An Army of the Dead: Bodies and Images from the Mexican War on Drugs (original) (raw)

The practice of postmortem photography can be traced back to the nineteenth century, when it was common to take pictures of the dead and keep them as mementos. Although this practice survived well into the twentieth century in some parts of the globe, it eventually vanished from the public sphere. In Mexico, however, the practice of taking pictures of the dead reentered the public sphere in a dramatic way after 2006, taking on a completely different meaning. Since then, images of corpses and the public display of dead bodies have proliferated across the country, and have also invaded the cyberspace. While major news outlets inside the country have signed a pact agreeing not to publish disturbing images and putting restrictions on their coverage of the war, the drug cartels use these images as weapons, distributing them among their rivals and among the general population as a form of terror. This article explores the possibility of finding a place in society for images like these, which are usually dismissed as morbid and sent to the pages of sensationalist newspaper pieces specialized in covering crime, known in Mexico as la nota roja. The work of photojournalists who seek to return a human face to the victims of the Drug War instead of shying away from the horror is, from this perspective, invaluable.