organized crime currently afflicting Mexico and the political strategies that authorities use to address it are very much regional and global trends.” Thus, rather than limiting ourselves from making larger statements on the basis of case-study methodology, I find it more useful to acknowledge the specificities of the settings studied, reflecting on how they affect the generalizability of a study’s findings.

Beyond this, each of the methods utilized in this work possesses its own limitations. Media coverage is not the most reliable data source, given the political and financial concerns that inform coverage.” While I acknowledge this, my research relies on mainstream media sources that are generally viewed as reputable in Mexico, such as the newspapers El Universal, Milenio, and the current events weekly Proceso. In terms of both the observations and interviews, a main concern is the quantity of data. I focus on the REPUVE rather than the RENAUT and CEDI; my observations are limited to two field sites; and my interviews are with a select group of public administrators, workers, businesses, and users. I have little doubt that extending the interviews and observations to the RENAUT and CEDI would have yielded important insights on these programs and that conducting observations of the REPUVE in additional sites and interviews with more officials, businesses (such as insurance companies), and users would have produced distinct data. Nevertheless, the information collected does provide a robust view of the three programs, especially the challenges faced by the REPUVE. And the interviews produced common themes that, if not capturing the whole story of the REPUVE, represent key points for understanding its history.