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Despite a proclaimed strengthening of international human rights norms on an international level, the fundamental human ‘right to life’ is not always able to act as a barrier against state violence and militarization on national levels. As illustrated by Operation Michoacán, which in retrospective marked the start of the Mexican ‘war’ on drugs, the right to life has been interpreted and implemented by domestic state actors in ambiguous and often very counterproductive ways. Specifically, the argument to protect innocent citizens’ lives against drug criminality served as a major justification for the use of lethal force by the military in Mexico. While norm compliance and so-called norm ‘localisation’ processes have already received considerable scholarly attention, the possibility that state authorities evoke fundamental human rights norms for legitimizing their own violent practices (= norm instrumentalisation) has so far not formed part of the academic debate. This paper bridges this gap by conducting an in-depth discourse analysis of key state actor’s statements surrounding the start of Operation Michoacán.

The deadly protection trap: the ‘instrumentalisation’ of fundamental human right norms by state actors in the Mexican Drug War