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Introduction. Vulnerability and Victimhood in Mexico’s War on Drugs: A Human Rights Crisis

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Narratives of Vulnerability in Mexico's War on Drugs

Abstract

The book analyzes the political potential of the vulnerability of undocumented migrants, journalists, and mourning relatives of victims of severe crimes in cultural productions about the current human rights crisis caused by the War on Drugs in Mexico. To frame the selected fiction and non-fiction narratives of vulnerability, I characterize the War on Drugs as a “necropolitics” enforced by state and non-state actors who seek to administer the different criminal markets by expanding their power to the control of territories, information, and society. Following Judith Butler, vulnerability does not cancel out resistance. With this in mind, I attest to the political potential that vulnerability harbors for thinking about victims’ survival strategies and these three groups’ modes of organization and collective action against this necropolitical power.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The world is not worthy of words/they have been suffocated from the inside/as they suffocated you, as they tore apart your lungs …/the pain does not leave me/all that remains is a world through the silence of the righteous,/only through your silence and my silence, Juanelo.

  2. 2.

    Diego Enrique Osorno narrates in his book Contra Estados Unidos. Crónicas desamparadas (Against the U.S.A. Chronicles of neglect, 2014), the day-by-day account of the Caravan tour activities.

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Correspondence to Raúl Diego Rivera Hernández .

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Diego Rivera Hernández, R. (2020). Introduction. Vulnerability and Victimhood in Mexico’s War on Drugs: A Human Rights Crisis. In: Narratives of Vulnerability in Mexico's War on Drugs. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51144-9_1

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