Esteban Salmon Perrilliat

I am a PhD candidate in anthropology at Stanford University, studying law, violence, and the state. I am specifically interested in how the partisan control of criminal justice systems in Latin America enables ordinary state violence against criminalized communities.

My dissertation, Guilty as Charged: Criminal Prosecution and State Violence in Mexico, examines how prosecutors legalize state violence to protect police and punish alleged criminals in the ongoing “Drug War.” It moves across prosecutors’ offices, courtrooms, and the urban peripheries of Mexico City to offer an ethnographic account of criminal justice from multiple and contradictory perspectives.

As part of this research, I produced a podcast about wrongful convictions and wrote a piece about the effects of video surveillance on criminal prosecution.

Graduate Mentees: Botao He, Rebeca Santa Maria Granados, Rachel Zila Hidalgo, Kallie White