An Army of the Dead: Bodies and Images from the Mexican War on Drugs (original) (raw)
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Beyond Horror: Taking Pictures of the Dead in Mexico
The practice of taking pictures of the dead is not only circumscribed to police reports or forensic studies, nor is it merely a footnote in the history of photography. Due to the country’s history and culture, this phenomenon is particularly prevailing in Mexico, and has even permeated the work of foreign artists working in the country. This paper analyzes postmortem photographs from different sources: an archive of Mexican memento mori, the work of Joel-Peter Witkin and the media coverage of the “War on Drugs,” in order to elucidate the role of this phenomenon in Mexican society.
"Pulling Back From Apocalypse" (on Mexican crime photography), Scapegoat no. 6, 2014.
In two recent works of audiovisual documentary we see Mexican newspaper crime photographers rushing to scenes of violence. 1 John Dickie's 2008 film E l D i a b l o y l a n o t a r o j a , set in a southern Mexican city, focuses on the routines through which a small local newspaper covers violent crime. Its central character is an amiable, methodical reporter-photographer, followed as he drives from one crime scene to another during bright sunny days. A l a r m a ! (2010), Vice Media's 3-part online documentary about Mexico City's longest-lasting crime news periodical, is noisier and more sensational, as its source might lead one to expect. Filmed mostly at night, it is filled with the sounds of police sirens and footage of photographers on motorcycles speeding along city streets.
In recent years, as the drug war has intensified, the Mexican military has allowed media professionals to explore its Museum of Drugs, which is used primarily to train soldiers, and to introduce the Museum's exhibits of narcocultura, or drug trafficking culture, to the larger public. Drawing on observations in the Museum, this article argues that the exhibits of narcocultura, by authorizing visualizations of drug traffickers for the military and the larger public and modeling the transformative logic of culture, both support the military's professionalization and serve as the basis for a campaign that calls for the watchfulness and support of civilians.
‘Noticias no son noticias, ¿no?’ Mexican Perspectives on Violence in the Media and the War on Drugs
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Explicit images and descriptions of violent death are typical within the Mexican media landscape, and especially within the context of the War on Drugs. Here, I share observations of my encounters with these media, particularly television narcotelenovelas and tabloids. I also center the voices of people with firsthand experience of the narcoscape in Mexico City and Ciudad Juárez, including Mrs. Luz María Dávila, the mother of two youths slain in a 2010 drug cartel- directed massacre. Across the two main sites of this study, a university seminar and a public town hall meeting, a professor and a self-politicized mother each question the role of the media in upholding investments in violence within news and entertainment. As the professor asks, ‘News are not simply news, right?’ These insights invite reflection on the public’s participation as spectator-voyeurs in the more than 105,000 Mexican deaths facilitated by cross-border trade in illicit narcotics to-date. The interactional data also suggest effective ways of encouraging critical media analysis in and beyond university settings.
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American Ethnologist, 2022
Death-the image of the skeleton-has long been the symbol of a strong Mexican state. But, like most symbols, it has many faces. Nowhere is this more evident than in Oaxaca, where tourists flock to attend joyful Day of the Dead celebrations while the cult to La Santa Muerte, a sanctified death, is growing strong. Through the ethnographic lens of this image, I approach other representations of the slain body to reassess the country's intimacy with death against a backdrop of violence. This analysis unveils different scales of intimacies (from devotion to the nation), reckoning with how these images straddle the boundaries between politics, criminality, and religion. Ultimately, I offer the concept of transintimacy, proposing that the transintimate collapses well-known anthropological dichotomies, for it is not only a feature of how people relate with these images, but it is also at the very heart of our discipline. [transintimacy, images, anthropological theory, nationalism, death]
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Raisons Politiques. Revue de théorie politique, 2019
Judith Butler's works concerning the discursive practices used for legitimizing State violence offer a useful vantage point for exploring how the Mexican government has organized public representations of death during its ongoing Drug War. Following her insight that “frames of war” sustain a differential distribution of grievability, this article explores the discourse through which the government has presented poignant cases of carnage in order to highlight the usefulness of specific categories for sustaining and normalizing the war violence. By appropriating Butler's division between “grievable” and “un-grievable” subjects, this article complicates the understanding of the frames of war by showing that in Mexico they do not hide death but instead they allow for the exhibition of lost lives through sacrificial mourning. After showing the connections between the allocation of grievability, the quest for sovereignity and the instrumentalization of dead bodies, the article concludes by pointing towards the political possibilities of melancholia.
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Media-N | The Journal of the New Media Caucus, 2021
During the 2010s, Tamaulipas, a border state in northern Mexico, became a "silenced zone" for journalism as a result of the Mexican Drug War. In 2016, during an international theatre festival in the port of Tampico, the Stultifera Navis Institutom collective intervened at the headquarters of what used to be one of the most important journals in the city. The building, located in downtown Tampico, had been abandoned for thirty-three years. For three days, we brought the newspaper "back to life," using only fake news. This essay recovers the experience of this multidisciplinary site-specific intervention by casting a critical look at its theoretical foundation in Jacques Derrida's concept of "Hauntology" and Georges Didi-Huberman's method of "Anachronism." Engaging deontological debates within media practice and the "virtuality" concept in literature, it analyzes the use of fiction as an act of discursive rebellion. Finally, "spectrality" and Aby Warburg's notion of "images in history" are problematized with a decolonial perspective, concluding with a reflection on the theatrical character of historical resurgences through an analysis of Shakespeare's Hamlet.
The Mexican Revolution (1910-20) produced modern, industrialized death for the first time in the history of the Americas and previewed the coming World War. Hundreds if not thousands of executions took place during the Revolution, and all of the major revolutionary factions executed perceived traitors and prisoners of war. Despite the massive subjective experience with death, historians of Mexico have largely avoided treating the Revolution as war, or dealing with the collective experience of violence. This paper examines what the collective memory of executions can teach us about the subjective experience of violence during the Revolution, and how, through their patterned form and mass-mediation, executions became the pre-eminent symbol of Revolutionary Mexico at home and abroad. The paper argues that images of executions became a black legend of Revolutionary Mexico that masked the jarring experience of economic modernization and social dislocation at the heart of the Mexican Revolution and the modern mass death it produced. This mythology sustained both a popular cult of the dead that questioned and undermined the ideological pretensions of post-Revolutionary political leaders, but also, paradoxically, helped to sustain essentialist tropes of Mexican backwardness and violence.
Death and Photographs: “El Día del Muerto/Day of the Dead”
Writing From Below Journal, Death and the Maiden, 2014
This essay connects creative non-fiction reflections with critical discourse on death photography. The work documents personal moments of my father’s death while presenting research into death photographs and its significance in shaping my own work in creative writing. The essay Death and Photographs: “El Día del Muerto/Day of the Dead”, responds to the practice of death photography, analysing the power and wounding effect of such images in regards to the Barthesian idea of the “punctum”. In this essay, I exemplify how particular photographs of the dead are “memento mori”, adding that if the subject (in the image) is known, the photograph has the ability to transform into the “personal punctum” (own term), triggering memories of trauma and grief for the viewer/reader. These photographs in their ability to evoke personal recollections are transformative; becoming not merely a space for remembrance, grief, and meditation, but more specifically a site which allows for “photo-elicitation”, enabling questioning, dialogue, non-fictional narrative and fictional possibilities to emerge.
Photography and the Biopolitics of Fear: Witnessing the Philippine Drug War
positions 28:4; also in The Sovereign Trickster: Death and Laughter in the Age of Duterte (2022), 2020
President Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war in the Philippines has exacted an enormous toll in human lives and suffering. This essay looks into one of the earliest and most graphic responses to this war: the work of photojournalists and the plurality of responses to their images. How does photojournalism become a kind of witnessing linked to the work of mourning? How are trauma and grieving braided together in the experience of photographers covering war? What is the role of the camera, and what are the ambivalent effects of the technical and aesthetic imaging of the dead and their survivors? How has the drug war, by instilling a biopolitics of fear, transformed the latter’s ways of seeing and being? What becomes of justice amid images of injustice? For example, how do returning spirits of the dead that appear in dreams of their families stimulate phantasms of revenge? How is revenge imagined as a form of justice that reinforces rather than detracts from the brutal logic of the drug war?