Introduction: Visual Culture and Violence in Contemporary Mexico

Abstract

The essays on visual culture and violence gathered in this dossier are introduced through an examination of an event that postdates them, namely the disappearance of 43 students from the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers College of Ayotzinapa in the small hours of 26 and 27 September 2014. Homing in on the visual evidence deployed at a government press conference on 7 November 2014, this introduction analyses the way in which Mexico’s Attorney General sought to lay claims both to transparency and to national shared feeling; and at the same time, to present the case of the 43 students paradoxically as an ongoing, but closed case. Viewing the questions of visual culture, violence and (contested) historical truths explored in the essays in this dossier through the lens of the Ayotzinapa case (and vice versa), is to undercut the exceptionality of any single instantiation of violence, and instead brings into focus the very violence through which the modern social order has been structured. Finally, the introduction underlines the importance of taking political emotions seriously.

Keywords:

• Visual culture
• violence
• Ayotzinapa case
• visual evidence
• political emotions

In the small hours of Saturday 27 September 2014, an act of violent misrecognition is said to have taken place in Guerrero State, Mexico. Earlier on the night of Friday 26 September, 43 students from the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers College of Ayotzinapa were abducted by members of the municipal police force in the city of Iguala.¹ With a long-standing history of social radicalism, the student teachers, or normalistas, were part of a contingent of approximately one hundred, who had arrived in Iguala with the aim of commandeering commercial buses that, they planned, would take them to Mexico City to participate in the 2 October marches to commemorate the Tlatelolco massacre of 1968. The 43 were seized by the municipal police and handed over to members of the local criminal organisation known as the Guerreros Unidos. They then disappeared, almost without a trace.² Much is unresolved about the events that took place in Iguala on that night. Questions regarding exactly which actors were involved – in particular, what role the federal police and army played – and the whereabouts of the bodies of the students remain unanswered. It is widely accepted that the municipal president, José Luis Abarca Velázquez, was centrally implicated in the mass disappearance, ordering the detention of the students for fear that they would disrupt a speech due to be given by his wife, María de los Ángeles Pineda Villa, president of the local branch of Desarrollo Integral de la Familia (DIF, [National System of] Integral Family Development). Abarca and Pineda, with strong familial links to the Guerreros Unidos, fled but were subsequently arrested, and remain incarcerated awaiting trial at the time of writing. Beyond this, however, the official version of what happened has been forcefully contested by the families of the victims and by civil society more broadly. Echoing a slogan that has its origin in the response of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo to the disappearance of their children during the Argentine military dictatorship (1976–1983), in the days and weeks after the event, unprecedented numbers of protesters took to the streets chanting: ‘vivos se los llevaron, vivos los queremos’ (they were taken alive, we want them back alive).

In ‘La noche más triste’ (The saddest night), orginally published as a report on 1 January 2015, in the monthly current affairs and cultural magazine Nexos, Esteban Illades provides a detailed break-down of the events of Iguala on that fateful night. Including maps of the different locations in which the events unfolded, the report is based on three sources, which are not differentiated in the text: details and official declarations contained in the Procuraduría General de la República’s (PGR, Attorney General’s Office) ongoing investigation; the accounts of surviving students and other witnesses present in Iguala that night; and information available in the local and national media. According to Illades, the students were delivered to the Guerreros Unidos in a place called Loma de Coyote, where they were loaded into trucks and driven to a landfill site at Cocula, between 12.30 a.m. and 1.00 a.m. By the time of arrival, some fifteen students were already dead. A form of interrogation of the survivors ensued:

Los casi 30 estudiantes que estaban vivos lloraban y gritaban. Uno, al que los Guerreros llamaron “El Flaquito”, gritó que por qué se los llevaban, si ellos no sabían nada. Con él empezaron.

“El Pato” Reyes fue el que lideró los interrogatorios. “¿A qué vienen? ¿De dónde vienen? ¿Son Rojos?”, fueron el tipo de preguntas que hizo.

The some 30 students still alive were crying and shouting. One, whom the Guerreros called ‘El Flaquito’, shouted why had they been taken, if they knew nothing? They started with him.

‘El Pato’ Reyes led the interrogation. Why have you come? Where have you come from? Are you Reds? These were the type of questions he asked.

(Illades 2015a)

The interrogation grew more violent and focused on the normalista Bernardo Flores, known as ‘el Cochiloco’:

‘¿Eres Rojo? ¿Eres Rojo? ¿ERES ROJO?’, así era el interrogatorio. Flores se quebró. Llovía, estaba hincado, rodeado por 16 Guerreros y con armas apuntándole de todas direcciones. Junto a él los cuerpos de sus compañeros, asfixiados. ‘Sí, sí soy’. ‘El Pato’ Reyes lo obligó a nombrar a sus supuestos cómplices. Flores señaló a alguien más. No se sabe a quién.

Uno por uno, los Guerreros mataron a los estudiantes. Eran cerca de las dos de la mañana.

Are you Red? Are you Red? ARE YOU RED? This was what the interrogation was like. Flores broke. It was raining, he was kneeling, surrounded by 16 Guerreros and with weapons pointing at him from all directions. Beside him, the asphyxiated bodies of his companions. ‘Yes, yes I am’. ‘El Pato’ Reyes made him name his supposed accomplices. Flores pointed to someone else. It is not known to whom.

One by one, the Guerreros killed the students. It was nearly two in the morning.

(Illades 2015a)

In the abject setting of the landfill site of Cocula, the insistence ‘¿Eres Rojo? ¿Eres Rojo? ¿ERES ROJO?’ is a reference to a rival gang of the same name, with whom the Guerreros Unidos were in violent dispute for control over the ‘plaza’, or drug-trafficking zone, of central Guerrero and Tierra Caliente. With a significant percentage of the country’s opium poppy cultivated in Guerrero, this is a lucrative and, consequently, extremely violent ‘plaza’, in which the local authorities have been extensively co-opted by organised crime. Although cast in doubt in Illades’s report, on the night of 26 and 27 September, it is alleged that the Guerreros were acting under the misapprehension that the students had been infiltrated by ‘Rojos’. Furthermore, in the turf war between narco groups, the father of the local leader of the Guerreros Unidos, Gildardo ‘El Cabo Gil’ López, had previously been murdered by the ‘Rojos’. Hence, the brutality of the reaction to the supposed admission that the students were indeed ‘Rojos’. According to the official account offered by the PGR, the Guerreros Unidos then incinerated the bodies of the 43 there in the landfill site. Allegedly fuelled by tyres, gasoline, and other materials found at the site, the normalistas’ corpses were said to have burned and burned through the night, and into the next day, the charred remains of bones and teeth then disposed of in a local river.

Beyond the qualifiers ‘allegedly’, ‘supposedly’, etc., let me reiterate. Much remains to be clarified in the case of the missing 43 normalistas of Ayotzinapa, whose disappearance has united different sectors of Mexican civil society in protest against the endemic violence, corruption, and impunity, of which this is but one, albeit extreme, example. The opacity of the circumstances surrounding the case notwithstanding – or more to the point, working precisely with that opacity – let’s return to Illades’s reconstruction of events and to the account of the summary interrogation that took place on the site of the landfill. Flores’s putative affirmative response to the question ‘Eres Rojo?’ – by one understanding at least – is correct. As noted, Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers College has a long association with left-oriented social radicalism. Its alumni include Lucio Cabañas Barrientos (1938–1974) and Genaro Vázquez Rojas (1931–1972), leaders of important guerrilla movements active in the 1960s and early 1970s.³ The school has a long and bitter history of antagonism with the state. Let’s not also forget that, on 26 September, the goal of the normalistas was to commandeer commercial buses that would transport them to the capital to take part in the marches to commemorate the events of 2 October 1968. That is, they were making their way to commemorations of the massacre of leftist student and worker protesters that took place on the eve of the Mexican Olympic Games after a summer of unrest, when an as yet unclarified number were gunned down by government-backed sharp-shooters.

So were the normalistas ‘rojos’? By one understanding, yes they were. Indeed, the semantic confusion that supposedly took place on 26 and 27 September serves as a potent reminder that the violence unleashed that night has a history, stretching back into the broader regional dynamics of the post-World-War II period:

The legacies of those brutal decades are with us still. Certainly the cold war is still palpable in Central America and the Southern Cone, the Andean nations, and even Mexico as relatives of the victims of terror continue to protest past atrocities, exhume graves, and actively press legal claims against the perpetrators – thus far, with mixed results. Nor has the violence entirely subsided: lynchings and other episodes of extrajudicial violence continue to bubble up in countries like Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, and Mexico. Such local violence frequently maps onto the fault lines and frustrations of recent cold war pasts, and in some cases intersects with newer manifestations of bandidaje, gang violence, and drugs and arms smuggling.

(Joseph 2010: 409)

That the normalistas were planning to attend the 2 October 1968 commemorations in the capital, that they were allegedly confused with, or identified as, ‘rojos’/ ‘Rojos’, and almost certainly slaughtered en route, is precisely an example of a ‘cold war fault line’. As Carlos Illades and Teresa Santiago (2014: 63–64) demonstrate in Estado de Guerra: De la guerra sucia a la narcoguerra (State of War: From the Dirty War to the Drugs War), the division between the legitimate and illegitimate use of state violence, of which 2 October 1968 was emblematic but not exceptional, was eroded even further with Richard Nixon’s declaration of the ‘war on drugs’ on 17 June 1970. At this point, violence against guerrilla movements in states such as Guerrero intensified, for these could be eliminated with the impunity of ‘dirty war’ tactics under the umbrella of a broader hemispheric imperative. The Ayotzinapa case – involving the police, the army, politicians and drugs cartels working in collusion – has precisely exposed the blurred line between state violence and narco violence. Indeed, alongside the chant ‘Vivos se los llevaron, vivos los queremos’ – that itself runs along a hemispheric cold war fault line – another prominent rallying cry has been: ‘Fue el estado’ (It was the state).

At the same time, of course, the normalistas were not ‘Rojos’. They were not associated with narco trafficking; they were not members of the organised crime gang of the same name. What is at stake, though, when left-oriented students are, according to the official version of events, rhetorically and affectively confused with members of drugs cartels? I have opened this introduction with this brutal act of alleged misrecognition that took place on the night of 26 September 2014 – a date that, like 2 October 1968, is destined to go down in national history as a landmark event – in order to dialogue with what one of the contributors to this dossier, Viviana MacManus, terms the ‘limitations and political possibilities of visual culture’ in mediating the violence and impunity of the present moment. To be sure, the articles gathered together here examine visual artefacts and historical phenomena that predate the disappearance of the 43 normalistas: women’s participation in guerrilla movements during the so-called ‘dirty war’ (1960s–1980s), the assassination of presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio in 1994, and the bicentennial celebrations and drugs-related violence of 2010. However, I have chosen to explore a specific moment in the visual politics of the Ayotzinapa case – namely, the first government press conference on 7 November 2014 – in relation to the case studies gathered in this dossier for two reasons. First, I do so because in different ways the essays engage with a tension that Dominika Gasiorowski elucidates in her contribution, between the ‘centre’ and the ‘margins’. Less remarked upon, we are often so concerned in critical practice with the marginal – that which stands in opposition to, but is defined by the ‘centre’, or official culture – that we take the centre, the official, as a given. And yet, what the press conference evinces is that, as a category, the official is equally constructed and contingent. What is more, the press conference, like the state-commissioned artwork that Tania Islas Weinstein analyses, demonstrates that the construction of an official version, or of an official culture, is fraught with problems, and prone to failure. Second, I start with the Ayotzinapa case in order to question its exceptionality and that of the different instances of violence under scrutiny in this dossier. The assassination of Colosio may have represented a moment of national trauma, as Miriam Haddu affirms in her contribution here; but to view this act of fratricidal political violence through Ayotzinapa, and vice versa, is to bring into focus the very violence through which the modern social order has been structured. To invoke Joseph again, it is precisely to recognise the structural fault lines along which violence has run historically (2010: 409). Or, in the words of Gareth Williams (2011: 11), ‘modernity in Mexico has been predicated on the permanent application of state power in the construction of social order, rather than on the self-limitation of state power via a legal system guaranteeing individual rights and limiting public power’. Before introducing the articles themselves, then, let’s continue with an exploration of the politics of vision in the initial, albeit tardy, response of the federal government to the disappearance and presumed massacre of the normalistas, focussing in particular on the status and significance of the mobilisation of visual evidence.

#Yamecansé: mobilising visual evidence

On 7 November 2014, a worn-looking Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam appeared before the cameras in a press conference at which he set out what the government of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) claimed it knew about the fate of the missing students. Confessions extracted from three captured members of the Guerreros Unidos – Patricio Reyes Landa, Jhonatan Osorio Gómez and Agustín García Reyes – indicated that the students had indeed been taken to the landfill at Cocula, where they were executed, their bodies cremated, their remains bundled into black plastic refuse bags to be disposed of in the nearby San Juan river. Fielding questions from a range of journalists – largely national, but a handful international⁴ – the press conference lasted sixty minutes, at the end of which the Attorney General famously turned to his assistant and declared ‘ya me cansé’. Literally meaning ‘I’m tired’ [and do not want to take further questions], ‘cansarse’ also means to be fed up or to have had enough. In the age of social media, ‘ya me cansé’ immediately acquired a hashtag and went viral, condensing the political emotions of outrage and indignation in the face of the pervasive corruption and impunity that have for so long characterised the Mexican political system and the behaviour of its ruling class.

Indeed, the hashtag as an active force in Mexican politics is not to be underestimated, with an important precedent in #YoSoy132, a student movement that materialised on 11 May 2012, in response to presidential candidate Enrique Peña Nieto’s appearance at the Universidad Iberoamericana. ⁵ Like #YoSoy132, #yamecansé has had a galvanising effect, serving to channel the widespread outrage provoked by the Ayotzinapa case, uniting people from across the political and social spectrum to mobilise to demand the return of the missing students. It has also attracted the attention of the international community, with parallel protests to those in Mexico, held in key cities across the world. The Ayotzinapa case has significantly – and problematically – been hailed by a range of commentators as a ‘parteaguas’ or ‘punto de quiebre’: watershed or tipping point. It is, however, far from clear whether it might bring about political and social changes. If recent history is to be heeded – notably that other ‘parteaguas’, 2 October 1968 – it is doubtful whether indeed it will engender any at all.⁶

What Ayotzinapa has done, though, is to generate a state of shared political feeling that, so prominent journalist and novelist Juan Villoro claims, is unprecedented in national history:

Esos 43 muchachos tenían familias perfectamente reconocibles y no fueron estadísticas anónimas. Fue un caso muy concreto en un momento en que se tocó fondo y en donde se aniquiló a personas que deberían haber sido protegidas, respaldadas y apoyadas por el Estado. Creo que la respuesta inicial en México ha sido esta vez diferente y nos hacía falta para articular el descontento y generar una empatía muy grande, creando –por así decirlo– una “República Emocional”. No sabemos muy bien hacia dónde va a conducir esto, pero al nivel del sentimiento hay una unanimidad de la respuesta y ha conmovido a la comunidad internacional.

Those 43 young men had perfectly identifiable families and were not anonymous statistics. It was a very concrete case at a moment in which a depth was plumbed and in which people who should have been protected, backed and supported by the state were annihilated. I believe that the initial reaction in Mexico has been different this time and we needed it to articulate our discontent and to generate great empathy, creating – so to speak – an ‘Emotional Republic’. We don’t know exactly where this is going to lead, but at the level of feeling there is unanimity in the response and it has moved the international community (Villoro 2014).

We will come back to the notion of the ‘Emotional Republic’ and the invocation of politics as a structure of feeling, first in the analysis of elements of the press conference, and again at the end of this introduction. For now let’s note that Murillo Karam’s infamous hashtag statement ‘#yamecansé’ has received ample commentary in the media and across social networks. What is more, the case set out by the Attorney General has attracted the attention of members of the scientific community, who have pointed out that the disposal of the bodies in the way claimed in the suspects’ confessions flies in the face of physics.⁷ However, less remarked upon is the way in which the Attorney General and his team deployed visual evidence in his presentation in an attempt to lay claims both to transparency and to national common feeling, and, at the same time, to present the case of the 43 students paradoxically as an ongoing, but closed case.

Some two minutes into the press conference, which was streamed live on YouTube, where it remains for consultation (see References), the frontal camera that has focused on Murillo Karam cuts to his right, to a screen on which a series of mug shots of the three apprehended suspects are revealed, culminating in a triptych in which they appear together. Superimposed on an official background screen, emblazoned with the crest of the ‘Gobierno de la República’ in the upper right-hand corner, the names of the suspects – identified by Murillo Karam as members of the Guerreros Unidos – appear under their mug shots followed by their aliases. Of the three, Patricio Reyes Landa, placed at the top, performs suspicion and guilt. His face bearing the signs of a beating, with his left eye half open, he looks out of the screen with an air of unalloyed malevolence.

After the display of the suspects’ mug shots, the Attorney General then proceeds to explain the need for transparency in a language of shared feeling with the normalistas’ families and society at large:

El Gobierno de la República comparte con las familias y la sociedad en general, la necesidad de dar transparencia a esta investigación y por ese motivo hemos considerado la importancia de hacer del conocimiento público, paso a paso, los avances dados en primer término a las familias que sufren las consecuencias de la desaparición, pero también a una sociedad agraviada por un acto delincuencial que no se puede permitir y que no se debe repetir.

The Government shares with the families and society in general the need to provide this investigation with transparency and for this reason we have considered the importance of making public knowledge, step by step, the advances made in the first place to the families who are suffering the consequences of the disappearance, but also to a society offended by a criminal act that cannot be allowed and should not be allowed to be repeated.

The language of emotion deployed by Karam Murillo cannot but remind us of Villoro’s ‘República Emocional’, and the possibility of community that is both political and emotional. As Islas Weinstein demonstrates in her contribution to this dossier, the bicentennial commemorations of 2010 underlined nothing if not that the 1810 movement for Independence and the 1910 revolution failed to create a single fraternal community. As for the bicentennial commemorations themselves, these were widely perceived as an abject failure. However, the invocation of the emotions aroused by political events raises questions concerning: who has the right to invoke shared feeling, and by extension, who might belong to Villoro’s ‘República emocional’, and indeed what might such a ‘República’ mean for politics? ⁸ Finally, as Villoro also signals, importantly, it demands that we consider where such a phenomenon might lead.

While striking a note of caution – the investigation, he reminds his audience, is ongoing – the Attorney General claims that the images that are displayed during the press conference are deployed precisely in the interests of transparency, justice and the truth:

En la búsqueda de la verdad, mi obligación es seguirme a lo que consta en las averiguaciones y es por eso que los he convocado a esta conferencia de prensa. Las imágenes y videos que se presentan son con el propósito de que la ciudadanía que ha sido víctima de estas personas, pueda reconocerlos y denunciarlos. Quiero dejar muy claro que lo que hoy presentamos son avances de la investigación, no son, ni pretenden ser las conclusiones de la misma, la investigación continúa su curso.

In the quest for truth, my duty is to follow what is documented in the investigation and for this reason I have invited you to this press conference. The images and videos are presented with the aim that those citizens who have been victims of these people, can identify them and report them. I want it to be clear that what we are presenting today are advances in the investigation, they are not, nor do they claim to be conclusions, the investigation is on-going.

The still images that follow include: maps that trace the reconstruction of the events that led to the students’ disappearance; crime-scene photographs featuring the forensic team working the case; and, after some technical difficulties (which appear to irritate the Attorney General, who drums his fingers against the podium), videos of the suspects, subtitled to compensate for the poor sound quality, aerial sequences of the site at Cocula to demonstrate how remote it is (and therefore why no one noticed the fire that burnt for twelve hours); scenes that show the forensic team at work, sorting through the charred debris at the site. Of particular note are the testimonies provided by the apprehended members of the Guerreros Unidos themselves. In the videos, one of the Guerreros Unidos, identified as García Reyes – during what a subtitle denominates is a ‘psychological interview’– narrates his participation in the events. This is carried out in some kind of police station, and shown (also signalled by a subtitle) ‘with his consent’. Another sequence filmed ‘in the presence of the suspects’ defence lawyers’ takes place at the scene of the crime, in the company of police and forensic investigators, and shows the perpetrators re-enacting their actions on the night of 26 and 27 September, including, for example, how they unloaded the bodies of the students who had already died, or reached the scene unconscious. These sequences are edited together in such a way that the evidence provided during the ‘psychological interview’ is corroborated by that which follows during the re-enactments.

Before opening the floor to the assembled journalists, Murillo Karam rounds off his prepared speech with a referential gesture to the act of displaying the images in the context of the press conference:

Es triste presentar estas imágenes. Es una obligación ante la sociedad verdaderamente, verdaderamente ofendida, pero el hecho de presentarlas implica una llamada a encontrar las fórmulas para como dije antes, esto que no se debió dar, no se puede repetir.

It is sad to show these images. It is a duty in the face of a society that is truly, truly offended, but the fact of showing them implies a call to find the ways, as I said earlier, that what should not have happened, cannot be repeated.

As has been widely noted, the national PRI government was slow to react to the events of Iguala – leaving the investigation in the hands of incompetent and implicated state authorities. Taking place thirty-three days after the Guerrero State Attorney’s Office handed the case over to the PGR, the press conference therefore serves to demonstrate to an affronted and indignant citizenry – ‘verdaderamente, verdaderamente ofendida’ – that a thorough investigation is now being carried out. ⁹ Moreover, by concluding a speech that is peppered with references to the need for transparency and clarity with a direct allusion to the mobilisation of image-based evidence, Murillo Karam draws an implicit link between transparency, on the one hand, and that visual evidence on the other. At the same time, invoking the affect that attaches to the display of the images – ‘Es triste presentar estas imágenes’ – followed by the admonition that what has happened cannot be allowed to be repeated, he assigns to them a causal force. What these images – clearly, transparently – point to is the need for ‘formulas’ to prevent the repetition of such acts of criminal violence.

However, this is an investigation that starts and ends with the landfill site at Cocula. Despite the fact that the Attorney General declares that experts at the University of Innsbruck cannot say how long it will take them – if indeed, given their degraded state, it is possible to identify the human remains now in their possession – the aim of the press conference is to bury any form of investigation that, rather than ending in the landfill site at Cocula, might look further afield.

Looking further afield, before Ayotzinapa

In a further press conference that took place on 27 January 2015, Murillo Karam reiterated the PGR’s version of events, controversially claiming that this was the ‘verdad histórica’, or ‘historical truth’: ‘Los 43 normalistas de Ayotzinapa desaparecidos […] fueron “privados de la libertad, privados de la vida, incinerados y arrojados al río. En ese orden. Ésta es la verdad histórica de los hechos, que debe tener validez jurídica ante los órganos jurisdiccionales”’ (The 43 disappeared normalistas from Ayotzinapa […] were deprived of their liberty, deprived of their lives, incinerated and thrown in the river. In that order. This is the historical truth that should be legally recognised by jurisdictional organs) (Castillo García 2015). The four articles in this dossier, as noted, focus on the relationship between items of visual culture and historical phenomena that precede the events of 26 and 27 September 2014. They deal with questions of visual culture, violence, and (contested) historical truths, and how we might approach these questions. Furthermore, the phenomena they explore, when viewed together, belie the exceptionality of the Ayotzinapa case, pointing instead to violence as a structural issue in modern Mexico.

In ‘Ghosts of Another Era’, Viviana MacManus takes us back to the turbulent period of the ‘dirty war’, which occurred against the backdrop of the broader dynamic of regional cold war politics. Significantly, the Mexican experience of ‘Latin America’s cold war’ (Brands 2010) has, in relative terms, been overshadowed by other more visible instances of state-sponsored terrorism in terms of processes of transitional justice, historiographical attention, and commemorative practices. While, until recently, it has not loomed large in regional cold war scholarship, Mexico was not left unscathed by the dynamics of the conflict. This includes high-profile events such as 2 October 1968, or the ‘Jueves de Corpus Massacre’ (10 June 1971) in the capital, as well as the covert war on ‘subversion’ in the countryside, with Guerrero one of the most severely affected states. As Joseph (2008: 8) observes, since Mexico is one of Latin America’s two ‘middle powers’ (the other being Brazil), and the ‘southern neighbor of the hemisphere’s Cold War hegemon’, the country deserves our attention because it ‘not only points up oft-ignored, highly ambivalent relationships between Cold War allies but also showcases pivotal cultural and social issues’. The peculiarity of the Mexican case must be understood in the light of the phenomenon of ‘revolutionary nationalism’ that emerged out of the 1910 civil war, which masqueraded as democratic but, as all contributions to this dossier recognise, in ‘the second half of the twentieth century, traditional routines of power gave way to “authoritarian normality”’ (Williams 2011: 28).

Although beyond the scope of MacManus’s essay, we might legitimately ask what factors lead some ‘dirty wars’ to achieve heightened visibility within narratives of the hemispheric experience of cold war. What role might visual culture – and particularly indexical practices such as documentary film, photography – have played, and continue to play, in the different conditions of visibility that say, Argentina and Chile, enjoy in the regional – not to mention the global – cold war imaginary, in contrast to Mexico? Visibility and the fraught business of visualising the traumas of the recent past, however, stand at the centre of MacManus’s essay, which explores the documentary Flor en otomí (Luisa Riley 2012), and in particular the erasure of women’s participation in, and experience of, the guerrilla movements that emerged in the 1960s. Taking its cue from Gordon Avery’s Ghostly Matters (1997), the essay focuses on ‘the seething presence of the un-representable’, in its exploration of the life and death of Dení Prieto Stock, a female activist in the Mexican urban guerrilla group, the Frente de Liberación Nacional (FLN; National Liberation Forces). MacManus explores the way in which Flor de otomí eschews an approach to its subject that would assert ‘una verdad histórica’. Instead, in its attempt to give Prieto Stock – and women activists more generally – a ‘hospitable memory’ in the history of a conflict that has itself been relegated to the historical margins, the documentary combines different kinds of archival materials, in ways that invite its viewers to become aware of the medium’s limitations to represent its subject. Indeed, MacManus argues, its representational power lies precisely in its foregrounding of the limitations of historical representation.

Although her focus is a feature film, Colosio: el asesinato (Carlos Bolado 2012), Miriam Haddu’s ‘Political Violence and Fiction in Mexican Film’ also explores the potential of moving images to engage with a past trauma that haunts the present. In this case, the trauma is that associated with the assassination, in 1994, of PRI presidential candidate Colosio. This event caused shock waves and, albeit in the absence of concrete proof that the party of state was centrally implicated in the crime, confirmed for many the deep-seated corruption that pervaded the PRI, reaching to its highest echelons. Like Flor de otomí, Colosio: el asesinato incorporates a range of archival materials, in addition to its fictional presentation of an investigation of the candidate’s assassination. Most salient amongst these is the widely broadcast footage of the shooting of Colosio in Lomas Taurinas, Tijuana: a scene to which the film takes its viewers back over and over again. Drawing on the generic conventions underpinning the political thriller, Haddu probes the way in which film as a medium might facilitate the process of working through a ‘seething presence’, namely the ghost of Colosio.

If Haddu’s essay explores a moment of national tragedy, the subject of Tania Islas Weinstein’s contribution might be classified as an instantiation of ‘tragicomedia mexicana’, to invoke José Agustín’s (1990, 1992, 1998) dissection of public life between 1940 and 1994. ‘A eulogy for the Coloso’ examines the ‘social biography’ (Kopytoff 1986) of a failed sculpture commissioned for the 2010 bi-centenary commemorations that took place during the controversial sexenio of Felipe Calderón Hinojosa (PAN, 2006–2012). The story of Juan Carlos Canfield’s Coloso has all the ingredients of farce, were it not for the backdrop of the tragic consequences of Calderón’s ‘war on drugs’, which the sculpture uncannily invoked. Originally commissioned to be permanently displayed in the newly constructed Bicentennial Park, after it had been ceremonially paraded along the Paseo de la Reforma, Coloso was so large that it had to be dismembered. Designed to symbolise the body politic, it ended up doing so in a way that exceeded the intentions of both its sculptor and the state that had commissioned it. Grotesquely, the sculpture could not but evoke the mutilated bodies and body parts that, by the time of the bi-centennial celebrations, littered the Mexican media-scape, a result of the ‘war on drugs’.

As Islas Weinstein recounts, Coloso ultimately disappeared en route to a re-staging in the northern state of Nayarit. Again, the irony could not be greater, in a country in which the issue of forced disappearance has acquired prominence, with resonances that stretch forward to the present, post-Ayotzinapa moment. The disappearance of the 43 prompted searches for the normalistas’ bodies in the countryside of Guerrero, which, in turn, led to the discovery of clandestine graves containing the remains of unreported victims of disappearance. Speaking of the discovery of these graves and the case of Ayotzinapa, prominent Catholic priest and human rights activist Alejandro Solalinde Guerra underlined violence as a structural issue that runs through this dossier. Tracing a genealogy that runs from 2 October 1968 and Jueves de Corpus Christi through the Aguas Blancas, Acteal and Tlataya massacres, Solalinde Guerra declared: ‘México es una tumba clandestina, porque todo lo enturbian y no hay claridez en la justicia mexicana’ (Mexico is a clandestine grave, because everything becomes muddy and there is no clarity in Mexican justice) (Manzo 2014).¹⁰

At the same time, it is important to underscore that Coloso – ‘an eight-ton, sixty-six-foot-tall figure of a man with a prominent moustache and sideburns’, with ‘a broken sword in his left hand’ – was to stand in for the body politic. That is to say, that national body was an emphatically male body. In ‘Bodies that do not matter’, Dominika Gasiorowski returns us to the question of gender, and in particular to the representation of women sex workers/prostitutes in Maya Goded’s 2006 collection Plaza de Soledad. Although Gasiorowski’s essay is less concerned with specific historical events or phenomena than other contributions, it nevertheless raises pertinent issues related to visibility and visualisation, and to the agency of photographic images and visual culture broadly construed. It is located within a turn in visual studies, away from a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ or ‘negative aesthetics’ that for so long dominated approaches to photography (and indeed to other cultural texts),¹¹ to one that is concerned to understand ‘photography as a tool that intervenes in social relationships’, where as a medium it has transformative potential. In this way, Gasiorowski’s essay makes explicit that which is implicit in the other contributions. The visual – ‘a term encompassing not only visual objects themselves but also the tangled political, social, economic, cognitive, and emotional processes surrounding them’ (Adelman 2014: 3) – enables things to happen. It does not construct clear, transparent ‘historical truths’. It does, however, ‘construct fields of social action in ways that would not have occurred if [it] did not exist’ (Edwards 2001: 17). In the essays presented in this dossier, far from inert objects, the items of visual culture explored actively intervene in their historical and cultural contexts in ways that move and unsettle, precisely drawing attention to the impossibility of ‘historical truth’.

Postscript: writing about now

Writing about Ayotzinapa acutely emblematises the difficulties involved in what Pablo Piccato (2013: 91) terms ‘the history of the pasado inmediato and uncovering some painful aspects of that past’. The immediate past of Piccato’s analysis is broadly post-1940 Mexican history, with a special emphasis on Mexico’s experience of ‘dirty war’. That is to say, it focuses on the quest by historians to explore the ‘abuses of an authoritarian regime that tried to resist opposition with extralegal means’. As illustrated by the act of misrecognition with which I opened – whereby the Guerreros Unidos ‘saw red(s)’ – we would do well to attend to the longer historical trajectory of the case of the 43 normalistas. Falling a long way outside the pasado inmediato with which historians conventionally deal, Ayotzinapa has already started to generate academic debate and detailed comment, especially in light of the first anniversary. (See, for example, “Ayotzinapa September 26, 2014” (2015); “Una historia de corrupción, barbarie e impunidad” (2015); Aguayo (2015); González Rodríguez (2015); Illades (2015b). An emphatically unclosed case, new evidence continues to come to light. Just before writing this postscript, on Sunday 6 September 2015, the Grupo Interdisciplinario de Expertos Independientes (GIEI, Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts) from the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights published its ‘Informe Ayotzinapa’. Running to over 550 pages, the report highlights the authorities’ incompetence and lack of willingness to investigate and bring to justice those responsible for the disappearance of the 43 normalistas. Significantly, it calls into question the ‘historical truth’ that the normalistas’ bodies were incinerated in the landfill site at Cocula.

In light of this report, let’s return to the notion of the ‘República Emocional’. What Villoro is describing is a form of affective contagion, or transmission of affect (Brennan 2004), that has coursed through the national body politic and international community. These are not separate entities: while human rights abuses take place in local settings, testimonial appeals and protest are ‘increasingly being addressed to a global imagined community’ (Kurasawa 2007: 30; see also Fraser 2005). However, Villoro’s invocation of the resonant image of an ‘emotional republic’ is then followed by a qualifying statement: ‘Esta primera respuesta que veo en clave emocional más que en clave política era necesario para que la comunidad internacional también despertara’ (This initial response, which I see more in an emotional than political key, was necessary to rouse the international community). However, as Martha Nussbaum states in the opening lines of Political Emotions (2013, 1):

All societies are full of emotions. […] The story of any day or week in the life of even a relatively stable democracy would include a host of emotions – anger, fear, sympathy, disgust, envy, guilt, grief, many forms of love.

Public life in the ‘authoritarian normality’ (Williams 2011: 12) of modern Mexico is no exception, where violence is precisely the rule and not the exception. Indeed, as the essays in this dossier indirectly attest, in the context of a ‘dirty war’ that continues to haunt the present, of an increasingly corrupt and violent political culture, and the related upsurge in narco-related violence, the story of contemporary public life is arguably hyper-suffused with emotions. Meanwhile, on 8 September 2015, the Instituto de Mercadotecnia y Opinión (IMO, Institute of Marketing and Opinion) reported that 80 percent of Mexicans ‘feel proud or very proud’ to belong to the country; 83.9 percentage do not feel proud about the way democracy works there (Langer 2015). Rather than divorce politics and emotions as if they were separate spheres, in an atmosphere in which outrage and indignation – and their co-relative fear – swirl around alongside pride, there is an urgent need to develop academic and public discourses focussed on political emotions.

Notes on contributors

Andrea Noble is Professor of Latin American Studies in the University of Durham (UK), with research interests in the field of visual culture studies and Mexican cultural history. Amongst her publications are Mexican National Cinema (Routledge 2005) and Photography and Memory in Mexico: Icons of Revolution (Manchester University Press, 2010). There are two strands to her current research and writing projects. The first is called 'Tears in Mexico: A cultural History of Emotions and Motivations', which explores public acts of weeping in Mexico from the Conquest through to the contemporary moment, funded by a Marie Curie Outgoing International Fellowship (2013-2016). (www.andreanoble.org) The second is a collaborative project, with Professor Thy Phu (Western University, Canada), ‘Cold War Camera’, one of the outcomes of an international ‘network grant’ funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (2012-2014). (www.inthedarkroom.org/; http://translatingcultures.org.uk/awards/research-networking-awards/photography-and-the-transnational-politics-of-affect/)

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Giovanni Algarra, Kevin Coleman, Thy Phu, and especially David Wood for helpful conversations and suggestions. This work was supported by a Marie Curie International Outgoing Fellowship [302181 - FP7-PEOPLE-2011-IOF – MEXTEARS].

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Style conventions dictate that whole numbers from zero through one hundred be spelt out. I am using the numeral 43 to signal its highly charged status in contemporary Mexico and, indeed, beyond.

2. The identity of only one of the students – Alexander Mora Venancio – has been confirmed by forensic specialists from the University of Innsbruck (Austria) from the remains of bones found at the crime scene. At the time of writing, on 16 September, the PGR announced that there are signs (indicios) that establish the identity of a second – Jhosivani Gerrero de la Cruz – had been confirmed by the same forensic team. The families of the victim have refused to accept the PGR’s report.

3. See Padilla (2014); Castellanos (2007).

4. Noteworthy were the different styles of address to the Attorney General adopted by national versus international journalists, where the former proceeded with a degree of deference that stood out by contrast to the more direct approach taken by the international journalists. On one level, this is a question of context-bound etiquette, but it also speaks volumes about political and media cultures in Mexico. As Islas Weinstein notes in her contribution to this dossier, in 2010 Mexico had already earned the distinction of being one of the most dangerous countries in the world in which to practice journalism. Freedom House’s ‘Informe Libertad de Prensa. 2015’ confirms that it continues to occupy this position.

5. For an overview of #YoSoy132, see https://nacla.org/article/yosoy132; and Fuentes (2015), for a fascinating discussion of the power of the yamecansé hashtag.

6. The events that took place in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas on 2 October 1968 occupy an anomalous position in the regional context of cold war-inflected ‘dirty wars’. Although attempts to bring the perpetrators to justice have stalled, the massacre has been consecrated within official history and memory through the Memorial de 68, which was inaugurated on 22 October 1997. For a discussion, see Vázquez Mantecón (2012a, 2012b). In this sense, Mexico stands in contrast with other sites of state-sponsored terror in the region, such as Argentina, where there is a well-established memorial culture and in which high-level perpetrators have been brought to justice.

7. Jorge Montemayor, from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México’s Institute of Physics, has claimed that in order to ‘cremate 43 corpses, 33 tons of tree trunks of four inches in diameter are needed, that is to say, two trailer loads of wood and 53 kilograms of gas for each body’ (Rosagel 2014). At the time of writing, one theory is that the students’ bodies were cremated at the army base in Iguala, where evidence suggests their cell phones were last registered. In a second press conference that took place on 27 January 2015, Murillo Karam reaffirmed, bluntly: ‘Está clarísimo: los normalistas fueron calcinados’ (It is very clear: the normalistas were burned to a crisp). Murillo Karam resigned from the post of Attorney General on 27 February to move to a new role as Minister of Agricultural, Territorial and Urban Development.

8. In an act of breath-taking political and emotional insensitivity, President Enrique Peña Nieto was also to claim that ‘¡Todos somos Ayotzinapa!’ (We are all Ayotzinapa) See López y Rivas (2014).

9. By comparison, it was interesting to note the official response to the shooting of the eleven Charlie Hebdo cartoonists on 7 January 2015 in Paris. Within hours of the attack, President François Hollande went to the offices of the satirical magazine. This is not to suggest that the events are analogous; it is, however, to signal a more appropriate response by a head of state to an act of violence in the national public sphere. In Mexico, it has been suggested that the national government was slow to respond because the slaughter took place in Guerrero, which was governed by the opposition Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD or Party of the Democratic Revolution); that when it did react, it was to a significant degree due to international pressure (Díaz 2015: 16). At the same time, in contrast to the exceptional Paris shootings, the slow response of the Mexican government suggests once again that, far from being exceptional – far from a parteaguas/watershed – the massacre was part of the deep-rooted, structural violence that permeates the country.

10. For a report see “Fosas clandestinas: El horror que dejó el narcotráfico en México” (2014). The massacres mentioned by Solalinde Guerra were all state-sponsored acts designed to attack and disarticulate social movements: Aguas Blancas: massacre of seventeen campesinos by the police on 28 June 1995 in Guerrero; Acteal: massacre of forty-five indigenous on 22 December 1997 in highland Chiapas; Tlatlaya: massacre of twenty-two people on 30 June 2014 in the State of Mexico.

11. See Felski (2011) for a brilliant discussion of how the hermeneutics of suspicion has worked in the analysis of literary texts.