Missing in Mexico: Denied victims, neglected stories
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3989/chdj.2014.018Keywords:
Enforced disappearance, dirty war, rehumanization, transitional justice, memory, war on drugsAbstract
In this article, I will describe the mostly invisibilized “fight for rehumanization” of the families of the dehumanized disappeared of the Mexican Dirty War of the 1960s and 1970s. The conflictive memory politics in Mexico and the ambivalent transitional justice process led to processes of re-dehumanization for the families of the disappeared. Within these processes of clarification of past crimes, new spaces of violence emerged. The current “war on drugs” has caused an unprecedented number of new cases of disappearances. I will argue that there are continuities between the Dirty War in the past and the Dirty War practices within the present conflict. In this complex context of violence, the disappearances take place in a battlefield with blurred boundaries: disappearances for political reasons are intermingled with cases of disappearances due to organized crime and new fights for the rehumanization of the disappeared have evolved. In this climate of terror and fear, the families of the disappeared—those of the past and those of the present—are crucial counter-memory groups that object to official discourses that deny the crimes committed by the state.
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