Chapter 9 chronicles the postwar trajectory of extrajudicial killings within the Guatemalan police. It first examines state violence during the transition period and subsequent postwar police reforms, which included the creation of the new National Civilian Police (PNC) in 1997. The chapter then analyzes how the dominant wartime distributional coalition managed to survive peacebuilding reforms and uphold the undermining rules governing extrajudicial executions to eliminate “undesirables.” In an important contrast from the case of Guatemala’s customs administration, the PNC saw the direct reentry of these groups into the upper echelons of the security cabinet, highlighting a different pathway of institutional persistence.

Chapter 5 examines the wartime origins of undermining rules governing extrajudicial killing by Guatemala’s National Police (PN). It argues that the development of such procedures is rooted in the specialization of the police force and the broad discretion granted to concentrated groups of police elites amid the late 1960s period of perceived threat escalation. Specifically, with the creation of highly insulated elite investigative units like the Detective Corps [Cuerpo de Detectives], previous extralegal violence waged by right-wing death squads was institutionalized as routine state activity. The new rules were sanctioned by top military intelligence officials, who devised clear procedures for how to frame the resulting killings to the public.

Chapter 3 analyzes President Obama’s announcement on the killing of bin Laden to reveal the way discounting life is authorized and legitimized through extrajudicial, extraterritorial killing. Specifically, Obama’s celebratory narrative of the killing as a nation-healing, nation-securing achievement codes vengeance as “justice,” normalizes US imperialism, implicitly justifies “collateral damage,” and remakes the parameters of legitimate state conduct in relation to terrorism. Attending to how Obama’s announcement used image, narrative, political myth, and sound to manufacture necropolitical law’s authority, legitimacy, norms, and community, Chapter 3 argues that we are interpellated by the official announcement, not as liberal legality’s empowered citizenry but as docile spectator-subjects. Chapter 3 also shows how the announcement, in avoiding the category “law,” enables a lawyer-president-commander-in-chief to invest the category “justice” with a range of meanings that contradict liberal legality, in that they invite us, as subjects, to acquiesce in state secrecy and in necropolitical law’s extraterritorial, extrajudicial violence.