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Dissident Mourners: Victims’ Political Participation in Human Rights Activism

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Narratives of Vulnerability in Mexico's War on Drugs

Abstract

Discussing Erinn Gilson’s ethics of vulnerability as an attitude of openness and response to others, I demonstrate how in Carlos Martín Beristain and Diana del Ángel’s non-fiction writings, the empathy of “broader communities of mourning” and the accompaniment provided to victims by psychosocial, legal, and forensic independent experts counteract bureaucratic violence and empower victims to participate in human rights investigations. I also observe that the mourning relatives of victims of the War on Drugs, as portrayed in a post-Ayotzinapa documentary series by Periodistas de a Pie, have become what I call experts without credentials. These experts have confronted the paralyzing effects of forced disappearances in society by assuming the role of the state and accredited experts in the search for justice and their missing loved ones.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Jairo Antonio López explains that since 2007, regional and national NGOs have played a central role in giving visibility to the human rights crisis in Mexico by documenting the humanitarian emergency, which international organizations only began to acknowledge in 2014 with the forced disappearance of the student teachers of Ayotzinapa (2017, 2–3).

  2. 2.

    Beristain’s Historias de andares (2012b) [Stories of paths] is probably the most closely related to El tiempo de Ayotzinapa. It includes a series of narratives about the ties that he built with those affected by the war in Colombia, his experience in Peru with the Comisión de la Verdad y Renconciliación (Truth and Reconciliation Commission), and his close work with relatives of the disappeared in Guatemala.

  3. 3.

    The experts put forward the hypothesis according to which the student boarded, without knowing this, a bus that may have been involved in the transactions of the criminal organization Guerreros Unidos to sell and move heroin from Iguala to Chicago, which would explain to some extent the level of aggression against the student teachers, as well as the fact that checkpoints were set up on highways and an operation was coordinated to prevent buses from exiting the city (GIEI 2016, 64).

  4. 4.

    Cecilia Sosa puts forward the notion of broader communities of mourning in her analysis from a queer perspective of the experience of mourning and forced disappearance in Argentina, a country where “the circulation of the language of family in human rights struggles tends to encompass modes of understanding processes of transmitting trauma that extend beyond lineage by blood” (2017, 206).

  5. 5.

    If El tiempo de Ayotzinapa describes the constant tensions in the interactions of the members of the GIEI with some of the highest ranking staff of a branch of executive power, the PGR, in charge of investigating and bringing to justice crimes that fall within the federal government’s purview, Procesos de la noche presents another bureaucratic universe, that of the ministries and municipal authorities with whom citizens deal on a daily basis.

  6. 6.

    To understand the origins of the series and its behind-the-scenes, I interviewed five of the producers in a group session in the offices of Periodistas de a Pie. Mexico City, October 21, 2017.

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Correspondence to Raúl Diego Rivera Hernández .

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Diego Rivera Hernández, R. (2020). Dissident Mourners: Victims’ Political Participation in Human Rights Activism. In: Narratives of Vulnerability in Mexico's War on Drugs. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51144-9_4

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