Violence in Uncertain Terms: Anecdote and Anonymity in the New Mexican Chronicle

Abstract

In the early years of the 21st century, the cronica has been able to cement important forums for its own region-wide dissemination, as exemplified by the relatively recent emergence of Etiqueta Negra, El Malpensante, and Gatopardo. The success of these and other ventures has contributed to what many have called the “boom” of the Spanish American chronicle. As with the 1960s boom in Latin American fiction, this term above all designates the genre’s commercial viability within an increasingly globalized literary market. If the boom of the chronicle is a twenty-first- century phenomenon deeply entwined with the economic and cultural processes of globalization, in Mexico it has also been accompanied and partially shaped by the intensification of the drug war. In the last decade, news reports coming out of Mexico have disseminated grisly tales of violence among warring drug cartels; of violence inflicted upon rural and urban populations as a result of these conflicts; and of the equally ruthless violence that the Mexican military and police forces have perpetrated against civilians in their efforts to root out the drug trade by brute force. Since 2006, the year that Felipe Calderon initiated a formal military campaign to combat the narco, Mexican journalism has transmitted the image of a state in crisis, a landscape gripped by violence, a population caught in the crossfire of an anti-narcotics war in which state and criminal elements have become difficult to distinguish. Such an image participates in one of the byproducts of the auge de la cronica, namely the facile identification of Latin America with a few marketable commonplaces, among which Julio Villanueva Chang names “corrupcion, guerra, narcotrafico y miseria” ‘corruption, war, drug trafficking, and destitution’ as the most visible ones (604). This article aims to offer an assessment of the twenty-first-century Mexican chronicle against the background of the patterns of violence emerging around the illicit narcotics industry. For the relationship between the chronicle and drug-related violence is not merely circumstantial, nor solely a question of content: the material necessities surrounding any attempts at journalistic coverage of the drug war have forced chroniclers into strategies that leave a perceptible imprint on the form of the chronicle. In the work of the Culiacan-based journalist Javier Valdez, I argue, these formal innovations allow for an epistemological intervention that transcends the mystifying tendencies of mainstream journalistic discourse on the drug war.