“Hasta la Madre!”: Mexican mothers against “the war on drugs”

Abstract

The Mexican government’s “war on drugs,” carried out with full support from the United States, has gained a visible media presence in the past few years, particularly because of extremely high levels of violence. This violence, however, has been largely represented in the media as a masculinized battle between cartels and military forces. Official discourses often insist that most victims are men directly involved in narco-trafficking, oversimplifying the nature of the violence (which is often created by military forces) and missing women’s presence among the victims as well in activist circles. This essay problematizes these misconceptions by examining the recent emergence of activism among Mexican women affected by the violence of the “war on drugs.” In particular, I analyze, first, how women who lost family members to this violence became active protestors of government policies and, second, the affective and political relations they forge as part of this activism. Based on fieldwork in Mexico City and the United States, I examine the trajectories and experiences of women involved in the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity (Movimiento por la Paz con Justicia y Dignidad) and The Mothers’ Network (La red de las madres). Specifically, I analyze the way that gender roles, kinship ties, and motherhood informs the experience of many activists but also the ways in which some of them make sense of their agency in their roles as sisters, daughters or indeed through their experiences of violence not expressed through an affiliation with kin.