A Country of Mass Graves: Topography of Death, Resonance and Disappearances in Contemporary Mexico

In Mexico prevails a unified version of history that in the twentieth century became known as official history, a legitimating component of a rigid and repressive political system. This narrative excluded a problematization of colonial violence, the centrality of the idea of race, and the effects of forcibly modernizing the country through several stages. In the late twentieth century, Mexico experienced the waning of its authoritarian system and witnessed a period of sui generis democratic openness. Critical revisions were made to this once centralized perspective of history, and as a result, a more nuanced narrative made manifest violence, once hidden, visible, thereby affecting the memory, the re-collection, of the recent events. However, in 2006, a National Action Party president—different from the Institutional Revolutionary Party, the hegemonic party that ruled for over seven decades—won the elections and decided to legitimize his administration by declaring a war on drugs. A relentless wave of violence began by unleashing the army in the streets attempting to fulfill police duties. Human rights violations became the norm. The reactions by the amorphous and ubiquitous cells of organized crime were devastating, and the ensuing turf wars have held the civilian population hostage for years. The 2006 declaration of war has resulted in a staggering number of murders and disappearances, estimated at 350,000 and 94,000, respectively. Thus, Mexico’s topography has been macabrely pockmarked by almost five thousand clandestine mass graves. Mexicans who learned the official historical narrative at school were discursively disconnected from the reality of state violence, but in recent years they themselves have become victims of the quotidian interactions due to organized crime’s eliminationist violence. This chapter will examine the ways in which civil society, activists and collectives engage with a vertiginous production of death and the phenomenon of disappearance. The multidimensionality of memory will be used as the analytical category to explain resistance to oblivion since it is the force behind the resignification of space and the meaningful relationship with death so far disrupted by disappearances and the perpetual crime they represent.