Abstract
The widespread violence in Mexico by state and nonstate actors since the government launched a military strategy against drug cartels in 2006 has generated demands for justice, including spaces of mourning and commemoration that recognize hundreds of thousands of Mexican nationals and migrants from other countries who have been killed or disappeared. Creating memorial spaces for ongoing forms of violence whose perpetrators and victims are hard to define has proven difficult from a bureaucratic, political, and aesthetic perspective. This article examines and contrasts three commemorative and transformative memorial interventions to show that in a context that lacks a clear transition and access to justice, memory activists respond to the state in a playing field that is not simply concerned with a politics of memory—who gets to decide how to remember the past—but with delineating the past from both the present and the future in the first place: a politics of time.
Highlights
La violencia desatada en México desde el inicio de la estrategia militar para combatir a los cárteles de drogas en 2006 ha generado demandas de justicia, incluyendo espacios de memoria y duelo que reconozcan a los cientos de miles de mexicanos y migrantes de otras nacionalidades que han sido asesinados o desparecidos en este contexto
The Movimiento por la Paz con Justicia y Dignidad, led by Javier Sicilia, a poet whose son was killed by members of a drug gang in Cuernavaca, Morelos, in 2011, had envisioned a space for communal mourning that could represent and mobilize society around the ongoing violence and its many victims, victims who were often portrayed by the government and the media as collateral damage, as criminals who killed each other, or as “deserving” of what happened to them
We have aimed to describe this struggle over symbolization as one of statesanctioned narratives and their active rejection in memorial sites
Summary
The first notion of a politics of time describes a challenge to the traditional sequencing of transitional justice. The attempt to address, name, and historicize ongoing forms of violence whose beginnings (and ends) and whose perpetrators and victims are often hard to delineate has proven difficult from both political and aesthetic perspectives, and has been highly contested This debate raises questions about the sequencing of specific transitional justice measures, for example with regard to evidentiary questions that remain unresolved but are often a condition for commemorative efforts (Buchenhorst 2017). Some of the activists have focused on providing the abstract site of El Memorial with a more tangible narrative by adding names, by renaming the memorial itself, and by linking current violence to a longer, yet specific trajectory of state crimes dating back to the 1950s They challenge the state’s effort to actively engage in the (increasingly global) aesthetics of countermonuments (Assmann and Conrad 2010) before questions of what is to be remembered are resolved or even debated. These efforts come with their own risks and tensions: they work with and against the state at the same time; they attempt to depict wide-ranging and often structural violence while acknowledging the necessity to mourn individual victims; and they often take place in the cultural sphere where they run the risk of depoliticizing the larger debate on narco-violence
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