Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies

Esteban Salmón is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Watson School for International and Public Affairs. He is a political and legal anthropologist whose research examines the coexistence of human rights and state violence. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork with prosecutors and criminalized populations in Mexico City, his work explores how a profound human rights reform in Mexico has intersected with a long-term insecurity crisis characterized by the militarization of law enforcement. In this context, criminal prosecutors often rely on frame-ups to secure convictions, manipulating cases in ways that make human rights protections appear compatible with extrajudicial violence. This research has been supported by the Fulbright Commission, the National Science Foundation, and the Social Sciences Research Council. His previous research was an ethnography about how the United States' border policies shaped a transnational community in Central Mexico. Esteban holds a PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University.