Meanings of Violence in Contemporary Latin America

Meanings of Violence in Contemporary Latin America Dueñas and Maria Helena Rueda 9780230113787_01_previii.indd i 6/1...

Author: Gabriela Polit | María Helena Rueda

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Meanings of Violence in Contemporary Latin America

Dueñas and Maria Helena Rueda

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M e a n i ngs of Viol e nc e i n C on t e m p or a ry L at i n A m e r ic a

Edited by Gab r iel a Polit D ueñas and María Hel ena Rueda


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MEANINGS OF VIOLENCE IN CONTEMPORARY LATIN AMERICA

Copyright © Gabriela Polit Dueñas and María Helena Rueda, 2011. All rights reserved. First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–11378–7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Meaning of violence in contemporary Latin America / edited by Gabriela Polit Dueñas and María Helena Rueda. p. cm. ISBN 978–0–230–11378–7 (hardback) 1. Violence—Latin America. 2. Political violence—Latin America. I. Polit Dueñas, Gabriela. II. Rueda, María Helena, 1964– HN110.5.Z9V555 2011 303.6098—dc22

2011005473

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: August 2011 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.


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C on t e n t s

Acknowledgments Introduction Gabriela Polit Dueñas and María Helena Rueda 1

2

3

4

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Txitzi’n for the Poxnai: Indigenous Women’s Discourses on Revolutionary Combat Arturo Arias

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Against Violence and Oblivion: The Case of Colombia’s Disappeared María Victoria Uribe Alarcón

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Facing Unseen Violence: Ex-combatants Painting the War in Colombia María Helena Rueda

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Considerations on Violence, the Global South, and an Aesthetics of Sobriety Hermann Herlinghaus

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Urban Violence and the Politics of Representation in Recent Brazilian Film Marta Peixoto

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Ciudad Juárez, Femicide, and the State María Socorro Tabuenca Córdoba

115

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Chronicles of Everyday Life in Culiacán, Sinaloa Gabriela Polit Dueñas

149

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An Aesthetic Event: Ricardo Wiesse’s Cantutas and Political Violence in Peru Víctor Vich

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C on t e n t s

Sound, Violence, and Politics: Critical Perspectives from Contemporary Rio de Janeiro Samuel Araújo

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(In)visible Connections and the Makings of Collective Violence Javier Auyero and Matthew Mahler

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Fuerte Apache Cristian Alarcón

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Afterword Mary Roldán

235

Contributors

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Index

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his book would have not been possible without the generous contributions and the extraordinary patience of our contributors, to all of them our deepest gratitude. Both the Spring 2008 conference that originated this project and the preparation of the volume itself relied a great deal on institutional support. From SUNY Stony Brook, we are indebted to the FAHSS research fund, the Departments of Sociology and Hispanic Languages and Literature, the Humanities Institute, and the Stony Brook-Manhattan campus, where our meeting took place. At Smith College, we received support from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, PRESHCO, and the Committee on Faculty Compensation and Development. In the University of Texas at Austin, we would like to give a special thanks to the Teresa Lozano Long Professor of Sociology, Javier Auyero, for his unconditional support throughout this project. Thanks also to Paul Firbas, and Ibtissam Bouachrine, for their assistance during the conference; to Rachel Price for her crucial support in both the initial and latest stages of production of this book; to Pamela Newmann and Joseph Pierce, for their translations; and to Julia Marley for her editorial work. Juan Manuel Echavarría has a special place in the backstage of this production. The night before the conference that led to this volume, he opened his Manhattan studio and shared with us his work on violence in Colombia, providing an inspiration that marked all subsequent discussions. A note on translations: unless otherwise indicated, quotes from Spanish and Portuguese throughout the book were translated to English by the author of each chapter.


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I n t roduc t ion Gabriela Polit Dueñas and María Helena Rueda

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he primary goal of this volume is to address a situation now described among the most pressing issues faced by Latin America in our times: the proliferation of increasingly complex forms of violence. The shadow of violence has become an inescapable part of everyday life in many places of the region. It is a reality with multiple ramifications for the population, marking the sociopolitical landscape in decisive and long-lasting ways. This book includes contributions by scholars from various fields—the social sciences, journalism, the humanities and the arts—whose work offers insightful and innovative ways to understand this situation and its effects on society. As an interdisciplinary endeavor, it also provides an array of perspectives that contribute to ongoing debates on the study of violence in the region.1 Broadly speaking, studies on the subject tend to approach violence within two general paradigms. Some of them perceive it as a pathological phenomenon that disrupts an established social order. Others understand it as a structural problem that shapes a social order, at both the individual and collective levels. With an interest in both symbolic and physical instances of violence, the authors included in this volume challenge such categorical approaches, by examining the value systems, forms of representation, and structures of meaning that underlie different forms of violence. The interdisciplinary approach offered in this book goes beyond characterizations of structural violence and discussions of its legitimacy—or lack thereof—to study violence through the logic of its practices. Understanding violence from this perspective implies examining not only its explicit manifestations and effects but also the social acts that precede it, provoke it, and name it. This view also involves studying the practice of violence as not limited to intentional acts, with precise motives and objectives, or to seemingly spontaneous, isolated incidents that interrupt the presumed regularity of everyday


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life. Violence here appears as one of the natural yet dramatic manifestations of how individuals interrelate and organize themselves in society. For some of the authors included in this volume, violence is an intrinsic part of the social order, a reality that encompasses both the individual and collective aspects of daily life. For others, violence is rather a force that defies and destructures a given social order. In their approach, violent practices are seen as forms of resistance, emerging both from individuals and from communities as a whole. Still other contributors deal with the representation of violence, tackling the problems implied in this process, and the aesthetic and political implications of such representations. The eclectic approach to the uses and practices of violence included in this book raises ethical concerns with regard to the foundation and purposes of violence, and also to the way societies deal with it, in aspects such as the rule of law (or its absence), the notion of justice in both individual and collective terms, and the legitimate ways of processing traumas and articulating discourses on memory. The common ground of these essays, however, is that they offer new ways of confronting and understanding the slipperiness of violence: they show its many faces, its gray zones, its blunt manifestations, and the multiple ways in which these forms of violence are represented.2 Meanings of Violence in Contemporary Latin America continues a line of analysis set forth by Susana Rotker in Ciudadanías del miedo (2000) (Citizens of Fear, 2002), one of the first books to synthesize various scholarly concerns regarding the new forms of violence that lacerated daily life in Latin America during the last two decades of the twentieth century. Rotker’s book responded to the emergence of new agents and forms of violence, which could no longer be approached within traditional paradigms. In the post–Cold War era, and with the advent of neoliberal reforms, it became more and more problematic to think violence within the traditional separation between the state and its hegemonic institutions on the one side, and the armed actors that fought against it on the other. Rotker discussed how violence became ubiquitous, manifesting itself as a constant threat, and creating a reality in which anyone could be a victim or victimizer. Cities became the primary site of this new landscape of violence, and fear its defining characteristic. The means for accessing knowledge about violence had also changed. The proliferation and ubiquity of threats and aggression led to a crisis of meanings, and traditional narratives seemed no longer able to address such ubiquity. Analyses of violence were increasingly presented


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through accounts of individual experiences and subjective representations, to which journalists, intellectuals, writers, and artists appealed in various ways, in attempts to understand violence as it happens. Cities formerly structured through fluidity and exchange became increasingly segregated, as inhabitants constructed barriers in search of greater security. Narratives that emerged with regard to crime became intertwined with these urban transformations, leading to new social practices and structures of meaning. New categories emerged, such as those equating violence with marginality, which legitimize behaviors and perceptions that reinforce the current landscape of social fear. Such situations, coupled with a widespread weakening of the state, gave greater legitimacy to those seeking individual protection or personal justice. This led to a diversification not only of the modalities of aggression, threats, and fear but also of the personal ways of resisting them. Today, for instance, private violence is granted impunity in virtually all sectors of society. The distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate violence, oppression and resistance, victims and victimizers are increasingly blurred in this context. Current reflections on urban violence critique the hegemonic discourses that helped develop this landscape of violence, which equated poverty with criminality.3 By presenting poverty as a serious threat to society, these discourses implicitly cultivated fear and the desire for greater protection. Behind the pretexts of such discourses, the levels of poverty and social exclusion widened, making economic inequality the main form of violence in the region. Inequality and the diverse forms of aggression, however, must be understood against specific local histories: contexts of war and postwar, dictatorships and postdictatorships, increasing power of the drug trade and its violent machinery, mass migration and the experience of immigrants. The authors of this volume address these issues by offering their views on the new modalities of violence, together with reflections on memory, trauma, and its various expressions, as well as the links between violence and its representation. Meanings of Violence is a contribution to the study of emerging practices of violence in Latin America. It reflects on violence as a continuum that links individual acts and responsibilities to their collective expression, connecting state interventions with the actions of communities. The perspectives laid out here link violence and its common manifestations with peaceful or violent responses to them. This book puts in perspective current practices of violence, connecting them with their remote origins, and with their lasting effects.


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By bringing together the work of sociologists, anthropologists, journalists, ethnomusicologists, and literary and cultural critics, our aim is to offer an interdisciplinary perspective onto a constantly changing phenomenon, one that continues to modify our societies and the ways we understand them. While we acknowledge the risks, challenges, and limitations of a book that addresses the complexities of contemporary practices of violence in the region, we believe violence has to be understood in its contexts, both local and global, as well as in its subjective and collective forms. The first three chapters in this volume deal specifically with testimonial representations, a genre that has received much attention, as a privileged means to access firsthand accounts of the experience of violence.4 Arturo Arias and María Victoria Uribe open the first section of the book focusing on trauma and memory. In “Against Violence and Oblivion: The Case of Colombia’s Disappeared,” Uribe considers various ways of coping employed by rural Colombians suffering from the social wounds left by the disappearance of bodies. She describes various personal and collective strategies for dealing with trauma, reflecting on the forms of memory they help configure. While in structural terms the violence inflicted by the guerilla, the state, or the paramilitaries may be similar—from an ethnographic perspective—Uribe explores the dissimilarities in how various groups process these experiences of war and death, to better understand the ways in which they give meaning to the present. Uribe prioritizes the feminine voice in the articulation of memory, as does Arturo Arias in his analysis of discourse in “Txitzi’n for the Poxnai: Indigenous Women’s Discourses on Revolutionary Combat.” Arias reflects on women’s experiences during the Guatemalan war, based on material from three books of interviews and testimonials. Arias’ work calls attention to the importance of gender in processes of memory formation, by recovering women’s stories that contrast with the official truths offered by political parties, the state, and resistance groups. Women reveal a nuanced view of trauma, articulating it in a particular way. Using a postcolonial framework, his analysis opens a space in which to reflect on the value of memory as a cultural instrument of resistance. In “Facing Unseen Violence: Ex-combatants Painting the War in Colombia,” María Helena Rueda, in collaboration with Colombian artist Juan Manuel Echavarría, registers and reflects on a specific instance of work done to preserve the historical memory of violence. Rueda describes how Echavarría conducted a series of artistic workshops in Colombia, in which former combatants from the guerrilla, the


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paramilitaries, and the army narrated their war experiences through paintings. Some of the paintings were then shown in museum exhibits in Bogotá and other Colombian cities, displaying forms of violence that usually remain hidden from urban dwellers. The process involved a series of limitations on what was said or shown, drawing attention to the complexities of preserving memory in a context of aggression. It also problematized our traditional understanding of the separation between victims and victimizers, while at the same time presenting a profound exploration into art as a vehicle to evoke memories of violence and trauma. Victor Vich in “Ricardo Wiesse’s Cantutas” reflects on the staging of memory, and by extension on the implications of representing trauma. Vich analyzes the aesthetic and political dimension of a performance by Peruvian artist Ricardo Wiesse, who painted giant cantuta flowers on the Cieneguilla hill (located on the outskirts of Lima), where the bodies of nine students and their professor were found after their assassination in the university known as La Cantuta. Vich analyzes the significance of this performance, which happened during the repressive government of Alberto Fujimori, right after an amnesty treaty was signed, and was preserved only in pictures taken by photographer Herman Schwarz. The flowers Wiesse painted, eventually erased by the wind, symbolize the missing bodies, and Schwarz’s photographs represent an attempt to recover their memory in an act of resistance. As such, they were later incorporated in a poster that mobilized people against the abuses of Fujimori’s regime. In this portrayal of the double resistance to oblivion, Vich explores the esthetic representation of violence as an event that alters language and inaugurates new meanings in the social landscape. For Hermann Herlinghaus, an aesthetics of “de-intoxication” can be what defines the ethical value of a cultural product. In “Considerations on Violence, the Global South, and an Aesthetics of Sobriety,” he examines the violence immanent in globalized societies, and explores the potential of an ethics that is inspired by Walter Benjamin’s thoughts on the dialectics of ecstasy and sobriety. From there, Herlinghaus develops the concept of a global “aesthetics of sobriety.” This aesthetics describes an ethical option in narratives from the Global South, which challenge “affective marginalization.” He questions the idea of a culture of fear in Latin America and points to artistic expressions whose undermining of ecstatic (“intoxicating”) violence communicates this aesthetic of sobriety, such as the narcocorridos that have been made a cultural and affective force by Los Tigres del Norte. For Herlinghaus, these ballads are


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an example of an aesthetic that is “de-intoxicating,” with a potential for subversion. Representations of violence can also be calls for a truth or for the legitimacy of a certain version of the truth. Analyses on how hegemony plays a part in the representation of violence abound, some related to aesthetic productions and others dealing with views on the uses of violence. These approaches typically question the criteria used to establish a truth or a series of truths about acts of violence and their agents. In “Urban Violence and the Politics of Representation in Recent Brazilian Film,” Marta Peixoto focuses on film production in Brazil since the 1990s, commenting on controversial fiction features such as City of God, The Trespasser, and Elite Squad and on the documentaries News from a Personal War and Bus 174. Peixoto deconstructs the supposed redemption of the poor transmitted in the film Elite Squad, in order to reveal how it reinforces stereotypes in subtle ways, celebrating an order established by military-trained forces. She then shows how the commercial success of certain works is proportional to how they reflect a hegemonic vision of the situation in the favelas (shantytowns) and their inhabitants. She contrasts this to how the same situation is portrayed in lesser-known documentaries, which include the point of view of those living in the favelas: News from a Personal War and Bus 174. Peixoto argues that in the process of representation certain norms are developed around the conventions used to portray violence and designate its culprits. Through a decodification of official discourses on the killing of women in Ciudad Juárez, Socorro Tabuenca analyzes, in “Ciudad Juarez, Femicide, and the State,” the tensions and conflicts over who legitimately speaks for the city’s hundreds of dead women, and the various and contradictory ways in which they are represented by diverse societal actors—the media, politicians, bureaucrats, and nongovernmental organizations. In a detailed revision of the multiple accounts that have been told over the last fifteen years about these crimes, Tabuenca shows how the survivors of such violent experiences become objects of an often-terrifying symbolic violence that confuses, threatens, and ultimately eliminates their capacity to protest or resist through political action. A significant portion of the acts of violence that occur today in Latin America are directly or indirectly linked to illegal drug trafficking. At the national level, drug-related violence has to do with the search for inclusion and social mobility, as well as with the fragility of state institutions and their clandestine relationship with crime. Most of the victims of the war on drugs in Latin American countries


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come from marginalized populations or are lower-ranking members of security forces, legal and illegal. But drug trafficking has also given rise to new rituals of violence, in which dead bodies become messages and threats. In contemporary Mexico, even the narration of drug trafficking is a dangerous challenge. In “Chronicles of Everyday Life in Culiacan,” Gabriela Polit looks at the work of reporter Javier Arturo Valdez, a founder of the weekly newspaper Riodoce who writes about the everyday threats and aggressions experienced by Sinaloenses. His short chronicles depict the human suffering associated with normalized violence, and the many and absurd ways in which society copes with it. Avoiding stereotypes, Valdez successfully and sometimes humorously, recreates the sinister and naïve characters of the region. While drug traffickers and their assassins are not the protagonists in these narratives, their codes and value systems permeate their language and the rules that determine their fate. The last three chapters of this volume explore ethnographic approaches to the practice of violence. Samuel Araújo writes about his work as an ethnomusicologist in Maré, one of the oldest favelas in Rio de Janeiro. “The Sounds of Violence: Critical Perspectives from Contemporary Brazil,” offers a unique contextualization for the idea of violence as a continuum. The sounds of violence, Araújo argues, cannot be explained only as a socially orchestrated phenomenon. By including the perspective of favela residents, he suggests that violence can be best understood as a form of personal survival. Writing from his experience as an advisor to analysts and scholars living in a favela, Araújo suggests that there is a lack of dialogue between academic knowledge and local wisdom. He thus goes beyond normative explanations of violence, and challenges readers by illustrating a practical way to be actively involved in marginal areas like favela da Maré. For more than ten years, Javier Auyero has been studying the intervention of the state as a crucial agent in the repertoire of collective action in contemporary Argentina. In the chapter he cowrites with Matt Mahler for this book, the authors refer to the “gray zone” as that space where the practices of political culture blur the lines between state coercion and collective violence. This gray zone, as the authors define the area of clandestine connections between established power holders and perpetrators of violence, is a region of social and political action that needs to be closely scrutinized, both theoretically and empirically, if we are to understand the dynamics of collective violence. The last chapter of the volume includes a chronicle about Fuerte Apache, one of the most dangerous slums of Greater Buenos Aires, written by Cristian Alarcón. The chapter is composed of two chronicles


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that were published a few weeks apart in Diario Crónica, Argentina, where Alarcón reported on the murder of a police officer in Fuerte Apache. As the story evolves, the killing of the policeman turns out to be an act of revenge by the local youth for the murder of one of their friends. The order of events certainly alters the outcome, thus showing how, in media portrayals of life in marginal areas, violence always has a very specific meaning. As Alarcón’s story makes clear, violence in a slum emerges in response to aggression by the state. This chronicle provides a final contextualization for the conceptual theme that guided most of these essays, that is, to consider violence in its continuity. The book concludes with an afterword by Mary Roldán, a scholar whose work on violence in Colombia has brought historical perspective to the nuanced ties between violence and social structures of power. In this text Roldán considers the ways in which every chapter in the volume establishes a dialogue with the others, and with the general context of current studies on violence in Latin America. She thus provides a thorough closing reflection on how this book can open doors to a better understanding of what is now seen as one of the most pressing issues in the region as a whole.

Notes 1. Some recent books that discuss the new forms of violence in Latin America are the collections edited by Corona and Domínguez-Ruvalcaba (2010); Arias and Goldstein (2010); Jones and Rogers (2009); Ubilluz, Hibbett, and Vich (2009); Valenzuela Arce, Nateras Domínguez, and Reguillo Cruz (2007); Rojas and Meltzer (2005); and Frühling, Tulchin, and Golding (2003). See also the books by Rodríguez (2009) and Herlinghaus (2009). 2. The concept of slipperiness of violence is used by Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe I. Bourgois, in the introduction to their anthology Violence in War and Peace (2004): Violence is a slippery concept—nonlinear, productive, destructive, and reproductive. It is mimetic, like imitative magic or homeopathy. “Like produces like,” that much we know. Violence gives birth to itself. So we can rightly speak of chains, spirals, and mirrors of violence—or as we prefer a continuum of violence . . . . Violence can never be understood solely in terms of its physicality—force, assault, or the infliction of pain—alone. . . . The social and cultural dimensions of violence are what give violence its power and meaning. (1) 3. Javier Auyero’s ethnographies of urban destitution in the Great Buenos Aires are one of the best examples as attested in the article included in this volume. For Sao Paulo, see Teresa Caldeira’s seminal book City of Walls


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(2001). See also Rosanna Reguillo’s works (1999, 2000), and Moraña’s (2002) compilation of articles on urban space, communication, and violence in our times. 4. Discussions on violence in Latin America have been associated in many ways with the idea of testimony as an imprint of aggression. While some countries seek ways to address traumas left by experiences of war and repression, a complex debate has emerged over how to configure the memory of violence. The Truth Commissions in Guatemala and Peru, for example, have problematized the very notion of truth, opening a space for reflections on the precise meaning of stories generated by violence. Aside from giving a voice to the subaltern, the testimonial genre brings new insights into the nature of memory and its representation. The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy (2001), edited by Arturo Arias, closed a chapter in academic discussions on this issue, but there is still a need to rethink the discourse of testimony in the current context of violence.

References Arias, Arturo. The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001. Print. Arias, Enrique Desmond, and Daniel M. Goldstein, eds. Violent Democracies in Latin America. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2010. Print. Auyero, Javier. Routine Politics and Violence in Argentina: The Gray Zone of State Power. New York: Cambridge UP, 2007. Print. Caldeira, Teresa. City of Walls. Berkeley: U of California P, 2001. Print. Corona, Ignacio, and Héctor Domínguez-Ruvalcaba, eds. Gender Violence at the U.S.-Mexico Border: Media Representation and Public Response. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2010. Print. Frühling, Hugo, Joseph S. Tulchin, and Heather A. Golding, eds. Crime and Violence in Latin America: Citizen Security, Democracy, and the State. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2003. Print. Herlinghaus, Hermann. Violence without Guilt: Ethical Narratives from the Global South. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Print. Jefferson Jones, Gareth, and Dennis Rodgers, eds. Youth Violence in Latin America: Gangs and Juvenile Justice in Perspective. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Print. Moraña, Mabel, ed. Espacio urbano, comunicación y violencia en América Latina. Pittsburgh, PA: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, 2002. Print. Reguillo, Rosanna. Ciudadano N: Crónicas de la diversidad. Jalisco, Mexico: ITESO, 1999. Print. ———. Emergencias de culturas juveniles. Estrategias del desencanto. Buenos Aires: Norma, 2000. Print. Rojas, Cristina, and Judy Meltzer, eds. Elusive Peace: International, National, and Local Dimensions of Conflict in Colombia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Print.


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Rotker, Susana, ed. Citizens of Fear: Urban Violence in Latin America. Trans. Katherine Goldman. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2002. Print. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, and Philippe I. Bourgois, eds. Violence in War and Peace. Malden MA, Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. Print. Rodríguez, Ileana. Liberalism at its Limits: Crime and Terror in the Latin American Cultural Text. Pittsburgh, PA: U of Pittsburgh P, 2009. Print. Ubilluz, Juan Carlos, Alexandra Hibbett, and Víctor Vich. Contra el sueño de los justos. La literatura peruana ante la violencia política. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2009. Print. Valenzuela Arce, José Manuel, Alfredo Nateras Domínguez, and Rossana Reguillo Cruz, eds. Las Maras: identidades juveniles al límite. Mexico D.F.: El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, and Casa Juan Pablos, 2007. Print.


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T X I T Z I ’ N for t h e P O X N A I : I n dige nous Wom e n’s Discou r ses on R e volu t iona ry C om b at Arturo Arias

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fficial analyses of the Guatemalan civil war (1960–1996) shift between those that proclaim massive and/or enthusiastic indigenous participation in guerrilla organizations and those that claim that there was a manipulation of innocent, or ignorant, “indigenous masses.”1 This never-ending production of labels to designate cultural dominants about the war is not an innocuous fact: it is intertwined with the act of interpreting who won and who is to blame for the entire process. In the Guatemalan case, global and local actors from opposing academic power fields remain mired in generalities. As a result, perfunctory phrases such as “indigenous masses,” “indigenous combatants,” or “indigenous ex-URNG members” (URNG is the Spanish acronym for the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity) continue to circulate in most papers written about the subject without any serious problematization of the meaning of these vague notions.2 What is more, in the midst of their mudslinging, neither side has, for the most part, spoken of gender, nor have they allowed the voices of indigenous ex-combatants to be heard directly. That is, very few people have actually interviewed indigenous ex-combatants to hear their own explanations for choosing to engage in revolutionary war, perhaps one of the most dramatic limit-experiences and demonstrations of agency in which an individual can engage. Part of this obscurity is attributable to the fact that the Maya uprising in Guatemala happened before cyberspace became an alternative means to official (and officially censored) methods of disseminating information. Yet this cannot be the only possible explanation. Indeed,


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the phenomenon appears to derive in part from what Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano has named “the coloniality of power,” a theory that emphasizes how the grid of colonialism continues to frame social, political, economic, and cultural relations in Latin America. Quijano is especially attentive to the efficacy of colonial racial categories and relations, given how they reproduce unequal political and economic power and thus constitute a framework whereby inequality reproduces itself. Gustavo Lins Ribeiro argues that it is also necessary to explore a parallel category that he labels “nationality of power” in interim fashion,3 a concept that would account for the structuring effects of national elites who articulate social relations reflecting the coloniality of power within a given nation-state, where they most often find their natural ground and stability, their space of emplacement. Finally, it would coincide with what Boaventura de Sousa Santos labels “abyssal thinking,” in which subalternized peoples become nonexistent in the eyes of Westerners exercising hegemony.4 Even for a Ladino, or mestizo, Marxist revolutionary, the coded elements imposed by the coloniality of power, and displayed by abyssal thinking, implied that indigenous discursivity was a space where their world was violently displaced. Although Marxism represented for many the maximum of possible consciousness at a given time and place, it remained anchored in European Enlightenment and was logically articulated with all forms of modern Western thinking. Indigenous discursivity, on the other hand, problematized Marxist certainty, pointing out that it implied merely a Eurocentric point of view that privileged class struggle. It thus destabilized and decentered this singular form of modern certainty. It showed Ladino revolutionary leaders that they did not live in a homogeneous and coherent space patterned after modern Europe, but, rather, one conceived of by Europeans as premodern. It is my contention that this blindness has led Ladino revolutionaries and analysts to refuse systematically to account for the coexistence of Ladino and Maya cultural forms, that is, of accepting the reality of non-Western conceptual systems within the nation-state, especially since these might problematize their class analysis. In my understanding, these factors account for the lack of sources documenting indigenous accounts on the war.5 In this paper, therefore, I intend to bring to light indigenous discursivity about the war, focusing on testimonials by indigenous women ex-combatants. If indigenous accounts in general have been virtually ignored, even less has been published on women indigenous combatants and the effects of war on them. In 1998 Norma Stoltz-Chinchilla published in Spanish Nuestras utopías: Mujeres guatemaltecas del siglo XX


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(Our Utopias: Guatemalan Women of the 20th Century), a series of interviews of women involved in the Guatemalan revolutionary war.6 Not all interviews were with indigenous combatants or even about combatants as a whole, but a few were. In 2006, Susan A. Berger published Guatemaltecas: The Women’s Movement 1986–2003, in which she argued that a counterdiscourse to globalization had slowly emerged within the Guatemalan women’s movement. Again, her book is not primarily about combatants and less so about indigenous women, but it necessarily touches marginally on some of those experiences. Finally, in 2008, Ligia Peláez edited Memorias rebeldes contra el olvido: Paasantzila Txumb’al Ti’ Sortzeb’al K’u’l (Rebel Memories Against Oblivion),7 a book that I will use as a primary source for analyzing this topic.

¿Qué Pensamos Las Ex- combatientes? Memorias rebeldes opens with the telling question “¿Qué pensamos las ex-combatientes?” (What do we ex-combatants think?), followed by a preamble signed by the ADIQ-Kumool Women Ex-Combatants Collective.8 In it they state that they are all Maya women, primarily Ixils, though a few are K’iche’, and that, during the war, they were all militants of the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP, for its acronym in Spanish) in the “Ho Chi Minh” Front that covered the entire Quiché area. None of them, however, was included in the official list of demobilized combatants that the URNG presented to the UN and the Guatemalan government in 1996. When the Peace Treaty was signed on December 28 of that year, they were all scattered in the jungle, distrustful, wary, and afraid, and they were thus left out of the official peace process. It should be noted that they were de facto abandoned by the EGP, the organization in which they militated, and for which they had sacrificed everything. When they returned to their hometown, about 600 of them agreed to meet in Nueva Esperanza, Nebaj, and they founded the Kumool association in 1999.9 Trying to make ends meet and help their families survive, the Kumool women attended a meeting of the Red de Mujeres (Women’s Network) in Uspantán in May 2006.10 There they came in contact with Peláez, who was then working for the Association for the Advancement of the Social Sciences (AVANCSO, for its Spanish acronym).11 The ex-combatants complained at this meeting about their situation. Peláez perceived intuitively the epistemological decolonizing attitude rooted in the catharsis of their anger.12 From a purely alternative ethical stance devoid of any theorization,13 these seemingly


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plain indigenous women understood that the former combatants were divided into two realms: “this side of the line,” where the upper echelon of the URNG stood in cahoots with the Guatemalan government and the Army’s High Command, all of them Ladino men perceived to be living in the wealthiest neighborhoods of Guatemala City, and “the other side of the line,” where they had been dumped, invisible to the Ladino Westernized world. In order to make the Peace Treaty benefit the Ladino elite who fought on both sides of the war, on the traditional modern ideological grid of right and left, the indigenous majority had to be invisibilized, exemplifying Arif Dirlik’s claims that “nationalism of the ethnoculturalist kind has always presented a predicament of easy slippage to racism” (1368). In this case, Mayas end up essentialized as premodern, inferior beings lacking reasoning. We cannot lose sight of the power dynamics of this labeling, nor of the coherence it lends to racial thinking across Guatemala. Within this context, the Kumool women struggled to reclaim the dignity of their culture and their struggle; they did not want to be sacrificed at the end of a set of operations, defined by Ladino men living in the city, to which they had no access, but, rather, they wanted the right to envision their own future. The dismissive attitude Peláez perceived led her to bring together journalists and activists to help them record their experience. In June 2006, Peláez, Rosalinda Hernández, and Andrea Carrillo, journalists from laCuerda, a feminist weekly, Ana López, another colleague from AVANCSO, and Jacqueline Torres from the communications team of the Agrarian Platform14 met with 33 Kumool women between 35 and 45 years of age in Nebaj .15 By the second meeting, in July of the same year, the Kumool women, offered by their visitors the opportunity of recording their story in a series of journalistic articles, a series of pamphlets, or a book, chose to have a book written about their trajectory, one that would finally recognize their struggle in the mountains and preserve their experiences for posterity.16 They themselves stated that they wanted to do this so that “the youth of the country can come to know it, and they can form for themselves an idea of how things happened” (Memorias 9).17 In other words, these women wanted to exist in a relevant and comprehensible way of being. They were implicitly demanding a theory that would more or less enable constructive action on behalf of subalternized peoples, empowering their knowledge to contest the dominant discourse of the postwar elite, and making a decolonial turn in the process. The women in this meeting spoke of txitzi’n, an Ixil word that means “deep pain.” However, the idea articulates not only physical


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suffering but also “a wounded soul,” conceptualizing an image in which a part of the subject is dead. It is a topic at the epistemic borders of modernity, a different paradigm for conveying the unnamable condition of surviving genocide (Memorias 14), one that anchors a discourse articulating a new relation between violence, survival, ethics, and politics. Feeling txitzi’n did not preclude agency. On the contrary, it was a prerequisite for meaningful agency, one that contextualized their struggle and constituted the women as comprehensible subjects. The need to talk about profound pain, never previously articulated discursively by any of them, nor by most Maya women under Western eyes, was followed by a different emotion tied to agency, the joy of being together again, the memories of their deeds and achievements, of their courage, and of their capacity for decision making and executing. By naming the past, they were able to talk about the future because it made them fully conscious of their identities as ex-combatants, and as women who could continue their political struggle as fully conscious indigenous subjects and as organized women who refused to self-racialize. As they themselves stated, they lost their fear in the mountain, so that whenever they were in a social gathering in a village they recognized females who were excombatants because they were always the ones who did not stand quietly and meekly behind their husbands, but who spoke out with assurance and without fear: “What the heart says we speak out; there is no fear, there is no trembling, we feel our heart is alive; it’s strong because it’s not fearful. I lost my fear because I rose with the rebels in the mountains, where everyone talked, where we were not mute, and here it’s the same; I talk with everyone” (Memorias 16).

Building Identities Peláez argues that memory is a site of struggle where indigenous women ex-combatants are demanding a right to express themselves (24). At the same time, they have to contend with a certain essentialized perception in Latin America of nostalgia for a life in the mountains as a guerrilla combatant. It is an image pregnant with romantic images of heroism and integrity, such as those compiled in Guatemala, escuela revolucionaria de nuevos hombres (1982; Guatemala, Revolutionary School of New Men). This vision has had a profound impact on guerrilla representation, and guerrillas themselves have provided idealized images of lived experiences that fetichized combatants. Thus, it was necessary to expose the gap between the experience of lived reality and the perceived ideal to witness the contradictions that shaped


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the representations of women combatants and define the process of their subject-formation. After all, these ex-combatants represented new forms of witnessing. They were simultaneously participants and survivors struggling to record their suffering and to create a record of their destroyed communities. In the middle of Peláez’s book are full-color photographs of the women combatants in their present state that do not highlight the aestheticizing tendencies present in most visual representations of guerrillas or soldiers. All the women appear middle-aged and dressed in traditional indigenous clothes, often with husbands or family members. Only one picture out of a total of 28—that of Lorenza Cedillo Chávez—shows a woman combatant in military fatigues when she was young. The nature of the photos in the book therefore creates a contact zone between the genres of testimonio, reportage, community photograph album, and national history, producing a more permeable and multiple text that may recast the problematics of testimonio.18 We have here a similar representation of the voice and image of subaltern subjects but a different intent because these are not the passive informants of a Western subject but the architects of their own discourse. Thus the debate shifts from the nature of a genre or form (testimonio) to the nature of memory, or, rather to the forms of representation and the forms of memory. Indeed, I would argue that discourse on representation must be accompanied by discussions of the civil war memory: not just how the war itself is represented (i.e., Stoll, Morales, Sabino), but also how it is it remembered. That is, we should always ask what the role of discursivity is in preserving civil war memory, and, nuancing remarks about testimonio made in the 1990s, we should move on to how testimonialists might problematize their community and gender. This would allow us to explore the representation of memory and to illustrate the complex demands of portraying the memories of the Guatemalan civil war. We could conceivably ask ourselves, along the lines of Vinebaum, what forms retrospective witnessing and remembrance should take, and how events are transferred from history to memory.19 Peláez’s book traces the constitution of the women subjects, not only in the family and the nation, but also in their combatant experiences, while also making the reading of photographs central to the recovery project. Nonetheless, it is the women themselves who affirm the need to remember as a vital responsibility of the subject, and concede that written knowledge has a role to play (albeit a challenging one) in preserving the memory of genocide. They thus insist upon their own agency, without distancing themselves from their lived


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reality or leaving space for others to doubt their remembrance. Their discourse thus marks a temporal and spatial exile from the site of their experiences, a simultaneous need to build and to mourn. As indigenous women, most of the combatants had no childhood proper, as conceived by Western society. They have no memories of playing or of enjoying leisure time. Their childhood memories are mostly about working at home, in the cornfields, and on the coffee plantations of the Pacific coast, thus evoking many aspects of Rigoberta Menchú’s narrative. Often they had to get up at three in the morning to haul water, make firewood, clean the hut, cook the food that all members of the family would take with them to the workplace, and then head out themselves to work on the fields or to sell the family products at the local market, a job that implied carrying huge loads on their backs while walking for miles on mountain paths toward town. If this were the case, they would head out at two in the morning and walk for about three or four hours to be in the town by daybreak. Many also claim that they were not allowed to go to school because they were girls (Memorias 54–56). Their brothers did go, however, and the girls had to wash the clothes of their male siblings and prepare their food for when they returned from school. Most of them were beaten by their fathers. Another common factor is that they were still children when the war started. Some remember their parents stating that war had come to Guatemala because there were too many poor people. Others recall their parents crying because their few animals had been shot by the soldiers or their fields burnt. Whenever they heard rumors that the soldiers were coming, they would head out and hide in the fields. One recalled her parents being arrested and then being told afterward that they had been killed. One woman who did go to school recalled that the soldiers came while she was in class, kicked the students out, and shot the teacher. When she returned home, her family had disappeared. She found two brothers, and the three wandered in the mountains for seven or eight months before being captured by the army. Later, the guerrillas attacked the army patrol, liberated her and her brothers, and invited them to join their ranks (Memorias 58). Peláez states that the narrative of their lives was not easy for them to verbalize. Many cried when they recalled their first menstruation or how they lived it during the war, or when they talked about being pregnant while waging war in the mountains. Again, txitzi’n was invoked. For some, this concept became somewhat of a mystical or inner experience. It was as if their heads contained opposing viewpoints at the


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same time. They were able to deal with it because their minds were flexible, and they quickly learned the grid of their new inner environment. Though described in simple, plain words, it was for them another space for the production of knowledge—an “other way of thinking” in the words of Arturo Escobar, pointing to the very possibility of talking about “worlds and knowledges otherwise.”20 In this logic they lived their wartime period more as a learning process of the inner self. It was one of self-constitution and an unconventional acquisition of knowledge, rather than one of death and destruction on the battlefield, as it is traditionally conceived. For them, it transformed the sites of the atrocities into sites for the memory of the construction of their subjectivities. In this sense, their narratives portray a world that was lost, and convey the magnitude of what was lost and gained in a way that other discursivities or testimonios cannot. In his essay, Escobar asks himself, if the processes of Eurocentered modernity subalternized local histories and their corresponding designs, could there still be a possibility that radical alternatives to modernity were not foreclosed? (5). For Escobar, this possibility is merely a hypothesis, but in the experience of Maya women at war, it becomes concrete. In this text, we witness an interstitial transitional space where their subalternized local history is challenged by the emerging visibility of a radical alternative as a result of the procedures of social emancipation.

Fear Triggers Combat Experience The phantasm of rape was a significant force that pushed indigenous women to the mountains; indeed, many women claimed that they joined the guerrillas out of fear of being raped by the soldiers (Memorias 50). Margarita said that her village was attacked by the army and her brother was killed.21 She then decided to “alzarse” (the common term they all employed, akin to “rise up” or “revolt”): My thought was that the armies [sic] had to pay because they killed my brother. I was like 15 years old. . . . My thought was also that I had to defend my life, though I knew that the same thing that happened to my brother could happen to me, but if I died, it wouldn’t be like him, my brother did not know how to use arms. . . . But if I was to die I wanted it to be for something, for defending my life, or that of other children and young people. (76)22

Eva, who spoke only Ixil, also declared that she joined the guerrilla when the army came to her village. She saw them burning houses and


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killing people in Chajul, one of the three towns of the Ixil triangle. Both her parents were killed. She then decided to fight for her life. Both her first and second husbands were also killed in combat, as was one of her sons. Maricela adds: “We headed for the mountain to save our lives. I was three years as a combatant, in that time we only ate weeds, I think I was 13 years old. I went to the guerrillas with my father and a brother, but they died in the war, they were combatants, only I was saved” (Memorias 77).23 Rita added that her parents approved when she joined at age 12 or 13 with her three brothers, because fellow villagers had been killed. Lucía said she feared being raped in a model village. Antolina claimed that it was a war that they fought for dignity. Estela joined when her village was massacred and the church was burnt (78). Irma also joined when the army entered her village and she feared being raped (80). Kumool women stated the important symbolism of changing their manner of dress. Some explained this heavily charged transformation as a result of their gradual politicization or even as a result of family discussions in which their parents already showed sympathy for the guerrillas’ cause. It was a momentous decision, symbolized by shedding their traditional clothes and embracing a military uniform. For all of them it was the first time they wore pants. As one explained, “At first I felt bad in pants, because I had never dressed like that; I only used a corte. I felt kind of ugly in pants. But little by little I got used to it. I came to like it” (Memorias 51).24 It was also the first time their duties were the same as those of the men, since they were treated exactly the same during training exercises. They were surprised to discover that some men were more afraid than women, or that some women were better shots than men. One of them added that, at first, they could not run as fast as men or carry as much weight on their backs, and that she wished she was a man. But with training, she realized that a woman’s strength is the same as that of a man (Memorias 53). This transfiguration removed something of the horror of the violence they witnessed and ameliorated the circumstances of extreme traumatic dislocation they underwent. It alleviated the txitzi’n. It also justified for them their need to see themselves represented in writing.

Brave PACHITA Warriors While in the mountains, the Ixil women took special pride in being “pachitas” (Memorias 74), very short, but extremely brave.25 They were not shy about describing their ability to handle weapons, to


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organize resistance activities or teamwork, or to display the aptitudes that made many of them “jefas de escuadra,” squadron leaders, which meant they had seven combatants under their charge, though none became platoon leaders, which would have meant having four squadrons under their charge. They also participated in medical services, in political formation, and in recruiting future combatants. One of the issues in which all the women take pride is that during the war, there was parity between man and woman combatants. Their one demand when they joined was that they be able to participate on equal terms with men. Even though some were assigned to less frontal activities such as medical services, radio communication, or political formation, this did not mean that they did not fight as well. They also shared equally with the men those chores traditionally associated with women, such as cooking, cutting firewood, washing clothes, or performing sentry duty (Memorias 74–75). Concerning actual combat, the only criterion was their physical ability. Some women were not chosen for combat but many others were, and they were proud to have been chosen over men considered not strong enough for combat duty. Isabel stated that she was proud of having been a good shot. Olivia remarked that she was able to join a platoon because she was one of the “chispudos,” sharp ones (81). Lucía was a squadron leader in Ixcán. She was a good shot and knew how to lead. She went from using a Mauser, to an M-16 (U.S. infantry rifle), a Galil (Israeli infantry rifle with munitions manufactured in Guatemala), and an AK- 47 (Russian rifle considered the best because it could be used even under water) (Memorias 82). Rita was in charge of raising the villagers’ consciousness and also taught young children to write, but she also trained other combatants on how to prepare weapons for combat, and explained to civilians how to defend themselves from the army. Irma, whose father is K’iche’ and her mother Ixil, learned both K’iche’ and Spanish, as well as to write a bit in Spanish. She also used M-16s, Fals (Belgian rifles), carbines, and revolvers, though her main job was transporting grenade boxes and machine guns, which she carried with another woman. She specialized in fixing weapons that got stuck and in infiltrating army bases to pass messages along: If there is combat I go and see if all have returned, if no one was wounded; if someone is, I run to notify and help carry the wounded person . . . As a liaison, when we reached our campground, the commander would write a letter and I would carry it . . . I would go alone, with the risk of finding the army on the road, I went with a bit of pinol


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(toasted corn) if not with weeds or cooked sweet potatoes. Sometimes there was nothing, only pepper, and that’s how we’d go into combat. (Memorias 83)26

Lina mentioned that she never felt alone, because she had her gun with her and this calmed her down. She felt free in the mountains. She was also a combatant and learned Spanish. Flora also learned Spanish with the guerrillas, carried a weapon, and was trained to work using the book Where There Is No Doctor. She became a health instructor, and later coordinated 17 “communities of peoples in resistance” (CPR) living in the jungle (Memorias 84–85).27 Feliciana was bombed by helicopters and learned to avoid getting hit by running around big trees in the opposite direction of the helicopter’s flight path. Roselia mentioned that she was not afraid of weapons, and how when she engaged in combat she had a big surge of adrenaline, and was always happy to be in a battle and to discover the thrill of coming out alive. She claimed the best thing she ever did was to fight (Memorias 87). Telma also learned Spanish, besides learning to read and write. She, however, preferred being a nurse and giving public speeches in community rallies. She remembered vividly the smell of blood the first time she had to dress the wounds of an injured combatant. She added: “I spent 20 years in the mountains. What we learned there was not for nothing, we didn’t win, but we learned a thing or two. For us, the struggle left us something, I think it would no longer be easy for them to push us around; we’re ready to fight and participate all over again” (Memorias 88).28 Despite her preference, Telma was a good shot and even got to carry and handle an RPG-7, a portable, shoulder-launched, antitank rocket-propelled grenade weapon (93). “We practiced military harassing, search-and-destroy missions and arms recuperation. I know how to do all of that” (93).29 She claimed the male compañeros would say of the women combatants, “ustedes son buzas” (you gals are sharp). Lidia liked military instruction because she learned not only how to handle weapons but also what was happening to the Guatemalan people and elsewhere in the world. She also gave talks about how to handle wounded combatants in Ixil, K’iche’, and Spanish. She loved it so much she never forgot the languages she spoke. Lucía, an Ixil speaker, besides learning to speak Mam, Kaqchiquel, and K’iche’, also learned how to read and write in Spanish. She explained that during combat, fear and loneliness vanished. She focused exclusively on confronting the army. Her mouth dried up, and she shivered because of nerves,


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but when she began shooting she felt a gush of heat invading her body. It was almost like a mystic experience, an ecstasy in the midst of terror. Her best friend was killed on International Women’s Day, so Lucía now commemorates both every year. She was always chosen for the front lines of her platoon because of her bravery, together with four other women (Memorias 88–89). Like Lina, Antolina also felt free in the mountains where she lived for 12 years, despite the fact that the army burnt everything, that there was an inordinate number of deaths, and that two of her brothers were killed (89). When Amalia was captured in 1989, she was told by military officers, “We want to see you as a woman and not as a man. Take your pants off” (Memorias 90). She was forced to go back to wearing a corte. Though she was not raped, she claimed she felt as if she had because they took her pants and boots. Only Angelina emphasized the sadness of having been on the mountains, perhaps because she joined when she was only ten years old, after her entire family had been wiped out (Memorias 91). For her, the catastrophe of war’s destruction of life weighed much more than the excitement of self-empowerment. Margarita did enjoy her inner experience, though, expressing what she lived through as if it were a sovereign moment of all desiring subjects. She claimed that, when they had a brief moment to rest, they got very sad because they remembered all the dead, but they were so busy and hungry most of the time, eating only a couple of spoonfuls of pinol a day and exhausted from walking in the muddy jungle and carrying heavy weight in the backpack on top of the weapon and munitions while sleeping in the muck and going often without drinking water, that they had no time to think about themselves (91). In this logic, txitzi’n was an unproductive expenditure. She added that she fought hard from 1981 to 1986. Then, her strength diminished, but she still went to the jungle by Ixcán, near the Mexican border, and on to the Cuchumatán Mountains as squadron leader. In her mind, the hardest combats were those fought at night (Memorias 92). Amanda fought for 18 years. She was first a courier, when aged 13. She was intercepted in a bus once, in San Marcos, but the soldiers did not realized she was the person carrying the embutido (secret document), and they let her go, though they searched all people on the bus. By age 14 she was in the medical services and trained to assist in operations. She became a combatant at age 15. She said that “there was a tailor who sewed the clothes that were needed, olive green suit, pants, shirt, hat, backpack, everything” (Memorias 93).30 Once she was in a patrol that rescued eight men and five children


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being tortured by the army. They took them back and cured them. The soldiers were also captured. They claimed they had been forced to do those vile deeds and joined the guerrillas as well. Amanda concludes, “For myself, when we turned in our rifles I feel [sic] that one no longer has any strength. I don’t feel very good without a weapon . . .” (Memorias 93).31 As Peláez herself points out, it is revolutionary for women in Guatemala, and especially for Maya women, to speak from the positionality of their gender without having as referent exclusively the culturally defined activities women are supposed to perform. The added strength that it means for all of them to consciously know that being women was no impediment for the realization of tasks allegedly reserved for men cannot be underestimated.

Sex and the Mountains Once in the mountains, indigenous women combatants often found male companions, although, in order to avoid promiscuity and anarchy, the guerrillas forbade sexual relations except among married couples. After all, they all had to sleep together, men and women next to each other, even if they were wearing their clothes and combat boots. Women also stated that they wore no panties and no bra, simply because they were out of their reach (Memorias 51). There were some who did not know what menstruation was until another comrade-inarms explained it to them, because the tradition in their community was never to name it until it happened, and then, they were simply told that they were ready to be married and have children without further explanation. Most learned about sexual hygiene among the guerrillas, where they had workshops explaining the human body and the nature of female sexuality to them. They were, for the most part, thankful for all they learned regarding sexual matters in the mountains, a taboo subject in Maya village life.32 Women were friendly and complicit with one another in discouraging younger indigenous recruits from inviting male companions to have sex with them, and in urging them to tell their commander right away if any man made an inappropriate advance. Most acknowledged that their male companions were supportive when they had their menstruation. None deny that at least a few did try to take advantage of women’s bodies, even some commanders. They qualified them as “dirigentes abusivos” (Memorias 52), abusive leaders. But they also pointed out that the women in question never accepted it, got tough, and avoided getting raped and/or acquiescing to the male’s advances. Despite these


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prohibitions, most learned the meaning of sexuality in the mountains: “Some showed knowing smiles when they admitted that they know what sexual pleasure is; others made it explicit that sexual relations are also to be enjoyed, and are not only to have children or to give in to their husband’s desire” (Memorias 53).33 In the end, most of them got married, though with the awareness of their body’s worth and having learned to label it a “personal territory.” A few chose to remain single, a significant break with indigenous tradition, which pressured women to marry. Those who married also transgressed tradition, though, given that they chose their partners, instead of having them chosen by their fathers as in the past. Many of those who got married also tried to avoid pregnancy to extend their combat duty, and learned birth control methods. Nevertheless, they had no access to pills or any other form of contraceptives in the mountains. Indeed, they often had no access to hygienic control of their menstruations either, having at times to march in the jungle while bleeding, wearing the same pair of pants day in and day out. Still, they all claimed they learned their rights regarding sexual and domestic violence, equality between genders, and the number of children they wanted to have. The dichotomy of appropriation/violence generated by the subalternization process of the community as a whole became one of regulation/emancipation within the framework of the guerrilla organization, as alternatives became visible in the eyes of the citizens.

Society Has a Debt to Us When these women turned in their arms, they all did it individually, and at different moments and times. It was not an organizational or a structured decision. Some had lost contact with the guerrillas or chose to abandon their structure after it was decimated. Others could no longer stand the fatigue of decades of war and malnutrition. Often they ended up in opposite corners of the country from those in which most combatants were concentrated. Others joined the CPR, where they spent as little as 3 years and as many as 13. All had great difficulty readapting to civilian life, subsisting in miserable economic conditions, and fearing reprisals from the army. Some stated that the community mocked them, harassed them, or even threatened them. Neither the government nor the URNG came to their aid, as should have been the duty of both institutions under the Peace Treaty agreement. Lucía argued that real combatants like them, who spent over a decade in the mountains and jungle as combatants, were often


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wounded, had their feet destroyed by the long marches, the broken boots, and the constant humidity, and thus no longer had the strength for combat and had requested their release just short of the end of the war. Younger combatants took their place, and they were lucky enough to be serving when the peace accord was signed. They were the ones who received a bonus and scholarships for studies as the “official” combatants listed by their respective organizations. About 3,000 combatants in Lucía’s condition demanded that the URNG recognize them as official ex-combatants, but nothing was done by the high command. As a result, they were abandoned and left destitute, as well as full of rancor, resenting the ex-commanders’ villas in gated communities (Memorias 96). One of them stated: “We had nothing, no clothes nor corte, we were barefoot. When I returned to the village, some friends gave me clothes, some güipiles and ribbon for the hair. We had no blankets nor a grindstone for nixtamal” (Memorias 95).34 They built houses by cutting down trees and scraping to buy aluminum sheets for the roof. They had no medical or psychological support of any sort, despite the war trauma and the trauma of returning to civilian life after years underground. As one of them stated, “When I came out, I am no longer anybody, I have nothing” (96).35 Lucía adds: . . . When Kumool was founded, people from other countries came to ask our word, to take our time, but what was the use, who knows . . . It makes me feel sorry because we have not all been recognized as excombatants. It hurts a lot . . . When I remember what happened I get sad and disappointed, I’m crying and that sucks. (96–97)36

Margarita was captured by the army. They took everything from her, tied her hands behind her back, and tortured her. She was not raped, but they threatened her with it. After eight days, she escaped, and in the wilderness found traces of the guerrillas. Despite the fact that she skinned her hands, feet, and legs trying to catch up with them, when she finally found the guerrillas, they did not believe her story. She was sent to the CPR without a weapon, “though I wanted to be armed to defend myself” (Memorias 97). She felt rejected by the URNG. Nonetheless, she said she enjoys talking with other women ex-combatants about their feats. Feliciana recognized that war is costly and painful, but she also thought it was useful, because they learned Spanish, and people learned to raise their heads. However, she resented that some villagers call people like her poxnai, the name


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of a weed that grows in the mountains. The army used that name to insultingly name all those villagers who had joined the guerrillas. To defend themselves, they now joke about being poxnai, turning the word’s meaning inside out as has been done with other insulting epithets elsewhere. Feeling ignored by all sides, the ex-combatants founded the Kumool association to press for their rights. Amalia plainly stated that they were ignored during demobilization and that they felt the URNG used them “as a ladder,” that is, their commanders stepped on them to get to the highest positions of power in the country.37 Feliciana stated this about Kumool: “We are like in a family and we make petitions for everyone, although not much comes, we only receive a little. Here we get happy [sic] because we see each other again, we all fought against the armies [sic], we call each other compañeros, the same as in the guerrilla, because we are equal” (Memorias 98).38 Kumool has expanded its base to include not only men in general but also ex-civil patrolmen and even ex-soldiers recruited by force into the army ranks.39 All the members interviewed by Peláez’s team spoke of wanting to be recognized as “alzadas” amid feelings of frustration when they remembered that latecomers to the guerrillas were given a credential and compensation as part of the official demobilization process. In their understanding, they sacrificed the prime of their lives for the betterment of Guatemalan society, and they all felt that they are owed a minimal recognition for their efforts as an act of justice. One of them even drew a radical conclusion: “The war isn’t over yet, it just calmed down, because the poor people are still there, and so is the army; it’s true that our situation changed a little, because before they were persecuting us, and now they are not” (101).40 Assessing the present situation, Tomasa Jorge Ajanel stated emphatically that “without women there is no revolution” (Memorias 103).41 María Itzep Acabal added that among the guerrillas they developed their thirst for knowledge. They did not have time to study because of all the military activities, but they came to appreciate it, and they are transmitting that sentiment to their children. She claimed that “la guerrilla nos despertó” (the guerrilla woke us up; Memorias 104), and added that if women have the freedom to fight, they then have the rights to participate in all activities, anywhere. To her it means freedom for women and time to do constructive tasks beyond the traditional chores assigned to women. Santa Anastasia Tzoc Velásquez claimed they now do some of the work men used to do, but men never do women’s work. Catarina Matom Velasco added that for her the war was worth it, because discrimination was worse before, especially


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against indigenous children that spoke no Spanish. She also claimed that now women have the right to belong to organizations, and that all children, boys and girls, go to school, whereas in the past only boys went (Memorias 106). Juana Santiago Chel said that now, they have to see things with their own eyes, prior to giving their consent. Elena Cobo Gómez stated that women have to be autonomous, and that she explains to her daughters their rights and their freedom to be whomever they want. As Kumool, they demand access to jobs, health resources, scholarships for children, housing, fertilizers, and land so as to be able to emerge as communities from their present economic state and fully develop their capacities. For women, specifically, they demand a literacy campaign, weaving materials, workshops to learn miscellaneous crafts, scholarships for activists to professionalize their leadership qualities, and training in community health and in remunerative activities to be able to generate their own income. The Kumool project here asserts a logic of difference and possibility against the hegemonizing forces that Ladinos, right and left, have exercised during the decade after peace was signed, in complicity with neoliberal ideology. In Arturo Escobar’s words, the members of this group are trying “to make visible a landscape of cultural, ecological and economic differences” (18), that, by its very seemingly uncanny nature, comes together with alternative projects of feminism around the politics of place, themselves anchored in ethnic identity. This phenomenon alone points to the necessity of reading ethnicity in different registers to accommodate its very heterogeneity. As I have argued elsewhere, demands such as those presented by the Kumool women make it evident that alternative knowledge producers were transforming themselves and becoming the providers of a self-generated cognition, one originating in sites that were neither traditional nor conventional.42 Their symbolic imaginaries have successfully problematized the colonial nature of Latin American nationstates and evidenced the existence of conflictive historical processes that could not be solved within a diversity of homogeneous ethnic cultures, but instead ensured aporetic conflicts and alterities.

Discourse Itself A short reflection should be made on the nature of the Ixil women’s discursivity. Whereas all the quotes cited on Peláez’s book are in Spanish, and are also the direct transcription of these women’s words, it should not be forgotten that they are Ixil women, for whom


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Spanish is their second language, if not their third or fourth. Their own Spanish is the product of an intercultural dialogue, and of the intersubjectivity of Mayas and Ladinos, that is, their relationality in questions of interethnic dialogue, one that is mediated by the phantasm of race. In the eyes of many Ladinos, the grammatical mistakes made by Mayas when speaking Spanish chart the effects of racialized difference in the production of their own imaginary. In their eyes, Maya Spanish is quaint, when not “cute” or mocked, but it is also always wrong.43 Its reading, therefore, should be complemented with an analysis of the subject formation of Ladinos themselves. Maya discursivity in Spanish is one in which racialized subjects and Ladinoness are conjointly produced. When reading the Maya use of Spanish, an interaffectivity and intercorporeality unfolds among indigenous and nonindigenous subjects, a relationship already embedded within the cultural and historical specificity of Latin American indigenismo. The repudiation of both the continuity and the persistence of “bad Spanish” is also a product of unresolved Ladino anxiety. But these traces of oral performativity remind us of the transactional and transitive nature of “telling testimonio”—the fact that it constitutes a social exchange of telling and listening. The original performativity of the text foreshadows its reanimation in the act of reading, which convokes indigenous and nonindigenous peoples alike. This accounts for some of its alleged charm, and for my translating it with its grammatical mistakes, the “border” which, as Taussig suggests, emits rather than contains turbulent social, historical, and psychic forces.

Conclusions Peláez’s text clearly functions as memory and dialogue, offering a necessary space for personal remembrance. Ultimately, with the example of the Kumool women, we are presented with a new framework within the geopolitics of knowledge, one demanding respect for pluralizations of subaltern difference anchored in gender and ethnic difference. This framework produces a place-based epistemology that offers a new theoretical and political logic. It confirms that heightening social conflict, new citizens’ protagonism, and the abandonment of traditional political party practices can lead to ontological-political decentering of modern politics, in the words of Marisol de la Cadena (2007), conjoining what Arturo Escobar calls an alternative modernization with a decolonial project, where what is at stake is the end of coloniality. Maya women, connecting with Ladino women through organic organizations such as Agrarian Platform or Red de Mujeres, but also


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analogically through webs of signification of which Peláez’s edited book is a part, are quietly breaking with the coloniality of politics that censored the presence of subalternized indigenous subjects as validated citizens and granted the exclusionary monopoly of creating national imaginaries to lettered, preferentially upper-class, Ladino men. The exclusionary character of this monopoly is at the core of the modern epistemological disputes between Ladino and Maya regimes of truth and knowledge. The traditional Guatemalan left fell on the side of Ladinos in their understanding of modernity, while also enlisting and embracing Mayas for their cause. Mayas, however, were no innocent victims caught between two fires. They clearly understood the historical opportunity offered to them to undermine the pillars that sustained the system that oppressed them, and opened up a new epistemic perspective by showing that allegedly premodern subjects were perfectly capable of grasping all the tools that modernity could offer them and of asserting their difference to transform themselves and reimagine their communities within the framework of a legitimate political conflict. This has become an epochal marker for the country and for indigenous peoples in the Americas, initiating a systematic reconversion of the very nature and viability of Latin American nation-states. In the aftermath of 37 years of civil war and 10 years of alleged peace that offered them no benefits whatsoever, Kumool women gave flesh and blood to the colonial difference and global coloniality by coming up with a new postwar imaginary that, however tentative and economically precarious it may seem in its present conditions, enables effective and practical resistance to the seemingly overpowering logic of neoliberal globalization. They are evidence that subaltern subjects were not subsumed within the Washington consensus, but sought alternative possibilities. Their blueprint is an alternative vision for the construction of potential postcapitalist, postliberal, and poststatist societies. Finally, this particular text shows us that testimonial traits have not entirely disappeared from the horizon of literary expectations, but, rather, have taken new unexpected turns that distance them from their initial theorization in the mid-1990s, one that includes indigenous women’s historical experiences and gendered relations.

Notes 1. See Stoll’s Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of all Poor Guatemalans; Carlos Sabino’s Guatemala, la historia silenciada; and the recent interviews by Ana Monroy with Mario Roberto Morales, in “Verdad


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2.

3. 4. 5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

10. 11.

12. 13.

A rturo A r i as y veracidad de un testimonio,” for conservative viewpoints on the Guatemalan war. URNG stands for Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity in its Spanish acronym. It grouped all three guerrilla organizations—the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP), the Revolutionary Organization of People in Arms (ORPA), and the Rebel Armed Forces (FAR)— and included a symbolic presence of the Guatemalan Workers Party (Communist). See Gustavo Lins Ribeiro (2006). See Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ “Beyond Abyssal Thinking.” Peláez’s Memorias rebeldes contra el olvido: Paasantzila Txumb’al Ti’ Sortzeb’al K’u’l itself states that no other text gathers the lived experiences of gendered and ethnicized subjects within a clandestine military structure (18). Stoltz-Chinchilla’s book has the merit of being the first one to rescue women’s participation in Guatemalan political and historical events. Whereas Peláez directed the project, she cowrote it with Rosalinda Hernández Alarcón, Andrea Carrillo Samayoa, Jacqueline Torres Urízar, and Ana López Molina. ADIQ is the Spanish acronym for Association for the Integral Development of Quiché, the Guatemalan province with predominantly Maya descent located at the center of the country’s civil war. While most of its indigenous population speaks K’iche’, other Mayan languages include Ixil, dominant in the northern triangle of the villages of Nebaj, Chajul, and Cotzal, as well as Uspantek in the town of Uspantán area and Sakapultek in Sacapulas. “Kumool” means compañera-compañero in Ixil. A compañero is a fellow team member, a comrade, were it not for the overtly Communist connotation of the latter word. Comrade is actually translated as “camarada” in Spanish, and has a decisive Communist inflection. The “Women’s Network” includes Kaqchiquel, K’iche’, Ixil, and Ladino (mestizo) women working within the Agrarian Platform. AVANCSO was founded in 1986 as a private think tank to relaunch the Guatemalan social sciences after the army massacres had decimated social scientists in the country. Led since its inception by Clara Arenas, it suffered in 1990 the assassination of its top researcher, Myrna Mack, killed by members of the Presidential Guard for her research among Mayas living in the “communities of peoples in resistance.” Peláez moved in August 2008 to the Maya University in Quintana Roo, Mexico. Personal communication. November 24, 2007, 12:56 P.M. Alternative ethics is used here in contrast to mores and its cognates morality and moralism, and in association with a tactics of boundarycrossing, political “incorrectness,” transgression against entrenched intellectual parameters, and assumptions. However, it is also an


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14.

15.

16. 17.

18.

19. 20. 21.

22.

31

alternative code of ethics articulated within the boundaries of Maya cosmovisión (“worldview”). Agrarian Platform is a political network concerned with building a social movement that struggles for structural change in the countryside and for rural development, linking local struggles with national agendas. It was created in 2000, and presently groups 19 peasant organizations. Among its founders were AVANCSO, the Indigenous National Peasant Coordinating Committee, and the Inter-Diocesis Pastoral for Land, a Catholic organization. The municipality of Nebaj is located in northwestern El Quiché department and, with the municipalities of Chajul and Cotzal, forms the Ixil region. It has a surface area of 607 sq.km. The Population Census of 1994 placed the total population of Nebaj at 33,795 inhabitants (INE: 1995), of which 87.7 per cent were indigenous, nearly all of them of the Ixil sociolinguistic group. In “Sebastián Guzmán, principal de principales,” written anonymously in the name of the EGP by Spanish priest Javier Gurriarán for Polémica magazine, he stated that the Ixil region was virtually unknown to the rest of the country up until the end of the nineteenth century. This long-standing isolation was broken at the beginning of the twentieth century with the arrival of a group of Spaniards, expelled after Cuban independence, who settled mostly in the Nebaj area. Some years later, as a result of the Mexican revolution, a group of Mexicans also settled in the region. From the outset, both groups monopolized political power and accumulated wealth through their business ventures and from the production and sale of coffee. The book was financed by the Lutheran Federation. It was one of the last minifinancing projects destined to this part of the country. In the original in Spanish: “ . . . es importante que la juventud la conozca y así tenga una idea de cómo pasaron las cosas.” All translations are mine. To recall the debate on testimonio, perhaps the best texts to illuminate the issue would be Georg Gugelberger’s edited volume The Real Thing: Testimonial Discourse and Latin America (1996) and my edited one The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy (2001). See Vinebaum. See Escobar. When speaking of the war, the women used only their pseudonyms. When speaking of the present and future, they used their legal names. In the original Spanish: “Mi pensamiento fue los ejércitos tienen que pagar porque mataron a mi hermano. Tenía como 15 años. . . . Mi pensamiento también fue tengo que defender mi vida, aunque sabía que me podía pasar lo mismo que a mi hermano, pero si muero no va a ser como él, mi hermano no sabía portar armas. . . . Pero si yo voy a morir que sea por algo, por defender mi vida, la de otros niños y jóvenes.”


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23. In the original Spanish: “Nosotros nos salimos a la montaña para salvar la vida. Estuve tres años como combatiente, en ese tiempo sólo comíamos hierbas, creo que tenía como 13 años. Yo me fui a la guerrilla con mi papá y un mi hermano, pero ellos murieron en la guerra, eran combatientes, sólo yo me salvé.” 24. In the original Spanish: “De primero me sentía mal con pantalón, porque nunca me había vestido así, solo usaba corte. Me sentía como fea en el pantalón. Poco a poco me acostumbré. Me gustó.” Corte is a wrap-around woven skirt, typical of Maya women, made on treadle looms. As used, the two ends of long panels 35–50 inches wide are seamed together to form a tube. The woman steps inside this tube and folds the material in a complicated manner to form the skirt. This results in a fairly thick and heavy garment. 25. Due to chronic malnutrition, most indigenous women seldom reach five feet in height. 26. In the original Spanish: “Si hay combate voy a mirar si ya vinieron todos, ninguno se quedó herido, si alguno está, voy corriendo a avisar y se va a cargar al herido. . . . Como enlace, cuando llegamos a nuestro campamento, el mando hace una carta y yo la llevo. . . . Yo pasaba solita, con el peligro de encontrar al ejército en el camino, iba con poquito pinol (maíz tostado) si no con hierba o camote cocido. Había veces que no hay nada, sólo chile, y así nos íbamos a combate.” 27. When the army conducted its massive offensive against the Maya villages, hundreds of thousands of peasants fled to all corners of Guatemala and to the neighboring countries. A relatively small percentage of totally dispossessed people escaped into the Guatemalan jungle. In these inhospitable areas 23,000 people went into hiding and endured a decade of hardship to survive. Gradually, they organized themselves into groups of communities, calling themselves “communities of peoples in resistance” (CPR). 28. In the original Spanish: “Yo estuve 20 años en la montaña. Lo que aprendimos no es en balde, no ganamos, pero algo fue lo que aprendimos. Para nosotras nos dejó algo la lucha, creo que ahora no es fácil que nos dejemos, estamos dispuestas a luchar y participar.” 29. In the original Spanish: “Hacíamos hostigamiento, aniquilamiento y recuperación de armas. Yo sé hacer todo eso.” 30. In the original Spanish: “Había sastre y hacía la ropa que se necesitaba, traje verde olivo, pantalón, camisa, gorra, mochila, todo.” 31. In the original Spanish: “Para mí, cuando se entregaron los fusiles siento que ya no se tiene fuerza. No me siento muy bien sin arma . . . ” 32. Other Maya women have taken to teaching sexuality and documenting it among Mayas. The best known is Emma Chirix’s book Alas y Raíces: Afectividad de las mujeres mayas. Rik’in ruxik’ y ruxe’il Ronojel kajowab’al ri mayab’ taq ixoqi’.


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33. In the original Spanish: “Algunas mostraron sonrisas pícaras al reconocer que saben lo que es el placer sexual, otras hicieron explícito que las relaciones sexuales también son para disfrutar, y no únicamente para tener hijos y dar gusto al marido.” 34. In the original Spanish: “No teníamos nada, ni ropa ni corte, estábamos descalzos. Cuando regresé al pueblo, unos amigos me dieron ropa, unos güipiles y cinta para la cabeza. No teníamos chamarras ni piedra para nixtamal.” A güipil, or huipil, consists of two back-strap woven panels with geometric and zoomorphic designs in vibrant colors. A decorative randa (coloured strip of embroidered cloth) joins the two pieces. Maya women wear them instead of Western blouses. Nixtamal is the treated corn used to make masa and hominy for tortillas, the basic food-staple for Mayas. Nixtamal is dried field corn soaked and then heated in a solution of slaked lime and water. Slaked lime, calcium hydroxide, is generally available in the form of “builder’s lime”—not to be confused with unslaked lime, calcium oxide, which cannot be used for making nixtamal. It is the lime that contributes to the unique taste and texture of corn tortillas. 35. In the original Spanish: “Cuando salí, ya no soy nada, no tengo nada . . .” 36. In the original Spanish: “Cuando se fundó Kumool, vinieron personas de otros países a pedir nuestra palabra, a quitar nuestro tiempo, pero de qué sirvió, saber. . . . Me da lástima porque no todos hemos sido reconocidos como ex combatientes. Duele muchísimo. . . . Al recordarme de lo que pasó me pongo triste y decepcionada, estoy llorando y eso es una chingadera.” 37. Indeed, since 1996, numerous ex-commanders have been government ministers or congressmen or have run for president, though the two most important ones, Ricardo Ramírez of the EGP and Rodrigo Asturias of ORPA, both died of various health complications. Most surviving commanders do live in the most exclusive areas of Guatemala City. 38. In the original Spanish: “Estamos como en una familia y hacemos solicitud para todos, aunque no llega mucho, sólo recibimos un poquito. Aquí nos ponemos contentos porque nos vemos otra vez, todos combatimos contra los ejércitos, nos nombramos compañeros, igual que en la guerrilla, porque somos iguales.” 39. According to Victoria Sanford, the Civil Patrols themselves constituted an integral part of the army’s counterinsurgency campaign. Forced participation in the civil patrols often took the form of torturing, assassinating, and massacring innocent people under army order. Those civil patrollers who refused to comply were always tortured and often killed. See “Civil Patrol Massacres and the ‘Gray Zone’ of Justice.” Regarding indigenous soldiers, there was no official draft in Guatemala prior to the peace accords. Soldiers were forcefully recruited in three Guatemalan villages in the aftermath of local ferias (yearly festivities dedicated to


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40.

41.

42. 43.

A rturo A r i as honor the town’s emblematic saint), often when they were passed out drunk. In the original Spanish, “La guerra no se ha terminado, se calmó, porque ahí están los pobres todavía y el ejército también; es cierto que nuestra situación cambió un poco, pues antes nos perseguían y ahorita no.” When speaking of the war, the women used only their pseudonyms. When speaking of the present and future, they used their legal names. See Arias, “The Ghosts of the Past.” Diane Nelson has an entire chapter on jokes about Menchú’s Spanish in her book A Finger in the Wound.

References Andersen, Nicolas. Guatemala, escuela revolucionaria de nuevos hombres. Mexico D.F: Nuestro Tiempo, 1982. Print. Arias, Arturo. “The Ghosts of the Past, Human Dignity, and the Collective Need for Reparation.” Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies 5, no. 2 (July 2010): 207–18. Print. ———, ed. The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001. Print. Berger, Susan A. Guatemaltecas: The Women’s Movement 1986 –2003. Austin: U of Texas P, 2006. Print. Burgos-Debray, Elisabeth. I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala. London: Verso, 1984. Print. Cadena, Marisol de la. “El Movimiento Indígena-Popular en los Andes y la Pluralización de la Política: Una Hipótesis de Trabajo.” LASA Forum 38, no. 4 (2007): 36–38. Print. Chiriz, Emma. Alas y Raíces: Afectividad de las mujeres mayas. Rik’in ruxik’ y ruxe’il Ronojel kajowab’al ri mayab’ taq ixoqi’. Guatemala: Grupo de Mujeres Mayas Kaqla, 2003. Print. Dirlik, Arif. “Race Talk, Race and Contemporary Racism.” PMLA 123, no. 5 (2008): 1363–79. Print. Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres (EGP). “Sebastián Guzmán, principal de principales.” Polémica 10–11, ICADIS [Costa Rica], July–October 1983: 87–92. Print. Escobar, Arturo. “ ‘Mundos y conocimientos de otro modo: El programa de investigación de modernidad/colonialidad latinoamericano.” Tabula Rasa, January–December 2003: 51–86. Print. Gugelberger, Georg M., ed. The Real Thing: Testimonial Discourse and Latin America. Durham and London: Duke UP, 1996. Print. Lins Ribeiro, Gustavo and Arturo Escobar, eds. Introduction. World Anthropologies. Disciplinary Transformations within Systems of Power. New York: Berg, 2006. Print.


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Monroy, Ana. “Verdad y veracidad de un testimonio: Entrevista a Mario Roberto Morales.” www.lahora.com.gt. La Hora [Guatemala] October 25, 2008. Web. Nelson, Diane M. A Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quincentennial Guatemala. Berkeley: U of California P, 1999. Print. Peláez, Ligia, ed. Memorias rebeldes contra el olvido: Paasantzila Txumb’al Ti’ Sortzeb’al K’u’l. Guatemala: AVANCSO, 2008. Print. Ribeiro, Gustavo Lins. “World Anthropologies: Cosmopolitics for a New Global Scenario in Anthropology.” Critique of Anthropology 26, no. 4 (December 2006): 363–86. Print. Sabino, Carlos. Guatemala, la historia silenciada (1944 –1989). Vols. I and II. Guatemala: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2007. Print. Sanford, Victoria. “Civil Patrol Massacres and the ‘Gray Zone’ of Justice.” Latin American Studies Association Congress. Miami. March 2000. Presentation. Sousa Santos, Boaventura de. “Beyond Abyssal Thinking: From Global Lines to Ecologies of Knowledges.” www.eurozine.com. Eurozine, June 29, 2007. Web. Stoll, David. Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of all Poor Guatemalans. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1998. Print. Stoltz-Chinchilla, Norma. Nuestras utopías: Mujeres guatemaltecas del siglo XX. Guatemala: Agrupación de Mujeres Tierra Viva, 1998. Print. Taussig, Michael. Mimesis and Alterity. London: Routledge, 1993. Print. Vinebaum, Lisa. “Holocaust Representation from History to Postmemory.” anaxagoras.concordia.ca. November 2006. Web.


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Ag a i nst Viol e nc e a n d O bl i v ion: Th e C a se of C ol om bi a’s Dis a ppe a r e d María Victoria Uribe Alarcón

T

he murders and massacres that have taken place in Colombia since 19801 have sought to consolidate territory and define borders between guerilla groups (the FARC, and the ELN), paramilitary groups (the AUC), and drug traffickers who have disputed the control of extensive tracts of Colombia’s territory.2 The country finds itself immersed in a confrontation in which the majority of those killed are civilians. It is dealing with an internal conflict whose methods of extermination are not only punitive but also preventative, and are directed against those who presumably are or could possibly become members of enemy factions. This is a war that annihilates many who are not a part of it; a “dirty war” in which anything goes, including forced disappearances, mutilation, torture, genocide, massacres, and extrajudicial executions. One of the most common procedures utilized to dispose of unwanted bodies and erase any evidence has been to throw the corpses into Colombia’s rivers, a custom that has been practiced in the country for several decades. Major river arteries such as the Cauca and Magdalena, both running in a south-north direction, have been truly converted into moving cemeteries for unidentified bodies, which are known in Colombia by the abbreviation NN. These are letters of infamy, pain, and oblivion. “The Magdalena River is the largest Colombian cemetery,” says Amparo Pérez, mother of twelve children and a widow since paramilitaries took her husband, Juan de Dios Santana, killed him, and tossed his body in the river.3 This woman’s story is one of many that circulate in towns and along the riverbanks, among those who have


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M a r í a Vic t or i a Ur i be A l a r c ón

seen their children disappear, and parents and siblings who never hear from them again. The practice of making bodies disappear by throwing them into the river is not new in Colombia; nevertheless, it is a dehumanizing practice that intensified with the growth of paramilitary groups around 1980. Due to the growing number of disappeared persons, a product of paramilitary raids, the cemeteries of many towns have a large number of tombs marked with the initials “NN,” indicating that they are the graves of anonymous and unknown individuals. The diffuse terror that started to impose itself during the decade of the 1980s left in its wake a great number of common graves, individual and collective, bone deposits in pits and dumpsters, and numerous tombs often located in the rear sections of town cemeteries. There is no reliable data on the number of persons that have disappeared during the wars in Colombia. There could be ten to twenty thousand or more. Some of them are listed on institutional rosters, but thousands more only remain in the memory of their family members, since we are talking about people of limited resources in remote areas of the country. A corpse taken by the river is a lost trace of human life. This is how the armed groups that have used (and continue to use) this practice became convinced that if they dig a grave in the earth, they are leaving evidence of their crime. It is because of this that they throw the corpses into the rivers, emptying their stomachs and filling them with stones so bodies cannot resurface. In this way they erase the remnants of their atrocities. According to the director of Medicina Legal, an entity responsible for exhuming and identifying the remains of the NNs in Colombia, the search process for an NN does not have a linear structure but is akin to a skein of thread whose end may be anywhere: sometimes in the confession of a paramilitary who was drawn to Justice and Peace Law,4 sometimes in the accusation of a family member, sometimes in the testimony of an informant.5 In general the tragic figure of the NN in Colombia is the prototype of a kind of death for which no amount of words can give meaning; nevertheless there are people who defy this presupposition, the majority of whom are women. In this chapter I will analyze three cases that take place in very different geographic regions but that have in common the spontaneous rescue of NNs by people who feel a moral obligation to impede the disappearance of these beings in a sea of oblivion. In Puerto Berrío, a port located on the banks of the Magdalena River, the poor adopt the NN through spontaneous gestures that are not mediated by the church or by any other institution. We see that these adoptive persons


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attempt to restore the unknown stranger to his/her condition as a person. In contrast, what happens in the small town of Beltrán, located on the banks of the Cauca River, is a patent case of dehumanization and absolute indifference toward the anonymous cadavers that are carried along by the river. Finally, in a cemetery in Riohacha, one woman on her own has for forty years kept watch over unidentified dead bodies, while confronted with all types of difficulties, depending only on her personal commitment and the support of her family to carry out her humanitarian efforts.

The Symbolic Rescue of Souls from the Sea of Oblivion The first case that I would like to discuss takes place in the Departamento of Antioquia,6 along the warm banks of the Middle Magdalena River, specifically in a town called Puerto Berrío that has around forty thousand inhabitants and that has been thrashed by a social and political conflict that goes back to the mid-twentieth century. During the period of La Violencia in the 1950s, the Conservative Party maintained political power and territorial control in the area through its power over the police force and local hired assassins. By 1965 the guerilla group ELN appeared in the region, which was replaced around 1973 by the FARC. The FARC was the hegemonic power in this area until 1983, when paramilitary groups began to take over. In terms of the historical context of this area, labor strikes and peasant uprisings led by the Asociación Nacional de Usuarios Campesinos (National Association of Peasant Workers) or ANUC were common. Willing to contain insurgency, Colombia’s Armed Forces installed military bases and battalions in the area. Their goal was to hold the advance of some peasant communities and Marxist guerilla groups that during the 1970s and 1980s had gained power in this region. Paramilitary groups developed later, during the 1980s, and were supported by the Army Bárbula Battalion and the Fourteenth Army Brigade. The objective of their counterinsurgent actions was the liquidation of the militants and sympathizers of the Communist Party and other leftist parties such as the Unión Patriótica Obrera (Patriotic Workers’ Union). They also sought to eliminate affiliated peasant leaders, mayors, and town council members through cleansing operations consisting of individual and collective assassinations, tortures, and forced disappearances.7 Puerto Berrío is, thus, a town of witnesses and survivors of this horror.


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The Fourteenth Brigade, which has jurisdiction over the Middle Magdalena River, has been installed in the old Hotel Magdalena. The building was declared a national monument, and its architecture reveals the times of the port’s splendor when the Magdalena River was the main route of communication between the interior of the country and the Caribbean coast. Currently, Puerto Berrío is a town inhabited by cattle owners and paramilitaries―sullen people of few words―who live alongside poor people, fishermen, and victims of violence being the most prominent. The city cemetery has a great number of tombs marked with the initials NN. This is due, in part, to the above-mentioned historical violence, but mostly to the number of cadavers―coming from various parts of the country―that become stuck in riverbanks at the base of the town. Many of the cemetery’s tombs house the bodies of individuals that pertained to labor unions and communal action groups, who were killed in raids carried out by paramilitary forces. Others house the bodies of people killed in fighting between the army, guerilla groups, and paramilitary organizations. These are corpses that were never claimed by their families and who were buried without identification. Their individual tombs are rudimentary, and placed next to each other they form a large wall that provides the material basis for a series of symbolic operations, performed by the poor inhabitants of this village. The wall is made up of a group of brightly colored rectangular tombs, upon which handwritten texts, one on top of the other, form a true palimpsest.8 The wall represents the silent resistance to violence, terror, and oblivion of the poor inhabitants of Puerto Berrío. Something develops on this wall that is not evident at first glance: a web of social meaning that is profoundly humanizing. In fact, the low-income inhabitants of Puerto Berrío adopt the NNs by marking their tombs with the word “escogido” (“chosen”). This word indicates that the NN now has a patron. The adoptive citizens establish a reciprocal agreement with the NNs that involves an exchange: the NNs are asked to grant the wishes of their adopters in exchange for their nurture, which takes the form of painting the tomb, offering flowers, and placing commemorative plaques that document the favors received. The pact is sustained by a popular belief that obliges the believers to provide respite to the souls of the NNs, through prayers that seek to alleviate their suffering. The adoption is temporary and allows the NN to fulfill its role, to adopt a new identity and become part of the world of the living. When the soul grants a favor, whoever has requested the favor later


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promises to provide housing in an ossuary and gives the deceased his or her surname, thus converting the dead into part of his or her family. Thus the ossuary and a new name convert the NN into a person again. During our investigation we conducted a series of interviews with people who were at the section of the cemetery where the NNs are buried. One of our interviewees told us that he had marked the tomb of an NN with an “X,” and that for months he had been asking favors of the deceased without any results. Six months later another person arrived and chose the same NN. This new person soon received an answer to his prayers. The first interviewee told us that he was not sure if the soul had not granted his wishes due to his mistrust or lack of faith. Another man told us he had chosen several NNs, giving them his surname; he visits them periodically and converses candidly with them. With the two million pesos he won in the lottery, thanks to the generosity of the soul of one of his chosen NNs, he had the headstones of their tombs engraved. Satisfied with the favors he had received, the man intended to move the remains to an ossuary in about three years.

Figure 2.1

The tomb of an NN in the cemetery of Puerto Berrío


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Each year in November there is a ritual that takes place in the cemetery around the figure of the animero, or soul-keeper, an institution quite possibly of colonial origin. The animero is a person from the village who is entrusted the keys of the cemetery by the parish priest, so that he can care for the souls of the deceased during this particular month. Generally it is someone who has made a religious vow or who is repaying a previously received favor. The townspeople confirm that currently the animero is not as respected as he was in the past, when nobody would dare to look him in the eye. In contrast, today many people go out with him to tend to the souls while laughing and chatting along. Each night in November the animero enters the cemetery at midnight, dressed in a cape that covers his face, and accompanied by the townspeople, he leads a few prayers. Once completed, he begins a frenetic run through the disorganized narrow paths that separate the tombs. After knocking on some of the headstones to call the spirits, the animero leaves the cemetery and leads the souls on a stroll around town. An hour later he returns to the cemetery with the souls, who then return to their tombs. Incorporating them into their lives and giving them social space, the inhabitants of Puerto Berrío infringe on the mandate by the perpetrators of war that would condemn the NNs to ostracism and oblivion.

Dehumanization on the Banks of the Cauca River The Cauca River, like so many other rivers in Colombia, is a watery tomb in which many victims of the armed conflict have been lost forever. There are stories detailing this type of action that go back to the 1950s—during La Violencia. Recently the riverside population has seen a large number of mutilated bodies floating down the river, coming from the northern municipalities of the Departamento of El Valle, which is an area under the control of the Norte del Valle drug cartel. Beltrán is a small settlement in the Municipality of Marsella in the Departamento of Risaralda, located on the banks of the Cauca River. Its social structure is precarious, only able to maintain a few houses and a small school. There is a ravine near the school, below which the Cauca River forms a whirlpool that traps anything that passes by. Among the debris carried by the river, which includes plastic dolls, pieces of furniture, mattresses, and pieces of timber and clothing, it is common to see human bodies. This place is known as the “kid’s store” since it is where the schoolchildren go when a body arrives. There they fish out all sorts of broken toys and pieces


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of objects and clothing with the aid of long sticks. Such is the level of familiarity that these children have with decomposed and mutilated corpses that they have invented a range of macabre jokes that they use among themselves. In the late 1980s and early years of the 1990s, several massacres and individual assassinations took place in the towns of Trujillo, Riofrío, and Bolívar in the Northern Valley. The people of Beltrán say that during this period up to twenty cadavers arrived in a single day. Nowadays, while there may be no highly violent situation in any location, bodies continue to arrive. One of the persons we interviewed claimed that between the months of September and October of 2008 at least fifteen people had come down the river during the daytime, adding that he doesn’t know how many would arrive at night when no one can see them. During this time period the bodies that became trapped in the riverbanks were removed in order to perform autopsies. This was done according to the regular autopsy procedures, but in a very precarious way, since they did not have the necessary equipment and the craniums had to be opened with a stone. Nevertheless, an inquiry was performed in which medical practitioners described the characteristics of the bodies, the clothing, the apparent cause of death, sex, etc. They even took a photograph, an act usually performed by Nahun Guerrero, a resident of the area whom the authorities paid for a copy of each picture. Guerrero has accumulated a great number of photographs for all the NNs recovered in Beltrán. His photographic archive of NNs is actually in danger since he has no ability to preserve the images; they are at the Alto Cauca Mayor’s Office, in complete disorder, stored in files that are exposed to humidity, vermin, and bats. It is probable that this archive will soon disappear completely, since there is no one in charge of its conservation, and the environmental conditions in this location are quite damaging. Nahun keeps in his house, however, a great number of copies of the photos he has taken over the years, but he has no information about the bodies, nor is he sure whether he should even keep the images. In his case we are dealing with a visual record of the horrors of war. Around 1992 there was an important change in the way in which people dealt with the NN cadavers that arrived in Beltrán. In the previous years, the people who performed the autopsies wrote on the death certificate that the place of death was “undetermined.” Following an order from the Departamento Administrativo Nacional de Estadísticas (National Administrative Department of Statistics, or DANE), the place of death for these bodies suddenly started to be identified as the Municipality of Marsella. This legislation increased


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the amount of homicides registered in this municipality, which led the local authorities—the Mayor’s Office and the police—to prohibit the bodies from being extracted from the river. To this mandate we should add another important factor: Marsella is a town that is greatly influenced by two drug capos, high-ranking narcotics smugglers, known as Rasguño and Macaco, who are natives of the area. Both own land in the region. Additionally, other capos who no longer actively smuggle drugs but who still possess large fortunes continue to impose their will in Marsella. These men own land on both banks of the river and have prohibited the rescue of bodies that become trapped in the swirling waters. For this reason, fishermen and farmers in the area have been ordered to push the bodies away so that they continue to flow downstream. During almost the entire decade of the 1990s, a woman working as a secretary at the Alto Cauca Mayor’s Office defied the orders of these town bullies, in a humanitarian effort that has now been permanently interrupted. She told us that she felt a moral duty toward these people and their families and that because of this feeling she always tried to correctly register and archive the arrival of these bodies—in fact, she organized most of the above-mentioned archives. In order to prevent this woman from continuing her work, the local administration neglected to provide her with adequate materials, and she was eventually so poorly treated that she was forced to resign in 2001. Nevertheless, since her husband is a fisherman, she would often accompany him on his fishing trips, and when she saw a body, she would take it out with her own hands and notify the authorities, forcing them to follow the necessary procedures. She tells how she received death threats calling for her to stop performing this task. The threats culminated in 2005 when her house near the river was set ablaze. Additionally she was told that if she did not leave Beltrán, the next attack would be directly on her life or that of her husband, for which she felt compelled to move far from the riverbank, to a house an hour away from town. The Colombia Ministry of Culture declared the Marsella cemetery a national historical and architectural monument. After this declaration, the town’s Sociedad de Ornato (Adornment Association) ordered that the cemetery be painted. This act erased the data accumulated over more than 400 bodies that had been buried as NNs and whose only form of identification consisted of the few pieces of information inscribed on their tombstones, such as their sex and the year they arrived in Beltrán. When this information was lost no one took the precaution of making a map that would allow a future identification


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of the remains, thus permanently erasing what little individuality they had. In addition, it has been speculated that in each common grave there may be up to twenty bodies buried together. The people that inhabit the town of Marsella have a relationship of rejection and exclusion toward the unidentified bodies that float down the river. These bodies elicit feelings of contempt as revealed in phrases such as “this isn’t our problem, these dead aren’t from here,” “the drowned [this is how they refer to them] are a problem of public health for the citizens,” and “it is their fault that our town has been stigmatized.” And all of this has translated into the fact that currently, locals only extract from the river those bodies for whose recovery there is a reward; the rest are pulled out (if some of their possessions are considered of value) and then returned to the river so that they can continue their trip toward the sea. The town’s population feels no moral commitment toward these NNs; they don’t even ask who might have killed these people. Even school-age children have a completely dehumanized relationship with the bodies; they are able to extract them, play with them, make macabre jokes about them, and return them to the river.

Cemetery G ENTE C OMO UNO in Riohacha, Guajira The initiative to bury the NNs in Riohacha’s main cemetery is due to the personal initiative of a middle-aged woman named Sonia. For forty years she has been fighting to find a dignified burial location for those who arrive at Medicina Legal (the City Morgue) of Riohacha with no identification. The story of this woman, which began at the age of fourteen as an assistant in the Medicina Legal branch of her hometown, is an example of unparalleled tenacity and conviction. Sonia tells how she entered the morgue practically as a cockroach. She makes the analogy to this animal because, according to her, “when cockroaches enter through the door they are kicked out but they come back and they enter through the window; they get in through a little hole.” During her adolescence Sonia would stretch, peering through a window to see how the autopsies were performed until one day the surgeon on duty told her: “You are leaving now, you have no reason to be observing this, this is not a public act.” She recalls that the doctor pushed her through the door and she returned through the window, like cockroaches do. “I would climb the walls because this [the autopsies] really grabbed my attention. I wanted to study


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forensic medicine, I wanted to be a plastic surgeon but my parents’ economic situation was very precarious.” Sonia’s father was a guard in the Divine Shepherdess School of Riohacha and her mother was a seamstress, which meant that they did not have the financial resources to be able to send their daughter to study. “When I was fourteen years old I saw that I had no possibility of entering the university and I said to myself, I should study something related to medicine because I want to handle bodies.” At this time, since there was no other place to practice the autopsies, they constructed a room in the main town cemetery that at times served as the morgue. Since Sonia’s father was also the cemetery’s guard, he allowed his daughter to enter, and she thus began to familiarize herself with the corpses. “Each time a body arrived I went running and I tried to see it through the window and they would throw me out and I kept on coming back until one day the doctor got tired of insisting and he told me: well, do you want to learn this thing [vaina]? I told him yes sir, I want to learn and he gave me the opportunity.” He told me that in this place I would have to do a little bit of everything, and I told him: “I don’t mind, whatever you ask me to do I’ll do it.” And the doctor told Sonia: “You are going to help us, you’re going to wash the instruments and you’re going to keep the morgue clean.” After this initial learning stage came a fight at home with her mother and her siblings who didn’t agree with the profession that she had chosen. They thought that it was a filthy, undignified job, and they told her that she was going to become infected working with bodies. Nevertheless, Sonia says that she felt happy. She tells in her story that at the beginning the NNs were buried in communal graves in the main cemetery, a fact that made recovering individual bodies impossible even if someone were to make a claim for one. The majority of these NNs had died violently, and a large percentage of them had arrived to the morgue in uniform, a fact that allows us to assume that they pertained to a guerrilla or paramilitary group. Sponsored by the local government, Sonia was able to travel to Bogotá and stay there for a year and a half studying in the Instituto de Medicina Legal, which allowed her to return to her hometown as an autopsy technician, a post she has carried out to this day. She has, thus, for forty years provided her services for the Departamento of Guajira. Sonia says that despite the fact that the local government has wanted to give her an assistant, she has refused because she is very protective of her bodies. In her own words she explains: “I treat my dead with dignity. I don’t know if I will be the only person who thinks this way, but when someone no longer has his or her faculties,


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can no longer say ‘Why are you pulling my hair? Why do you hit me?’—by this I don’t mean to say that my colleagues beat their cadavers, but that they don’t give them the treatment that I do. I love my dead very much, the love that I feel for my corpses is greater than the love that I feel for my mother, for my father and for my children. It is something that is born in me. I give all that I have for my dead.” In her drive to dignify the dead, Sonia establishes an almost personal relationship with each one of them and claims that because of them, she has gained the strength to be able to face this cruel world of anonymous death. She says, “I never get tired. Sometimes I have to dig the earth with a shovel, with a pickaxe. I carry my dead, I give them a burial and later I arrive to my house and I bathe and I say to God: One more hit that I’ve noted in your book, Father.” Shortly thereafter Sonia began to have difficulties with religious leaders who insisted that she bury the NNs in above-ground tombs rather than in the earth or in common graves, as was custom. She then began to search for her own space to bury the NNs in individual tombs. Her idea of the role of the priests in this process is the following: “The priests are missionaries for money, because what they like is money. A priest doesn’t just give away a blessing to a corpse who can’t pay. For forty years I have been working with the NNs and I’ve buried them in the main cemetery here in Riohacha. I built with my own money a lot with vaulted tombs in order to bury my NNs, so that they would have a dignified place, because they buried them in the ground and they buried five or six of them together, and that seemed like a ‘pot of beans’ [plato de frijoles], with everything mixed up and it seemed to me that we were giving to these mothers something that was not true, something all mixed up and that also should be respected, another person’s pain should also be shared.” One mayor of Riohacha decided to build an ossuary chamber for the NNs but, as Sonia says, Father Humberto demolished it and sent the remains of the NNs to be tossed out in order to sell the space where the ossuary had been. She still doesn’t know where the priest discarded these remains and states that she would have identified and buried them in their tiny coffins. The priest forced her to promise that she would stop burying the NNs there because she was not the owner of those dead ones. She answered that he was not the owner of the cemetery and that this was not the property of the guajiros or the priests. And she added that, “if he dares to remove my dead he’s going to see something amazing because I do have the civil and moral courage to take the dead to the main altar. I’ll put them in a cart and I’ll take it to the cathedral when he’s giving mass at the main altar.”


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The story continues when the city gave a contract to a man who has a private cemetery near the edge of Santa Marta to build some vaults to bury some of the NNs, and Sonia was ordered to hand them over to this cemetery’s undertaker. Such was her desire to know the exact methods that were being used where they were burying these bodies that, in her words, “I took the first body to the undertaker but he told me that he would only bury it when the sun went down. With the second NN he told me the same thing, I’ll bury it when the sun goes down. When we went with the fourth NN he told me something: ‘Go, take a look at your dead bodies.’ I went one day and I told him: ‘Mister Hugo, where is it that you are burying my dear bodies? And he responded, ‘over there in the ground.’ ” “And why?” Sonia asked him and he responded: “Miss, what happens is that when they are NNs, the owner tells me to bury them in the ground and when they are indigents who have relatives he tells me to bury them in the vault.” “Is that right, there’s a distinction?” Sonia asked, and she told the undertaker: “Could it be that you don’t understand that when someone dies there are no more distinctions of class, religion, or politics? What if the rich get the worms, then where would they bury us, the poor? What a shame.” She then said to Mister Hugo:

Figure 2.2

The cemetery “Gente como Uno” in Riohacha.


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“This is the last NN that will be buried here because from now on I am the one responsible for my dead bodies and if I have to be killed by whomever, I’ll die for my dead ones.” Faced with such negligence Sonia decides finally to search for a piece of land in the outlying area and to found the Gente Como Uno (People Like You) Cemetery. The main objective has been to construct and to maintain a single place dedicated to the bodies that have not been claimed, or those that have not been identified. Sonia carries out the autopsy in Medicina Legal on each one of the bodies and maintains a register card that can help with the later identification of the bodies. When the funeral home is not available, she loads the coffin in her car, ties it up, and goes to bury it with the help of her children. In the cemetery each NN’s body is buried in an individual grave or in a vault. Sonia, accompanied by her family, takes care of the burials, cries for the dead, sings to them, and decorates their tombs.

Final Considerations In her book Winter in the Morning (1986), Janina Bauman considers that what is most cruel about cruelty is that it dehumanizes victims before destroying them. She talks about the difficult fight to conserve humanity amid inhumane conditions, and she tells us that the greatest horror has to do with this desperate fight that delivers men, women, and children from environments that push them every day toward a death that has nothing to do with their daily lives. They are people who can do little to avoid what will happen to them since the enemy in pursuit is silent, implacable, and unpredictable. Over the past few decades Colombians have borne witness to this desperate struggle. We are dealing with people who live in rural areas and who have witnessed the murder of their loved ones by armed groups who throw their bodies in the country’s rivers. They have been forcibly removed from their homes and stripped of their personal belongings, thus condemned to perpetual migration and displacement. The inhumanity of the physical and symbolic slaughter that has taken place in Colombia is unprecedented in the Americas. Nevertheless, despite the drama of these local events, they do not transcend the place where they occur. The atrocities of our time lack words that can give them meaning. Amid this profoundly dehumanizing bellicose environment, the rituals that are carried out with the bodies of the NNs in places such as Puerto Berrío and Riohacha install physical and symbolic languages that fill with meaning actions that are perceived as senseless. Through


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profoundly humanizing practices, we see that for some communities, redressing these issues implies reincorporating into the social fabric the anonymous dead that had been condemned to oblivion. The animero, popular devotion, and the moral obligation to relieve the suffering of the souls of the dead are some of the elements upon which the inhabitants of Puerto Berrío counteract the disappearance and oblivion ordered by paramilitary groups, constructing new meanings that transform the horror of war. In contrast, in the town of Marsella, these same anonymous dead, whose bodies traverse the Cauca River, are uncomfortable and unwanted. In Beltrán, the one woman who treated these dead with dignity was later threatened and expelled from the community. The inhabitants of Marsella defend themselves by saying that these dead are not from there, that they come from other places, an outlandish argument for the inhabitants of Puerto Berrío, who bury the dead who arrive from elsewhere without preconditions. In contrast, in Guajira, a woman who, despite being religious, is profoundly anticlerical, holds wake over the bodies of the NNs as if they were her own children and fought until she managed to find them a site where they could be buried with dignity. She does not tolerate discrimination for the simple fact that they do not have families to claim them or because she does not know their identity or place of origin. Breaking many of the existing taboos in her community, Sonia establishes a close relationship with these anonymous bodies, which she carries, reveres, and buries with her own hands, basing her actions on a profound argument: rich and poor are the same in death. Translated by Joseph Pierce

Notes 1. This text is part of an investigation entitled “Memorias en tiempo de Guerra. Repertorio de Iniciativas Cívicas” (Civic Initiatives to Preserve the Memory of the Armed Conflict in Colombia), which is financed by the Open Society Foundation for the group Memoria Histórica de la Comisión Nacional de Reparación y Reconciliación (Historical Memory of the National Commission on Reparation and Reconciliation). I would like to thank researchers Diana Britto and Rocío Martínez for their individual contributions to the project and the collection of the corresponding data for the cases of Marsella and Riohacha that are analyzed in this article. 2. FARC stands for Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. ELN stands for Ejército de Liberación Nacional (National Liberation Army). AUC stands for


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4.

5. 6. 7. 8.

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Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia). The Magdalena River is the most important river in Colombia because of its extension from the south to north of the country and the fact that it flows into the Caribbean Sea near the city of Barranquilla. The newspaper El Colombiano of Medellín published in 2007 a series of articles in a special report titled “En las riberas del llanto” (“On the Banks of Lament”) in which it analyzes the role that the country’s main rivers such as the Magdalena, Cauca, Atrato, and Sinú have played in the disappearance of evidence related to various murders. The quotes from the interview with Amparo Pérez are taken from these reports. The Law 975 of 2005, called the Law of Justice and Peace, was sanctioned by the government of President Álvaro Uribe as the legal framework for the process of disbanding paramilitary groups. El Colombiano, April 1, 2007: 6A. Departamento is the word that designates provinces in Colombia. Comisión Andina de Juristas (Andean Commission of Attorneys), 1993: 8793. The wall with NNs in Puerto Berrío inspired a photography exhibition titled “Requiem NN” by the artist Juan Manuel Echavarría, which was displayed in the Antioquia Museum in 2008 as part of the exhibition Destierro y Reconciliación (Displacement and Reconciliation).

References Bauman, Janina. Winter in the Morning: A Young Girl’s Life in the Warsaw Ghetto and Beyond 1939–1945. London: Virago Press, 1986. Print. Bauman, Zygmunt. “Modernity and Ambivalence.” In Global Culture, Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity, Mike Featherstone, ed. London: Sage Publications, 1990. Print. Bauman, Zigmunt, and Keith Tester. Conversations with Zygmunt Bauman. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2001. Print. Bermúdez, Sonia. Personal interview. March 2008. Comisión Andina de Juristas. Nordeste Antioqueño y Magdalena Medio. Bogotá: Serie Informes Regionales de Derechos Humanos, 1993. Print. Das, Veena. Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India. New Delhi: Oxford UP, 1995. Print. ———. “Trauma and Testimony: Implications for political community.” Anthropological Theory 3, no. 3 (2003): 293–307. Print. Das, Veena, Arthur Kleinman, Margaret Lock, Mamphela Ramphele, and Pamela Reynolds. Remaking a World: Violence, Social Suffering and Recovery. Berkeley: U of California P, 2001. Print. Ellen, Roy. “The Semiotics of the Body.” In Anthropology of the Body, John Blacking, ed. London: Academic Press Inc., 1977. Print.


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“En las riberas del llanto.” El Colombiano March 25, and April 1, 8 and 15, 2007. Print. Leach, Edmund. “Anthropological Aspects of Language; Animal Categories and Verbal abuse.” In Mythology: Selected Readings, Pierre Maranda, ed. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1972. Print. Obeyesekere, Gananath. Medusa’s Hair: An Essay on Personal Symbols and Religious Experience. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981. Print. Rebolo, Luis Joaquin. “Memoria subversiva y alternativas sociales.” Revista Página Abierta, no. 150, (July 2004): 49–51. Print. Reyes Mate, Manuel. La razón de los vencidos. Editorial Anthropos: Barcelona, 1991. Print. ———. La ética ante las víctimas. Manuel Reyes Mate and José M. Mardones, eds. Barcelona: Editorial Anthropos, 2003. Print. Seremetakis, Nadia. “The Memory of the Senses, Part I: Marks of the Transitory.” In The Senses Still: Perceptions and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity, N. Seremetakis, ed. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994. Print. Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2003. Print. Uribe, María Victoria. Anthropologie de l’Inhumanité: Essai sur la terreur en Colombie. Paris: Calmann Lévy, 2004. Print. ———. “Dismembering and Expelling: Semantics of Political Terror in Colombia.” Public Culture 16, no. 1 (2004): 79–95. Print. ———. Matar, Rematar y Contramatar: Las masacres de La Violencia en el Tolima, 1948–1964. Serie Controversia No. 169. Bogotá: CINEP, 1996. Print.


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Fac i ng Unse e n Viol e nc e: E x- c om b ata n t s Pa i n t i ng t h e Wa r i n C ol om bi a 1 María Helena Rueda

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s one entered the Museum of Modern Art in Bogotá where the paintings were displayed, their simplicity stood out. The exhibition, called “La guerra que no hemos visto” (The War We Have Not Seen), could be perceived as just another example of that deceivingly uncomplicated style known as art naïf, if not for one’s knowledge that the painters were former combatants from Colombia’s armed conflict. In several paintings, many of them remarkable in their beauty, the subject matter was not evident at first glance. They showed mountains, rivers, rural towns, green fields, trees, blue skies, and country roads. The stories told by these pictures only became visible when one got a closer look: bleeding bodies scattered around; persons tied to trees; gruesome depictions of torture, beheadings, dismemberment, executions, and rape; armed warriors in camouflage gear; subtle and notso-subtle images that bore witness to a war that has for the most part remained unseen by the people who attend the museum. For those visitors, the images represented a glimpse into a hard-to-confront reality, one that is only partly rendered visible in the paintings. Explicit and revealing in their depiction of atrocities, these paintings are however surrounded by blanks and silences. The identity of the painters is unknown, as is the location and the time of the events depicted. We know they were all combatants in the war between the guerrillas, the paramilitaries, and the Colombian armed forces, but are told nothing about their affiliation or that of the people in the images; there are also no details about the precise circumstances in which the atrocities occurred. We don’t know the names, ages, race,


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M a r í a H e l e n a R u e da

gender, or regional origin of the painters. On the museum walls there is a label next to each painting, containing only its title, and a reference to the technique used (Vinyl on MDF, or Medium Density Fibreboard). There is also a blank sign to indicate what is missing: the titles, the identity of the painters, and any specific details about the stories behind the images. Similar blank spaces accompany the paintings in the exhibition’s catalogue and Web site, framed in thin black lines, to make the silence evident and draw the viewer to the words that are not there.2 The paintings themselves nonetheless tell a story, and it is in this interaction between what is said/shown and what remains unsaid / not shown that a memory of war is constructed with these images. Many studies on art’s work on memory emphasize a characterization of the latter as a process essentially rooted in visual perceptions (Gibbons 2). Both as a source of knowledge about the past, and as an agent for a reflective understanding of the present, memory is known to rely vastly on visualization and imagery (Candida Smith 3). This is evident in the importance given to monuments, performances, photographs, exhibits, and indeed paintings as vehicles for the remembrance of what is deemed significant for a certain collectivity. But visual efforts to preserve memory—and particularly those that refer to the memory of violence—must also rely on devices to make the absent present, that is, to represent what cannot be there or what has been vanished, as emphasized by Nelly Richard (2000) in her work on the aesthetics of memory in postdictatorial Chile. The markers of erasure and incompleteness not only bring forward the voids in any process of remembrance but also open the way to reflections on the reasons for those voids, reasons that are often enmeshed in the political fabric of a society. In “La guerra que no hemos visto,” the contrast between the excesses depicted in the paintings and the blank spaces that accompany them, to indicate the lack of words, provides key elements to understand the complexities implicit in the process of preserving the memory of war in Colombia, a process that takes place while the violence is ongoing and there is no thorough resolution to the conflicts that sustain it. The exhibition first opened in Bogotá’s Museum of Modern Art on October 14, 2009, and was later displayed in Medellín and other Colombian cities. It featured 90 paintings, selected by curator Ana Tiscornia, out of more than 400 made by ex-combatants from the internal war in Colombia, in workshops organized by the Fundación Puntos de Encuentro, in Bogotá. This nonprofit foundation was created in May 2006 by Colombian artist Juan Manuel Echavarría, with


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the purpose of promoting, supporting, and facilitating the exhibition of “projects that preserve historical memory through art” (La guerra 7). An important part of its resources and efforts have gone into the project that led to the creation of the paintings included in this exhibition. In this chapter I will discuss the significance of this project, basing a good part of my analysis on almost three years of conversations and e-mail exchanges with Echavarría, who conceived, organized, and oversaw every step of its development.3 The project started in 2007, when Echavarría saw some paintings by former paramilitary combatants in La Ceja, a rural town on the outskirts of Medellín, exhibited at a local cultural center. With a keen eye for the ways in which art reflects on violence, Echavarría has for years worked not only to create art that draws people’s attention toward the catastrophic situation of violence in Colombia but also to locate and display artistic efforts by direct victims to preserve the memory of this violence. The artistic aspects of the pictures in La Ceja aroused his interest, so he contacted the painters and offered them a space and materials to work on new paintings that narrated their war experiences. Other former members of the paramilitaries soon joined the first ones, and the workshops developed over time. The idea was always to provide a medium for these former combatants to express their experience with violence through images, preserving those memories and allowing society as a whole to access them and learn from that access. After the success of the first workshops, Echavarría decided to expand the project, to involve in it all factions of the war in Colombia. More workshops were organized for former guerrilla combatants, in collaboration with the Bogotá Mayor’s office in charge of assisting guerrilla deserters as they transition into civilian life. In order to also include ex-combatants from the Colombian army, other workshops were conducted with soldiers who were disabled in combat, and who were therefore no longer active in the war. Participation in the workshops was entirely voluntary, all of the participants were low-rank combatants, and none of them had received formal artistic instruction. The idea was to allow for their subconscious to emerge, as they visually recalled what they had gone through during the war. They were offered square pieces of fiberboard and vinyl paint, to paint whatever they wanted, from their experiences as members of the armed groups, or from any events in their lives that they perceived as linked to those experiences. They would start with one or several small square boards, and could add as many as they needed, in paintings that grew at the whim of their recollections or desire for expression. Each workshop met once or


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twice a week in sessions of up to four hours, over the course of six to eight months. Those done with the paramilitaries were small in size, and met sometimes in Bogotá, and sometimes in La Ceja. The ones with the guerrillas were large, involving thirty to forty young men or women at a time, and took place in an old warehouse in Bogotá.4 The ones with the disabled members of the armed forces were perhaps the most painful, according to Echavarría. The trauma of war was visible not only in the participants’ recollections but also in their bodies, permanently marked with the disabilities left by combat. These workshops were conducted in the army’s health facility where the soldiers are based. In every workshop, Echavarría and two other artists, Fernando Grisales and Noel Palacios, served only as facilitators. The former combatants were free to paint their recollection however they chose, without any indication, advice, or feedback from these facilitators. Once they finished a painting, they were asked if they wanted to describe its images. If they did so, at that point the pictures became windows into verbal recollections of their experiences of war, and the images got attached to words with descriptions on the context for the depicted events. Those narrations could have been preserved alongside the paintings, becoming part of a larger effort to build memories of the ongoing armed conflict in Colombia, as told by this specific group of participants. With time, however, the organizers concluded that those testimonies could not be kept or publicized, because of risks associated with the fact that the factions represented by the former combatants were still at war with each other. In that context, the revelation of certain details included in the stories could have unwanted consequences for their protagonists. These considerations determined the decision to exclude from the exhibition any written reference to the stories told by the painters. The initial idea of the Fundación Puntos de Encuentro was to display on the museum walls not only the works of art but also their titles, the aliases of their painters, and a summary of what they depicted, taken from the ex-combatants’ descriptions. As the project evolved, however, the organizers realized that it would be problematic to include those descriptions, or any information that could serve to identify the painter or the events he or she depicted, even the paintings’ titles. The ex-combatants themselves did not want to publicize anything that could identify them, out of concerns for their own safety. All the ones that came from illegal armed groups had gone through statesanctioned demobilization processes, to be reintegrated into civilian life, but they did not effectively enjoy the full benefits and protections


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of a “free” citizen. They were at risk not only because of possible retaliation from former enemies or comrades but also because they were potentially still liable to be judged for war crimes. Faced with this situation, the curator of the exhibition, Ana Tiscornia, decided to make the silence visible, displaying it in the blank signs that appear next to the paintings in the exhibition, and in the white, framed spaces in its catalogue and Web site.5 This decision was consciously conceived as an effort to promote reflection and debate. Tiscornia explains it in the preface to the catalogue: “These paintings . . . raise questions with regards to the limitations of the word when conjugating truth. We therefore built the exhibition around the absence of words, to emphasize this void, question it, and make it the subject of debate” (21). As an effort to preserve the memory of war, this exhibition thus defines memory as a project in the making. This definition is here related not only to memory’s general resistance to be conceived as a fixed and dormant entity. It is also closely linked to the reality of preserving memory in the context of an ongoing war. The curator’s reference to “the limitations of the word,” which draws attention to the exhibition’s emphasis on visual memory, is also revealing of the political and legal limitations that surround this exhibition, all related to the fact that the armed conflict is not truly resolved, even with the promotion of a framework that allowed for the demobilization of combatants. The law that made possible the demobilization of illegal armed groups’ members, including those who participated in these workshops, was the controversial Ley de Justicia y Paz (Peace and Justice Law), promulgated by the government of Alvaro Uribe in 2005. When this law went into effect, the main paramilitary organization in Colombia signed an agreement with the government, and around 32,000 of their members disarmed in block, following orders from their commanders, throughout 2005. Many guerrilla members also disarmed, but they did so individually, usually after deserting their units, since no peace accord was signed with commanders of their armed groups.6 The Ley de Justicia y Paz was unprecedented, with regard to other international cases of transitional justice legislation, in that it did not follow an accord for peace or complete demobilization, allowing for the reincorporation of combatants into civilian life while armed conflict was still ongoing.7 The end result was the creation of a legal and social limbo for these former combatants, and many sectors of society did not consider they had gone through a real process of justice.8 It is clear that these painters were not mere bystanders with regard to the horrors they painted about. They killed and raped, performed


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acts of dismemberment and torture, assisted in massacres and kidnappings, and were active participants in a war they entered for various reasons. They joined the ranks of the armed groups to run away from violent family situations or to seek revenge for the killing of loved ones, from being forced into it, because there was no other option, to make some money, or simply because the fight looked important and worthwhile. Once they joined the guerrillas or the paramilitaries, they were prevented from leaving with threats to their lives. Killing, torturing, or dismembering corpses was part of their duty in those armies, and not doing so would have led to punishment or death. For paramilitary forces in particular, dismembering bodies was an important war tactic, used to terrorize populations and to persuade them from any form of cooperation with the guerrillas.9 When we take this into account, several questions emerge with regard to the legal and moral position assumed by society toward the creators of these paintings. The role of low-rank perpetrators is often a matter of controversy in contexts of war and postwar.10 Any judgment of their actions seems always relativized by the fact that these perpetrators were following orders, and acting as part of organizations where performing those acts was both expected and enforced. In the case we are dealing with, the call for accountability is further complicated by how blurred the line is between victims and victimizers, as war actors here often moved from one role to the other and back. As Darío Villamizar puts it, in a comment on the content of the paintings, included in the exhibition catalogue: “In many cases we see the personal story of an armed actor . . . , several of them were also victims of the horror inflicted by other armed actors—even by those from their same organization—” (La guerra 63). It is clear that many of these former combatants come from situations of extreme violence and absence of protection by the state and its laws, where it is common to transit from the role of victim to that of victimizer without any mediation of state-sanctioned systems of justice. The paintings include many instances of ex-combatants depicting themselves as victims, either witnessing the death of friends or family members, or being themselves brutally punished by their own comrades. The fact that the exhibit does not identify the painter’s name and affiliation, however, makes it hard to determine where he or she represents him or herself, and whether it is in the role of victim or perpetrator. In any case, the majority of the paintings lead the viewer to focus on the victim rather than the executor of the atrocities. The center of the composition is usually placed in his or her suffering,


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rather than in any sentiment by the aggressor—of courage or pride, for example—as you would have in a heroic depiction of war actions. These paintings are in fact devoid of all heroism, with the perpetrators typically represented without any visible sign of emotions, occupying a sort of neutral zone where the real protagonist of the events is the victim. The victims, on the other hand, are in the majority of the cases depicted with clear markers of their suffering: painted tears on their faces, or highly visible streams of red blood coming from their wounded bodies.11 A good example of this is found on the painting identified with the Archival Number C046- 0180 (Figure 3.1, La guerra 173). In this picture, the human figures occupy one-third of the frame— which constitutes an exception, since in most paintings the human shapes are very small. The image shows two persons: a man in camouflage gear, wearing an armlet with the acronym for Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia), and a woman kneeling down, with droplets of blood coming from her face and arms, tears painted in her face, and her arms extended in a pleading way. The two figures are facing each other and the man is pointing a rifle toward the woman, torturing her and/or threatening to kill her. It is a clear depiction of two persons in the role of

Figure 3.1 Painting C046-0180


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victim and victimizer, and the contrast between them is striking. The body of the woman is considerably larger, and her face includes marks of emotion that are completely absent from the man’s face. His body is proportionate and harmonious, while hers appears disfigured, devoid of any sense of proportion, imposing in the enormity of her head, and showing an obvious difficulty in the painter’s attempt to depict the pleading gesture in her arms. It is a nightmarish vision that recurs in every painting that includes images of victims—as most of them do. Many studies on war perpetrators who act under orders show how killing for them can become a mechanical act, as training, indoctrination, or simple submission to power, leads them to ignore the victim’s plea for compassion. The well-known Milgram experiments, conducted at Yale University in 1961 (in the context of Eichmann’s Holocaust trial in Jerusalem), showed how human beings could become temporarily impervious to the suffering of others, and act accordingly, when it came to following orders that involved causing harm, within a system that justified such behavior.12 What these paintings suggest is that the plea of a person who suffers actually remains inscribed in the perpetrator’s mind, maybe years after the fact, even if they were able to block any possible compassionate response, to become capable of performing atrocities. The above-described depiction of the interaction between victim and perpetrator appears in almost every painting that includes representations of aggression and harm: combatants are depicted almost as automatons, their bodies portrayed using extremely simple shapes, like copied from a mold, devoid of any marker of movement or emotion, and painted without many variations among them, when several appear in the same image. The bodies of the victims, in contrast, appear oversized, painted in convoluted shapes, and markedly individualized, with pleading arms and an abundance of highly noticeable red flowing from their wounds. They are the evident and explicit focus of these paintings. As such, they draw the attention of the viewer, not only through their size and the awkwardness of their body shapes, but also through the markers of horror they bear (the blood or the missing body parts), and the way they are positioned with regard to other images in the composition. Many of these paintings include witnesses that the viewer can relate to, when confronted with the difficult images in the picture. They appear as survivors of the horrors portrayed in those images, and are usually depicted as observers of the cruelty, the aggression, and the pain. Among these witnesses, the painter sometimes includes him


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or herself.13 But even in those pictures where they do not explicitly paint themselves as witnesses, for the external observers these painters appear as witnesses, who bring with them firsthand knowledge of a situation that has multiple ethical implications. The effort to put into images this knowledge of traumatic events is for the painters much more than a therapeutic exercise, by which they would be called to visualize their trauma, as part of a healing process. It is also more than a static contribution to a museum-oriented archive of the war in Colombia. These images represent a process by which the former combatants, now acting as witnesses, invite the viewer to also become a witness, through the mediation of the painting. Photojournalist Donna DeCesare, who has photographed many scenes related to violence in Latin America, refers the process of witnessing and visually documenting violent events to the three acts of trauma narrative coined by Frank Ochberg.14 The first is “the opening act,” in which the photographer witnesses violence as it occurs, and the images are immediate, shocking, full of the drama and commotion of a catastrophic event that just happened. In the second the focus of the photographer is in documenting the aftermath, and represents an effort to draw out meanings by showing processes of grieving, healing, or search for justice. The third one is for DeCesare the most difficult to describe, and according to her is better achieved through art than through photography. In her words: “The final act of the trauma narrative reserves its most penetrating focus for moral anguish and mental disintegration . . . This is the realm of human experience for which answers are elusive, where victimizers may also be victims, where complex motivations resist any definitive taxonomy, yet archetypal meaning continues to be sought.” It is in this third stage of the rendition of a traumatic event that these paintings involve the viewer in the experience of violence, through the mediation of its witnesses. Although in most cases we see the commotion and the dramatic strength characteristic of Ochberg’s first act, the fact that these images are being recalled years after the events situates them well past that first-response stage. They are also located beyond the second act, since they are not really concerned with the aftermath of violence. The visual narration of these ex-combatants’ memories of war involve the viewer in the stage of “moral anguish,” where the appeal can probably best be summarized in the pleading gestures of the person who is tortured, or about to be executed. This is the moment where the plea of a human being who was hurt or killed can be heard retrospectively, in the fictional space of the painting, appealing to another human being who could have the ability to


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save him or her from anguish, pain, or death. That appeal raises questions that are extremely important, even if left unanswered, regarding what allowed those events to take place, and what can be done in the future to prevent similar atrocities from happening. This appeal is also valid for those aspects of the paintings where the harm and trauma of war are visible beyond the human shapes— which often occupy only a small portion of the picture. The preponderant color in most paintings is green, and the greater part of the composition is occupied by images such as fields, trees, forests, rivers, rural villages, and scattered houses. Frequently there are also animals that appear alien to the violent events included in the painting: mostly farm animals, such as cows and horses, but also birds or fish. The rural roots of the painters—all of them campesinos (peasants)— and the fact that the atrocities they painted about occurred in the countryside are the evident reasons for the presence of these images. Since they occupy such large portions of the paintings, and are filled with such detail, they could be seen also as an effort by the painter to provide elements to divert attention from the crudity and the horrific character of the scenes that explicitly represent violence. At the same time, and paradoxically, they show how in this context violence ends up blended with the landscape, becoming a naturalized presence that fills their everyday world. There is in any case nothing bucolic in the country scenes and rural towns that appear in the background of the paintings, but not only because of the scattered presence of wounded bodies, dismembered corpses, crying survivors, and people in camouflage gear. The traumatic aspect of these renditions of rural landscape becomes also apparent in how the majority of the towns and the fields in the paintings are deserted or in the process of being abandoned. Darío Villamizar notes this fact in the essay he contributes to the catalogue: “The representations of abandoned, lonely villages whose inhabitants have been displaced are striking” (La guerra 65). While some of the paintings do include images of the civilian population just going on about their every day lives, in most of them the only persons visible, apart from the armed combatants, are people frightened, wounded, killed, crying, or fleeing in horror. These paintings thus bear witness to one of the most painful and tragic effects of the decades-old war in Colombia: the massive displacement of rural populations.15 The one identified with the Archival Number B063- 0433 (La guerra 177) depicts a massacre, performed by one of the illegal armed groups, in which most of the inhabitants were killed under suspicions of being informants for the


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Figure 3.2 Painting B015-0064

enemy. It shows a town where the only human bodies are either in camouflage gear or covered in blood (their silhouettes painted in red), and lying on the ground. If there were any survivors, we can only assume they left the town, adding their names to the more than three million refugees left by the war in Colombia. Some paintings, like the one identified with the Archival Number B015- 0064, even show the inhabitants of a village in the process of leaving it, to escape the horrors of war (Figure 3.2, La guerra 137). Again here the emphasis is not on the warriors in camouflage gear that appear in the background, fighting in the mountains, but on the villagers that flee from violence, and on the abandoned town, in which each of the buildings is clearly marked with an identifying sign: “Discotek Dimencion Azul” (sic) (Blue Dimension Disco), “Tienda El Centavo Menos” (The Penny Less Store), “Iglesia Católica” (Catholic Church), etc. Those buildings, now abandoned, appear as silent evidence of how communities have been shattered by the presence of war. The general landscape of devastation and abandonment is portrayed explicitly, and under a different light, in the painting used for the cover of the exhibition catalogue and for the home page of the project’s Web site (Figure 3.3, La guerra 145). It shows an area of the jungle that has been cleared of trees, to allow for the cultivation of


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Figure 3.3 Painting A054- 0310

coca plants. A single tree that was left standing occupies the center of the painting, located in its top half. Surrounding that tree we see trunks and branches of different shapes and sizes, scattered over the ground, as evidence of the wreckage that has just taken place, and which occupies the majority of the painting. Behind that landscape of desolation, in the upper quarter of the frame, we can see a green, dense forest that offers evidence of how the place we’re seeing used to look like. In one corner of the frame, we see three small human figures, one of them holding a machete and seemingly busy cutting the fallen wood. The second one is working the soil with a hoe, and the third one is planting what appear to be small coca plants on the ground. The transformation of the rural landscape into one that has been put to the service of war and drug trafficking is evident here. Drug trafficking is a pervasive presence in these paintings. They include many representations of activities, objects, and spaces directly related to the drug business. “These paintings offer clear evidence that the biggest difference between the current war and the one that took place in the fifties, during the years of La Violencia, is the presence of drug trafficking,” said Juan Manuel Echavarría in one of my conversations with him.16 From his interviews with the workshop participants, he gathered that many of the horrific scenes in


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the paintings were crimes related to the drug business. One of those scenes, included as a fragment of the large format painting identified with the Archival Number A052-0351 (La guerra 215), shows a whole family in the process of being cruelly tortured, massacred, and thrown into the river by a group of armed combatants. The story behind it tells of a farmer who was ordered by the armed group commander to destroy his old crops and start growing coca plants. The farmer refused, insisting he didn’t want anything to do with that business. As a result, he and his family were brutally murdered. Aggression, killing, wounding, horror, and cruelty in general are however not the only subjects of these paintings. Some of them show the daily lives and activities of the armed groups’ members, and also of the civilian populations who live in the areas where they operate. In those depictions of daily life, the presence of activities and objects linked to drug trafficking is also recurring. We see images of peasants growing coca plants, and also selling the coca paste to members of the illegal armed groups. We see depictions of coca-processing laboratories, and also of airplanes fumigating the coca plantations. One particularly striking painting, identified with the Archival number A054-0314 (Figure 3.4, La guerra 273) shows a small fumigation plane in the middle of the frame, with traces of a white substance coming out of it, painted as blurry, straight lines under its wings. Beneath those lines, which occupy the largest portion of the painting, we see green fields, farm animals, a river, trees, birds, and a peasant family watching the sky from their wooden house. We know that the poisonous white substance will soon reach all of that. The devastating effects that the U.S.-led global War on Drugs has had in Colombia are well documented, including the damage it has caused to the environment.17 The larger consequences on Colombian society in general of the country’s deep involvement in the illegal business of drug trafficking have also been analyzed from many different perspectives. What remains largely absent from these numerous studies are considerations on how this transnational illegal trade has dramatically transformed the everyday lives of peasants who grow and process the coca leaves, the last link on this highly lucrative business, and the one who gets the least profit from it, if they get any profit at all.18 What these paintings show is the perhaps subtle, but ultimately decisive, ways in which the lives of Colombian peasants who live in the war zones are touched by the ramifications of drug trafficking. Since we cannot identify the creator of every painting that deals with this subject as involved with one illegal armed group or another, it is impossible for an unacquainted viewer to determine from these


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Figure 3.4 Painting A054-0314

images how perceptions of this reality differ between guerrillas and paramilitaries, for example. What we do see is a shared perception of the pervasiveness of this situation, and the horrors associated with it. The perception of a pervasive sense of horror is, however, not limited to those paintings that make direct reference to activities related to drug cultivation or trafficking. As Gonzalo Sánchez puts it, in the essay he contributes to the catalogue: “Whether seen by the guerrilla, the paramilitary, or the soldier, the images that tell the story of war have a common denominator: They are a record of the horror” (La guerra 47). The idea of a record refers to something belonging to the archive. What these paintings are recording and adding to the archive of history is indeed a horror, a nightmarish vision, made even more so by the silences that surround them, preventing us from locating with words the precise origin of such horrors, their motives, or their context. While looking at these images, the spectator has no way to know what originated the acts of aggression they portray, or to identify the people involved in them as civilians, paramilitaries, guerrillas, or members of the army. He or she is left in a state of bewilderment, where the desire to obtain more specific information on the workings of the war in Colombia is left in suspense. It is a way in which the blank spaces that surround the paintings add to the horror of what their images portray.


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Perhaps nowhere is this horror more evident than in those paintings that include depictions of mass graves. After the Ley de Justicia y Paz allowed for the block demobilization of paramilitary units in 2005, the former combatants revealed the location of hundreds of mass graves, where the bodies of their victims had been buried. Some guerrilla deserters also revealed the location of mass graves where their group disposed of the corpses of their own victims. The exhumation of those bodies was demanded by organizations of victims who hoped to find (through clothes, dental records, or DNA analyses) the remains of loved ones among them, and it constitutes a particularly painful chapter in the ongoing story of the war in Colombia. The process of unearthing the mass graves started around 2006 and continued for years. In the initial stages there were reports on its course published in every newspaper and broadcasted in every newscast, accompanied with graphic photographs and videos. Both the journalists and the viewers of such reports appeared shocked by the sight of human bones emerging from the ground, as experts from the Fiscalía (the public prosecutor office) performed the excavations. Hidden in strategic spots in the countryside, the existence of those mass graves had remained unverified, and their locations unknown, until the demobilized paramilitary combatants revealed them; they were blended with the landscape and virtually invisible up to the time of their unearthing.19 These paintings offer a different representation of those mass graves. In some paintings they appear as mere squares of dirt on the ground. In others, those squares become filled with pink and red spots of different shapes and sizes, which stand for dismembered bodies. Yet other ex-combatants paint them as pools of red blood, with pink or black shapes barely visible inside them, representing body parts. In these graves, the human bodies seem to have disappeared, but at the same time they are rendered more visible in that absence. In this barely visible way, the dead emerge here in their role as the real protagonists of war, the ones that in their sheer numbers are invoked to describe the magnitude of its damage. They are the bearers of the silences of violence, those who can no longer claim for their life, and now appear alongside the deserted towns and fields, quietly bearing witness to the devastation. While the images of mass graves that appear in these paintings do not have the immediacy and the dramatic impact attained by the photographs spread by the media, they offer a reflective depiction of the desolation implied in the idea of thousands of bodies buried and left to decompose without a proper funeral. They also invoke the irreparable trauma of the many friends,


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relatives, and loved ones left behind by those dead bodies, for whom there is nothing anonymous about them. In the acknowledgments for one of his books on violence in Colombia, Michael Taussig (2003) expressed his indebtedness to the many people in a rural town who had offered him testimony of their encounters with paramilitary forces. Indicating that he could not give their names because of the risks associated with revealing their identities, Taussig pointed out how “one of the first casualties of injustice is the abuse and eventual loss of a person’s name” (207). This comment, whose accuracy can be verified in the many other books on violence in Colombia where firsthand accounts of witnesses are published without identifying the source, reveals how in situations of ongoing and unresolved violent conflict, both the dead and the living can be forced into anonymity. Survivors who are still at risk of retaliation, or who have not gone through a conclusive judicial process, need to remain anonymous in order to go on with their lives, but they live in a situation of constant fear that prevents them from occupying a space of protection in society. When their testimonials are published, for example, compilers use strategies to allow for the divulgation of their stories, while guarding them from retaliation by hiding their identities.20 Their names are usually changed, as are any details in their narratives that could lead to identify them. The organizers of this exhibit opted instead for the exclusion of all words from the display, hoping for the images to speak by themselves. In the back matter of this exhibit’s catalogue, there is a page bearing the title: “Índice de pinturas por autor / Index by authors” (La guerra 277). This “Index” has three columns, one of them for the painting’s code, another one for its author, and a last one for its catalogue number. The first and third columns show the numbers assigned to each painting. The middle column shows only flat rectangles of different lengths, showing the blank places where the names of the painters would have been included. They have the appearance of place markers for the proof printout of an index that is waiting for certain information before it can be published in its final form. The same can be said of the white rectangles that accompany the reproductions of the paintings in the body of the book: it is the indication of an absence, but also a signal for the viewer to look at the paintings, allow them to express memories of violence in their imagery, and fill in the blanks with his or her own words, resulting from reflections on what the images evoked.21 In the essay she contributes to the catalogue, psychologist María Clemencia Castro makes the following comment with regard to the


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motivations for this exhibition: “While some prefer to radicalize causes, give precedence to the demands, allow scores to be settled or silence history, The War We Have Not Seen reveals a determined effort to provide an exercise in memory that will process, through art, what cannot be yet approached through words” (55). This comment points to the importance of approaching these images as part of a larger effort to confront and process the painful memories of this war. Beyond this exhibition, such dialogue is already happening in the hundreds of confessions, forums, and encounters that have taken place in Colombia since 2005, when the Ley de Justicia y Paz allowed for thousands of former combatants to confess their war crimes.22 Even within its limitations, this law allowed for the emergence of many truths with regard to the workings of the decades-long war in Colombia. In the specific context of this exhibition, contributions to this dialogue are made not only by the paintings themselves but also by the essays included in the catalogue, where experts from various fields— history, sociology, art criticism, psychology, political science—offer their perspectives on the paintings, and also in the forums and discussion workshops that took place while the exhibition was being organized by the Fundación Puntos de Encuentro in conjunction with governmental and nongovernmental organizations.23 Those workshops and forums were recorded and are now kept as part of the archival memory of this exhibition. La guerra que no hemos visto is a collective project based on efforts by survivors of extremely traumatic war events to use painting as a medium for the narration of their experiences with violence. Surrounded by blank spaces, indicators of an absence and an invitation for the accompanying words to emerge, these paintings offer a proposal that joins a larger effort for the preservation of memories of violence in Colombia.24 It is part of an arduous and ongoing process, limited and at the same time invigorated by the fact that it takes place while the war is still active and the antagonisms are not resolved. The way in which these works are displayed, accompanied by absences and blank spaces, is part of this reality. There are many other artistic projects that participate in this effort.25 They are cooperative and individual explorations on art as a medium for the much-needed preservation of memories of violence in Colombia. This exhibition stands out for at least three reasons: first, it is the result of a project carried out by hundreds of former combatants who worked both as individuals and as a collectivity, in a conscious effort to use painting as a way to express their experience with violence; second, these painters had


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firsthand knowledge of the atrocious events they were registering, but no previous artistic training, so their work was both a therapeutic exercise and the discovery of a language for the aesthetic expression of painful memories; and third, the absence of any words, both a way to indicate that there are limits to what can be expressed in a context of ongoing war, and an invitation for the viewers to participate actively in the aims of this project. The results are images that are both explicit and evocative, some astounding in their beauty, and the majority of them impossible to forget.

Notes 1. This chapter is in part the result of several conversations and long e-mail exchanges I’ve held with Juan Manuel Echavarría since 2007, when the workshops with former combatants from the war in Colombia were in their initial phases. His generosity and willingness to share with me the work of these painters, and the recollection of his experiences interacting with them, made this text possible and allowed for the development of much of its content. I am also indebted to María Victoria Uribe and Gabriela Polit-Dueñas, who read early versions of this text and made insightful comments that greatly influenced its final form. 2. The exhibit’s Web site is: www.laguerraquenohemosvisto.com. 3. Juan Manuel Echavarría is a Colombian artist who has worked for several years using photography and video to express some of the pain and dislocations brought by violence in Colombia. A good part of his work relies on exploring how people directly affected by violence use artistic expression to make sense of such violence. In a series of videos called “Bocas de ceniza” (Mouths of Ash), for instance, he shows the faces of people who have survived massacres and other forms of aggression, with each person singing a song that he or she wrote to help him or her cope with the pain and the trauma of the events they witnessed. In a collection of photographs entitled La muerte y el río (Death and the River), he shows images from a mausoleum where people from a village by the Magdalena River decorate gravestones marked as NN, containing the bodies of anonymous victims of violence who come floating on the river. The villagers thus adopt those bodies as their own. This particular instance of preservation of memory is discussed in the chapter by María Victoria Uribe included in this volume. 4. All the workshops together were conducted in a lapse of about two-anda-half years. 5. The decision by the exhibit organizers to omit the names of the painters, the title of the paintings, and a summary of the stories depicted in the images, as explained in this chapter, was based mainly on the lingering threats faced by the ex-combatants who participated in the


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6.

7.

8.

9.

10. 11.

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workshops. It was, however, at the same time a curatorial choice, motivated in part by the curator’s own interest in art as a vehicle for conveying the silences and absences of violence. The curator, Ana Tiscornia, is an artist from Uruguay, who has explored this subject in her work, marked by the context of the dictatorships in the Southern Cone, where so much effort went into developing artistic ways to express the reality of disappearance and silence that marked the brutality of those regimes. For information on her art, see the Web site: anatiscornia.com. By the end of 2009, there were around 19,000 former guerrilla members who had demobilized through the Ley de Justicia y Paz, which brings the total of former combatants demobilized in Colombia, in the context of benefits provided by this law, to around 51,000. This represents an enormous burden to the Colombian judicial system, and part of the reason why thorough processes of state sanctioned justice have not been possible with all these former combatants. International human rights organizations and groups of victims challenged the Ley de Justicia y Paz on the basis of its failure to properly address the rights of survivors to justice, truth, and reparation (Laplante and Theidon 52), contending that former combatants who disarmed were not forced to confess the truth before disarming, and would receive only symbolic prison sentences at best, if judged. These challenges were not successful, and the law remained in place. The Ley de Justicia y Paz was widely criticized by international human rights organizations, among them the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, precisely because of its inability to bring proper justice to demobilized combatants. To be eligible to participate in its benefits, they had to confess their crimes in a so-called “Versión Libre” (Free Version) that allowed them to be selective in their confessions. If they confessed serious crimes they would receive sentences of five to eight years, which was considered extremely disproportionate by many. The law also allowed for the state to continue investigating the former combatants, so that if they were later found to have participated in serious crimes that they had not confessed, they could be retrialed and could receive new sentences. This provision rendered legally unfeasible the divulgation of any stories where the former combatants described the events included in their paintings, since they could include incriminatory evidence. On the subject of dismemberment as a war tactic, see the text by Maria Victoria Uribe (2004), “Dismembering and Expelling: Semantics of Political Terror in Colombia.” For a recent compilation of studies on war perpetrators worldwide see: Jensen and Szejnmann eds. (2008). The naive style of these paintings allow only for very blunt markers of emotions in the human figures, such as painted tears, forced face


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12. 13.

14. 15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

M a r í a H e l e n a R u e da gestures, raised or extended arms, and kneeled legs. This is one reason why the images of victimizers are devoid of all emotion. So are the figures of most of the witnesses and other persons in the picture. This also makes more striking the presence of such markers in the depiction of victims. The conclusions of the experiments were published in book format. See Milgram (1974). I have this information from my conversations with Juan Manuel Echavarría, who asked the painters to describe the pictures after they had finished them. He noted that while in many cases the ex-combatants paint themselves among the aggressors, it was very common for them to appear among the witnesses of the events. Donna DeCesare. “Curator’s Statement” (2009). According to Internal Displacement Monitoring Agency (IDMA): “At the end of 2009 there were up to 4.9 million Internally Displaced Persons in Colombia, bringing it alongside Sudan as one of the two largest internal displacement situations in the world.” This information is at the IDMA Web page (www.internal-displacement.org), in the section on Colombia. The confrontation known as La Violencia took place in Colombia around the 1950s. It was a confrontation between members of the Liberal and Conservative parties that left hundreds of thousand dead in rural Colombia. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) started as a small peasant guerrilla right after La Violencia. They remained active for years, but it was largely with the influx of money derived from drug trafficking, starting in the late 1980s, that they became the large and powerful guerrilla movement they are today. The paramilitaries, on the other hand, were also directly and indirectly involved in the drug business, deriving a great deal of their resources from it. For a general account on the early stages of this process, see Tovar Pinzón (1999). For a general analysis of U.S. drug policy in Colombia, including references to the environmental damage caused by both cultivation and fumigation, see Crandall (2008). A few compilations of testimonial narratives do show some of the hardships experienced by coca cultivators in Colombia, most notably works by Alfredo Molano, and especially Aguas arriba: entre la coca y el oro (1990) and Desterrados (2001). In a comment to a first draft of this chapter, María Victoria Uribe noted that she has conducted interviews where both victims and victimizers point out that for an uninformed eye, it is virtually impossible to know where a mass grave is located. Only those who participated in the burial of the bodies have an approximate idea of its location. There are in Colombia many examples of compilations of testimonial narratives published without using the real names of the speakers, and


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21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

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with changes on every single detail that could reveal their identity, including dates and locations for the violent events. One important example of an author that has used this strategy to disseminate stories of abuse without endangering the people who bore witness to them is Alfredo Molano Bravo. On the subject, see Rueda (2009). The absence of any indication on what the images are specifically recording can still be perceived as a limitation by viewers who are left craving this information, and the blank spaces could also be interpreted as standing for the hope that one day the stories behind the images will emerge. Testimonials from such forums and confessions can be found, for example, in the Web portal Verdad Abierta (www.verdadabierta.com), a cooperative project created and maintained by the independent research center Fundación Ideas Para la Paz (Ideas for Peace Foundation) and the magazine Semana, one of the leading Colombian weeklies. The city of Bogota’s secretary of education helped organize visits by upper-grade students of the city’s public high schools, who participated in these workshops. The recently inaugurated Centro de Memoria, Paz y Reconciliación (Center for Peace and Reconciliation) is an effort to concentrate and provide links to various projects whose aim is the preservation of memories of violence in Colombia. Its Web site is www.centromemoria.gov. co. Some well-known recent artists whose work deals with the situation of violence in Colombia are Juan Manuel Echavarría, Oscar Muñoz, Beatriz González, Doris Salcedo, Fernando Arias, Gabriel Posada, and José Alejandro Restrepo. This list is very limited, excluding the names of numerous persons who currently explore art as a means to make sense of the violence in Colombia and preserve its memory. Some information on recent projects can be found at the Web site of Esfera Pública (esferapublica.org).

References Candida Smith, Richard, ed. Art and the Performance of Memory. London, New York: Routledge, 2002. Print. Crandall, Russell. Driven by Drugs: U.S. Policy toward Colombia. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2008. Print. DeCesare, Donna. “Curator’s Statement.” dartcenter.org. Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, March 7, 2009. Web. Gibbons, Joan. Contemporary Art and Memory. London, New York: Ibi Tauris, 2007. Print. Jensen, Olaf, and Claus- Christian W. Szejnmann, eds. Ordinary People as Mass Murderers: Perpetrators in Comparative Perspectives. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Print.


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Laplante, Lisa J., and Theidon, Kimberly. “Transitional Justice in Times of Conflict: Colombia’s Ley De Justicia Y Paz.” Michigan Journal of International Law 28, no. 49 (2006): 49–108. Print. La guerra que no hemos visto: Un proyecto de memoria histórica. Bogotá: Fundación Puntos de Encuentro, 2009. Print. Milgram, Stanley. Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. New York: Harper, 1974. Print. Molano, Alfredo. Aguas arriba: entre la coca y el oro. Bogotá: El Ancora Editores, 1990. ———. Desterrados, Bogotá: El Ancora Editores, 2001. Print. Richard, Nelly. Políticas y estéticas de la memoria. Santiago: Ed. Cuarto Propio, 2000. Print. Rueda, María Helena. “Nombrar la violencia desde el anonimato: relatos testimoniales en contextos de miedo.” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 34, no. 1 (Fall 2009). 227–46. Print. Taussig, Michael. Law in a Lawless Land: Diary of a Limpieza in Colombia. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003. Print. Tovar Pinzón, Hermes. Colombia: droga, economía, guerra y paz. Bogotá: Planeta Editorial (1999). Print. Uribe, Maria Victoria. “Dismembering and Expelling: Semantics of Political Terror in Colombia.” Public Culture 16, no. 1 (Winter 2004): 79–95. Print.


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C onsi de r at ions on Viol e nc e , t h e Gl ob a l S ou t h, a n d a n A es t h e t ic s of S obr i e t y Hermann Herlinghaus

Ethics is back in literary studies, as it is in philosophy and political theory, and indeed the very critiques of universal man and the autonomous human subject that had initially produced a resistance to ethics have now generated a crossover among these various disciplines that sees and does ethics “otherwise.” Marjorie Garber, Beatrice Hanssen, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz Ethics and morality have recently become very fashionable. . . . What we are witnessing with the current infatuation with humanitarian crusades and ethically correct good causes is the triumph of a sort of moralizing liberalism that is increasingly filling the void left by the collapse of any project of real political transformation. This moralization of society is . . . a consequence of the lack of any credible political alternative to the current dominance of neoliberalism. Chantal Mouffe . . . if we are to take the full measure of Benjamin’s point, that the state of siege is not the exception but the rule, then we are required to rethink our notions of order, of center and base, and of certainty too—all of which now appear as state of sieged dream-images, hopelessly hopeful illusions of the intellect searching for peace in a world whose tensed mobility allows of no rest. . . . For our very forms and means of representation are under siege. Michael Taussig


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H e r m a n n H e r l i ng h aus

Ethics at an Impasse The so-called turn to ethics,1 visible throughout the Anglo-American humanities, continues to set its marks. It encounters one of its centers of contention in the refashioning of influential variants of liberal democratic (cultural and moral) theory vis-à-vis those voices that question the procedure of invisibilizing the problems of inequality, exploitation, and injustice behind a “culturalization,” (Zizek, “Tolerance” 660) or a dehistoricization of politics. At stake is not an ethics of representation, nor one of subjects “represented” (or excluded). At issue is rather the way of dealing with our contemporary perception of the main conflicts, an ethics that becomes aware of the tremendous tension lingering beneath a self-understood “normality of values,” to the extent that it is able to start reflecting anew on the ominous duet of order and exception, of emergency and rule. Mouffe (2000) writes about the necessity to counter “the Kantian-inspired deontological model of democracy,” as well as a “neo-Aristotelian ethics of the good” with an “ethics not of harmony but of dis-harmony” (93). Seeking to address the actual grounds for the idea of “democracy,” she pleads for an “agonistic conception of democracy” in which the “ineradicability of antagonism and violence” should be recognized as the central conceptual problem. “What to do with this violence, how to deal with this antagonism, those are the ethical questions to which a democratic politics will forever be confronted” (94). From here, it might be pertinent to be more modest, as well as more specific, since ours is not an incursion in political theory, or sociology, so that it becomes necessary to reflect, once again, about the politics of aesthetics (Ranciére, among others), or phrased in a different way: what are the immanent relationships between figuration, cultural imagination, and conceptual insights that help address uncomfortable ethical perceptions? These are perceptions and experiences inherent in certain narratives and images that seem to have no home in the fantasmatic universe of the modern literary subject—the one, to use the Lacanian term, for which the formal symbolic order remains an “empty” framework (Zizek 1997) to be filled with objects from a familiar libidinal catalogue. With the attribute “uncomfortable,” I am referring to narratives that are an intrinsic part of what after 1989–1991 began to take contours under the designation of the Global South. For several reasons, the Global South is not the Third World. It has become, by force of worldwide readjustment of the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, more “contemporary” than the Global North. However, the Global South is not just a map of those territories that are today


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directly exposed to Empire’s almighty blessings of subjection. We are dealing, at the same time, with new spaces of self-awareness, and with narrative and imaginary formations of stunning affective, as well as epistemic force. Taking this point of departure, our aim is to discuss, after a few initial remarks, the notion of an aesthetics of sobriety. The conflicts over ethics, or more specifically over the core and the limits of a criticism both literary and cultural that sees itself as ethical, encounter a dramatic framing when we start asking what is the common ground from which all questions must begin and where they must find their consummation. The legitimate answer would presumably be “qualified life,” that is modernity’s main strategic albeit ambiguous achievement. “Qualified life” as the playing field is what should be retained as a minimal basis from which, and within which, ethical questions should be raised, interpreted, and gauged. But the uncomfortable issue immediately arises: if high reflexivity— aesthetically or philosophically shaped—has a stake in exploring the inner ties between “qualified life” and the sublime anxieties (and discourses) of those who, indefatigably, can lay claim to it, then what if questions were raised in relation to territories and aesthetic spaces of imagination where “qualified life” is, for large groups of social and cultural agents an exception, or a desperate desire rather than a guaranteed rule? (Herlinghaus 4–6). I am not pretending to speak in the name of subjects who are exposed to “bare life.” However, when dealing with narratives that address, today, an interruption of Western democratic civility, it seems to be problematic to continue viewing them as either aberrations from a norm to whose universal legitimacy we, as “naturally” self-reflexive subjects, can still hold claim, or as expressions of an “ethics of the break” (Basterra 25), that is to say, to stick to the poststructuralist convention that engages figurations of violence as evidence of “nonrepresentability” locating them in a metaphysical void, or placing them in a “non-symbolic,” “nonlinguistic” space of corporeal, and psychic vulneration. Vulnerability, victimization, and inequality are crucial issues, and they can affect both the “autonomous” individual and the precarious citizen at the margins of the democratic edifice. But when we speak of subjects who are not entitled to lay claim to a self-understood civility of “qualified life,”—that autonomy that we can critically address but whose underground we prefer not to touch—the concern about the “irreducible gap within the self” (Basterra 25; my emphasis) may seem strangely out of place. My goal is not to join the ethical discussion from an abstract viewpoint but rather to suggest an inversion of perspective that is


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itself relative, in that it approaches ethical perceptions as they emanate from contemporary narratives of the Global South. Throughout Latin America, the faces and images of endangered life and of bodies that are exposed to aggression or destruction, together with the fantasies of those that pragmatic globalism leaves behind, have become a daily presence about which new narrative formations can provide firsthand insights. Indeed, the dramatically increased vulnerability of today’s globe also threatens to dislocate the privileges of the First World. However, to assume that a “spontaneous” eruption of violence is simultaneously occurring in both the “postmodern, wireless world” and in the “impoverished, oppressive” environments—as de Lauretis phrases a post–9/11 perception (De Lauretis 1–2)—would be too easy a comparison. If Butler proposes that we take “precarious life”—life’s exposedness to injury and aggression—as a vantage point for a new, that is, an internationalist ethical thinking (Butler xii), it might be necessary to ask how the mechanisms for distributing vulnerability work, locally and globally. What are the aesthetic markers of contemporary Latin American works that engage these conditions, beyond or beneath the dramaturgies that massively uphold the production of media-induced “low-level fear?” (Massumi viii). For example, how do film, music, and literature address the experiences of what Davis calls a “surplus humanity,” the new “informal working class without legal recognition or rights” (Davis 6) that, on the one hand, challenges Negri’s and Hardt’s teleology of the multitude but, on the other, shows an astonishing potential for survival, communitarian resistance, and response to the aborting of hope for a “qualified life.” If we think about “Critique of Violence,” a text from the early twentieth century, we find a hint given by Benjamin, harboring a doubt as to Kant’s categorical imperative (“act in such a way that at all times you use humanity both in your person and in the person of all others as an end, and never merely as a means”) (Benjamin, “Critique” 241). Benjamin’s critical footnote can be put into contrast as well, ex post facto, with neo-Kantian desires for an ethical redressing of today’s antagonisms: “One might, rather, doubt whether this famous demand does not contain too little—that is, whether it is permissible to use, or allow to be used, oneself or another in any respect as a means” (241). What the Kantian imperative cannot safeguard against, as Benjamin anticipated, is global market capitalism’s genuine ability to make violence immanent to modern societies. In the developed Western situation, oppression appears obliterated, disguised as a free choice. In Zizek’s words, “our freedom of choice often functions as a


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mere formal gesture of consenting to one’s oppression and exploitation” (“Tolerance” 667). Contemporary globalization however, especially after 1989–1991, has brought forces to bear on societies which threaten to exhaust even that magic balance. This is the balance, based on unevenness and coloniality yet nevertheless a temporary balance of antagonistic forces, that works by virtue of the abstraction of universal human rights, injected into normative democracy and human lifeworlds alike through the universal exchange of commodities (Zizek, “Tolerance” 668). How is it that “qualified life” has been subjected, increasingly, to graduation, downsizing, or enclosure to the extent that the globalization of planetary space now functions by brutally revamping the norms of inclusion and exclusion, centers and peripheries? How is it that endangered human existence has begun to acquire unprecedented forms of global immanence while cynical common sense tries to reason away the heightened inequalities in today’s world, or while permeable borders are closed up by imposing geopolitical rule? How is it possible to access, today, those violated territories in spatial, affective, and narratological terms? How can aesthetic formations be understood as ethically charged imaginaries that not only have been stigmatized by proven, long-standing politics of othering, but have been undercodified in a more subtle manner by a spirit of deconstruction operating from a secure world, putting in doubt the transcendent message of discursive “orientalization,” yet sometimes falling prey to the exclusive mastery of the deconstructive discourse itself. In turn, what about the status of nonindividualist, radically heterogeneous imaginaries, whose conceptual and aesthetic value has often been lost in the critical process, for example by labeling them “popular”?

Humiliating Sobriety—a Surreptitious Path At a certain point in my work on heterogeneous modernities, and while teaching about the relationships between literary imagination and historical as well as epistemic violence, I could not but feel skeptical about a paradigm that had become common in Latin American literary criticism by the mid-1990s—the conceptmetaphor of a “culture of fear.”2 For I was struck by literary texts, films, and the so-called narcocorridos of the Mexican-U.S. border, shocking new material addressing violence, that I could not yet put words to but which seemed to have one aspect in common. The aesthetic-affective charge3 of such diverse material emerging from different Latin American and border contexts pointed in an


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unfamiliar direction: something resonated from these narratives that appeared to be completely untouched by fear. I mean fear understood as a sociocultural perception of urban middle classes vis-à-vis an increasing ubiquity of violence, or in terms of a cathartic aesthetics related to a tragic destiny that might befall a select individual (the traditional tragic hero), or as an allegory compressing the spirit of the present, or as just a dispositive of introspection. When I speak of “fearlessness,” to be sure, I am not suggesting popular genres in the first place, nor a certain Hollywood-based action dramaturgy that relies on images of divined superheroes. On the contrary, what seems to be surfacing are new imaginaries of vulnerability and deviance from the Global South and, from here, postures disputing the certainties of a genuinely modern space in which ethics and aesthetics can still meet in a conciliatory way. In a recent work, I have suggested rethinking a remark made by Benjamin in his essay on Surrealism, while at the same time placing the concept of “affective marginalization” in a framework of globalization (Herlinghaus 9–15). My purpose now is to move Benjamin’s enigmatic phrase further in a direction that can help lay out the idea of an aesthetics of sobriety. The formulation from 1929 reads as follows: “The dialectics of intoxication are indeed curious. Is not perhaps all ecstasy in one world humiliating sobriety in that complementary to it?” (Benjamin, “Surrealism” 210). The transgressive force of Benjamin’s concerns, together with his capacity to provide thought-images of singular scope, suggests that we take a prolonged look. We are facing one of the most vibrant reflections on Surrealism and the historical avant-garde. But there is more to it, and one of the ways of looking into this leads to the underground connections between secular modernity and the ways in which religiosity has always weighed on contemporary experience. Religion is not a question of dogma here, or of theological content. It rather points—as Auerbach has evoked when referring to Christianity’s magical powers—to a “movement from the depths, from the depths of the multitude as from the depths of immediate emotion,” capable of fighting “magical intoxication” (of pagan or other non-Christian kinds) by virtue of an “ordered” and “human” magic (Auerbach, Mimesis 61). Aesthetics is, of course, implied, since we are alluding to modernity’s symbolic trajectories and identity formations that are scriptural and figurative, and linked to a matrix of introspection as it has gained influence since St. Paul’s universal invention of grace for the sinner and the guilty. Regarding Surrealism’s actual roots, for Benjamin it was a revolt against Catholicism’s “anthropological powers” that, in


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the Church’s taking hegemony over “intoxication,” could make religious illumination an element of both everyday life and calculated violence, which propelled Rimbaud, Lautréamont, and Apollinaire to bring Surrealism “into the world” (Benjamin, “Surrealism” 210). That is to say, intoxication had to be wrested away from Christianity’s “ordered magic,” and it is here that the concept acquires its meaning by submitting the idea of secular progress and emancipation to reflexive exposure. When viewed from the semantic angle of the German word Rausch, intoxication can neither be reduced to a state of inebriation caused by one drug or another, nor to specific religious forces. The concept presents itself in Benjamin at a juncture of philosophical and anthropological concerns. Or, put differently, it is this very concept that was supposed to become crucial for his unconcluded project of “anthropological materialism,” in which the “creative overcoming of religious illumination,” including capitalism’s pseudoreligious powers (Benjamin, “Capitalism” 288–89) by profane yet nevertheless transgressive practices happened to be the crux. When Benjamin sets “profane” against “religious” illumination, not a few readers have taken this to be a return to (a “dialectified” version of) enlightened knowledge in the shape of a historicoanthropological materialism. However, what becomes displaced at this point is the strange “dialectics of intoxication” located in an asymmetric space—embracing both ecstasy and humiliating sobriety. We cannot move, say, in the direction of psycho-neurological and neurophysiological research that—when dealing today with the ambiguous status of intoxication—would provide a way of pursuing further what DeGrandpre has recently termed the “placebo text principle” (103). For we can assume that this was not Benjamin’s momentous cup of tea. What interests, instead, is an unusual move from “historical” to “anthropological” materialism. This was the search for what gave to the materialist-philosophical glance at history a map of figures of embodiment—a map that entailed a “scaling” of dreams, sensations of love, and other affects, rituals, practices of reading in the “coffee grounds,” hashish trance, and the magic of writing, all of which should help to achieve (an image of) profane illumination. If we stay close to the passages on Surrealism, the immediate as well as explosive space of inquiry is aesthetic experience, associated with Breton’s novel Nadja, and with Dante’s Divine Comedy. For Benjamin, the Surrealists’ was a politics of aesthetics, operating by means of radical heterogeneity, that is to say, unmoved by claims for artistic autonomy. It is from here that we must return to the matter of religion. Is not “anthropological materialism” another name for an aesthetics,


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one more powerful than “modernist idealism,” which is capable of contending with religious illumination and therefore, as well, with those simulacra of religion that lie hidden under the surface of secular modernity? (Herlinghaus 17). Are we dealing with the perception of an aesthetics that must face the “threat” or challenge of intoxication without succumbing to it? An aesthetics of sobriety, so to speak. But why then a “humiliating sobriety”? Perhaps profane illumination— not relying on the abstract-individualistic circle of accomodating reason, nor on the enchantments hidden in (the dream of) autonomous art—comes at an unfriendly price. This is a moment to deal further with overlooked connections. Into view comes Erich Auerbach, the German critic who survived Fascism by emigrating to Istanbul, and who would later teach at Yale. In “Surrealism,” Benjamin brings Auerbach’s “excellent Dante: Poet of the Secular World” (1928) into direct relationship with the “dialectics of intoxication.” Mimesis, the major work of the philologist, was not yet written. However, could not an imaginative encounter between “Surrealism” and Mimesis provoke insights along similar lines? For it is Auerbach who will directly approximate the notions of intoxication and violence through aesthetic (stylistic and rhetorico-figural) reflection when scrutinizing both Christian religion’s (powerful), and classical rationalism’s (rather limited) resources to narrate and thus to take hold of a terror-stricken world (Auerbach, Mimesis 61). In this reflection, humanistic rationalism falls short when it comes to condensing particular experiences into narration. In “The Arrest of Peter Valvomeres,” Auerbach deals with narrative material of medieval, and thus “early modern” nature, addressing phenomena that will come to resonate in contemporary global culture as well. There is that old problem that still, or perhaps more than ever before, causes perplexity—the one that arises at the point at which we look at violence under the aspect of intoxication. No clear explanation seems to be in sight. Yet, from the perspective of contemporary conflicts, and the tragic rise of the Global South, there are underconceptualized questions that have moved to center stage. A first problematic can be raised from what we have called the concept-figure of “affective marginalities,” leading us to ask how can globalization appear as a timely “war on affect.” By affective marginalization—following a logic circumscribed by the global “distribution of the sensible” (Ranciére 85)—we mean a wide array of psycho-political mechanisms and cultural forms by which dominant societies keep the “economy of the scapegoat” (Girard) alive. “Affective marginalities” can be understood as those (imagined


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and real) groups, territories, individuals, and symbols that are constantly yet ominously singled out in order to redirect negative energy streams away from those places where they originate: social conflict, moral and political subordination, economic exclusion, and symbolic intimidation. Marginalities that are affectively produced carry the burden by which a moral economy that increasingly operates in flexible, national, and global terms administers the reproduction of “safe places” versus those zones where contamination and abjection are supposed to take place. In that sense, “intoxication” can be seen to be produced by projection and attribution, closely linked to the flexible administration of otherness. The phenomenon of marginalization is more complicated than formal sociological and ideological-critical approaches have taught us so far. A second aspect related to “intoxication” is bound up with a paradox inherent in today’s “mediascapes.”4 Doesn’t the production of endemic, low-level ecstasy as it is generated by certain media, provide a mechanism that democratically regulates fear, and appeases those desires that the accelerated vortex of life’s commodification incites but must leave in part unfulfilled? In short, at issue is the cultural—psycho-economic and affective—fashioning (or “delegation”) of violence through dynamics that are hard to access, for example through the use and regulation of diverse states of “Rausch,” fostered by powers whose effectivity seems to lie in their quest for, and their command over purity and order. Here it is important to understand, starting with colonization and the transatlantic commerce of numerous, highly valued drugs from South America to Europe in the course of Western industrialization, as well as the controlled narcotics prohibition of the twentieth century and the socalled drugs wars, that hegemonic modernity has never just operated by an overcoming of “uncontained” cultures but has fused the ascent of secular rationality with both an instrumental and a transcendental fashioning of intoxication. In other words, the discourse of rational containment has become a central maxim of civilization’s moral path, yet it has cunningly relied on the “orientalist” fashioning of an intoxicated or intoxicating other. It was obviously not Auerbach’s intention to provide conceptual thought-images for understanding the present. However, we can extrapolate, with his help, that brute violence as an “intoxicating” force in early modern times (Auerbach, Mimesis 58, 59, 61) finds its constitutively modern contrast not in the moderate, self-disciplined “rational individualistic” universe, but in the global “war on affect” (Herlinghaus 8). This war relies on the cultural assumption that the West can “fight the enemy with his own weapons”—a sort of what


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one might today call modern “cynical violence” whose “magic is no less a magic than is bloodlust, and it is stronger because it is a more ordered, a more human magic” (Auerbach, Mimesis 60–61). In these thoughts about the concealed powers of Western, “applied reason,” we find a motive that applies, as well, to Benjamin’s interest in Surrealism. This holds, especially, for the Surrealists’ fascination with intoxication, and the reasons why Benjamin considered the fathers of Surrealism of the nineteenth century as rebellious neophytes—writers who had been schooled in Catholicism but who took its lessons to the other, the revolutionary side. Let me illustrate this search for an uncommon aesthetic politics of rebellion by quoting. . . . the true, creative overcoming of religious illumination certainly does not lie in narcotics. It resides in a profane illumination, a materialistic, anthropological inspiration, to which hashish, opium, or whatever else can [only; my emphasis] give an introductory lesson. (But a dangerous one; and the religious lesson is stricter.) (“Surrealism,” 210)

Doesn’t the stricter “religious” lesson, which modern reason together with commodity culture has learned to capitalize on (Benjamin, “Capitalism”), consist in just that: the fabulous capacity of hegemonic contemporary cultures and geo-economic powers to cover up violence with skilled magic and sophisticated morality, to make it work beneath the surface, and to fly across the abyss of domination still unharmed by the forces of resistance and wrath? At the same time, now that it becomes visible that the enlightened, self-contained, rationalistic impetus of the modern subject is not the effective force that will tip the scales when it comes to struggle, we might not find the actual force of resistance of those subjects, communities, and cultures that are excluded from the benefits of the West, in a moderate, individualistic, and at last rational ethics either. This is not just a question of why the oppressed should stick to moderation and containment if oppression has never done so; it is necessary, in the first place, not to rush into a subjectification or mythification of violence (for example, the fundamentalist attribution of terror and crime to certain social agents and groups in today’s world). Violence is, rather, an objective condition made immanent by global modernity’s triumphs, and is deeply ingrained in the lives of many. At this point, the concept of “sobriety” acquires an unforeseen ethical shimmer. What does it take to become attentive toward an aesthetics of sobriety, as it forcefully speaks from the Latin American global south?


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The Puzzle of Narconarratives Although scholarly reflection on narco-imagination, viewed as a hemispheric phenomenon of major scope, started only a few years ago, it is no secret that the so-called narcocorrido, which emerged in the 1970s, has helped pave the way for the new interest. At the same time, narcocorridos account for a substantial paradox whose understanding is crucial for detecting an ethical momentum inherent in the reconstitution of narrative imagination in the Latin American global south. It has repeatedly been said that narcocorridos celebrate the violence implicit in the informal economy of inter- and transAmerican narcotics trade. Judging from the level of textual referentiality as conveyed by the lyrical storytelling of these songs, starting with “Contrabando y traición” and “La banda del carro rojo” (Los Tigres del Norte), critics have argued or implied that the counterviolence of popular subjects as it is depicted in an increasing number of literary and filmic works leaves no room for ethical approaches beyond manichaean criteria. This perception has been extended beyond narcocorridos, and is sometimes applied to a heterogeneous group of films, performances, and literary texts that thematize the heightened status of the contemporary experience of violence in countries such as Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Argentina, and Brazil, as well as across especially contested spaces such as the Mexican-U.S. borderlands. It is now time for a conceptually more alert approach. A perspective that avoids either mythification or fear when approaching today’s uncanny narrative worlds. What is the paradox inherent in narcocorridos? When we take the most salient case into consideration, that of the norteño group Los Tigres del Norte, based in San José, California, the violent peripeties in the majority of their narco ballads are difficult to deny. Nevertheless, this should only be the starting point for critical inquiry. What these songs convey in their laconic, fragmentary, and sometimes coarse textuality leads to a subsequent reversal of violent gestures (and actions) at the level of affective aesthetics. If we take the violent outbursts, or the existential deviance of low-level drug traffickers who appear as heroes in Los Tigres’ songs, as moments of “ecstasy” we then find an affective (stylistic, synaesthetic, or intermedially charged) force of “humiliating sobriety” that is sometimes stronger than the seemingly ecstatic component. In most of Los Tigres’ ballads, the violence that occurs at the storytelling level is inverted by an immanently “reflective” dispositive of sobriety. As we have argued at length,5 the deviance of narcocorridos does not consist, aesthetically speaking, in


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foregrounding violence (ecstasy) but in rejecting the curse of fear and guilt (sobriety). This difference should be noted, as difficult as it might sometimes be to push criticism this far. At the point at which guilt and fear can be imagined as particularly pervasive forms of intoxication, it is not incorrect to associate sobriety with their subversion, or rejection. This is not the moment to talk at length about the underground fusions of modernity with pervasive remnants of religiosity regarding control of intoxication. However, it is necessary to remember that guilt and fear have played a crucial role as affective “agencies” in the circle of both subjectification and subjection in relation to the forces by which the modern individual has been constituted. Today, one can picture many constellations in which guilt and fear are susceptible to contestation. Nevertheless, a democratically assumed universality of Western lifestyles and underlying power structures has turned guilt and fear into a sometimes concerting “melody” of the subconscious (Deleuze 83–84). It is therefore necessary that we look beyond those epistemic comfort zones in which the intellect strives for peace. That is to say, we must pay attention to the unfamiliar aesthetic-ethical situations—those that arise in the case of narrators and artists from the Global South, one of whose major concerns is the “culture of exception.” By culture of exception we understand, in contrast to Agamben’s notion of “state of exception” (which is closely related to Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology), an existential reality of the nonexistent subject, that is to say of those people, groups, or communities who are destined to live at the margins of the conditions of citizenship that are protected by the law, and by relative (or should we say minimal) economic, territorial, and psychological “securities.” We are thinking of a state of exposure to either permanent or “adjusted” poverty, brutal displacement and transversal migration, latent threat to life, or other chronic forms of affliction on the body and of the social cosmos, due to which a cultural fabric is generated in which life is shaped and lived as something with no essential, let alone normative, value. The Global South is with us, indeed. As far as “guilt” is concerned—conceived as social emotion or symbolic attribution—it can become a particularly dramatic issue in those spaces where “cultures of exception” are confronted, as happens in many diverse ways, with either official or mainstream politics of affective marginalization. The stigmatizing force of hegemonic moral, or fetishistic, cultures is often inversely proportionate to the need to apply an incriminating rhetoric directly, although cases abound that attest to the contrary. Under these premises, the rejection of guilt (and fear) by subjects who, in


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fact, resemble “noncitizens” in the above-mentioned sense makes me think of a kind of strategic attitude of sobriety. To avoid misperceptions, this does not equal a depoliticization of the social realm but rather signals stunning, political-affective dispositives emerging across undercodified spaces that have often been exempt from critical cultural analysis. When practices of deviance, and resistance against conditions, or attributions of culpability become themselves bound up with violent behavior, we would probably think of humiliating acts of sobriety. To be more explicit, the need to resort to violence in order to secure survival within constellations that are in many ways violent themselves is one of the most humiliating experiences imaginable. However, “humiliating sobriety” also implies an ethical note. Let me repeat, the accent is placed on a questioning of guilt and fear under circumstances of enforced survival, rather than on the violent acts that may, or may not, accompany those postures. That is to say, the rejection of guilt, and its psycho-cultural figurations becomes a dispositif that serves affective survival in the first place—a sort of defiant ethico-emotional “entirety,” directed against mechanisms of dependency that are, in notable cases exposed by the literatures and narratives in question, not earned but immanent; it can thus become an affective gesture that might reveal a legitimate purpose, an ethical striving that reaches far beyond a violent situation or conflict. It is from here that we can start unraveling the puzzle of contemporary “narconarratives” that seem to have emerged within some of the most compelling imaginary—literary, filmic, and musical— territories that we can think of. It is necessary to abstain from rushing into qualifications of violence and terror when assuming the interpretive and analytic task. Writers and artists dealing with atrocious experiences have choices other than becoming intoxicated by their very matter, for example, the option that we have discussed when touching upon Benjamin’s respective concerns. When sobriety becomes an aesthetic force, it is possible that it serves a strategy for facing the threat, or the experience of intoxication (namely, guilt and fear) without succumbing to it. In such a light, we might even ponder the concept of “profane illumination,” understood as a kind of both mystical and critical energy, although it is unlikely to conceive illumination as an aesthetic end-result, rather than an image, an interruption, or an associative shock. Writing narconarratives from an aesthetics of sobriety comes at an inhospitable price. It implies working against mass-produced aesthetics of obscenity, streams that keep fueling low-level fear as a regulative device in favor of civic innocence, serving the complicity of a public who rejoices


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in a way of life that it deems distant from what it enjoys at the daily television screen, a form of perverse intoxication, so to speak. But an aesthetics of sobriety also implies avoiding the Adornian dream of autonomy, or negativity as art’s “natural” emancipatory force. It starts, as hinted at and performed by writers and film directors such as Alonso Salazar, Eduardo Antonio Parra, Elmer Mendoza, Víctor Gaviria, Felipe Aljure, and even Roberto Bolaño, with an incursion into reality by an aesthetic politics of defamiliarization, or contemporary forms of “Brechtian” estrangement (Verfremdung). What seems to get out of balance, in the first place, are the subtleties of influential modern conventions of writing, be they realist or fantastic, introspective or metafictional, as well as of shaping violence into approved (tragic, or even melodramatic) forms of narrative experience. For, in narconarratives, there exists an unruly nexus between the real, the surreal, and the fantastic that awaits further study. Perhaps it is time to take up the new challenges that have been emerging, at present, from the question if all ecstasy and intoxication on “one world” are not closely linked to a humiliating sobriety in the world “complementary to it.”

Notes 1. This chapter is part of a more extensive reflection belonging to my book in progress, “Toward a Global Aesthetics of Sobriety,” to be published in 2012. 2. See Rotker ed. (2002), and Mabel Moraña ed. (2002). 3. Among the few authors that have discussed an “affective aesthetics” while resisting a non-philosophical, “sentiment-based” notion of affect is Deleuze, especially in Cinema 1 and 2. 4. On the term see Appadurai (1996). 5. See Herlinghaus (2008): chapters 2, 3, and 4.

References Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 1996. Print. Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard Trask. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2003. Print. ———. Dante: Poet of the Secular World, trans. Ralph Manheim. New York: NYRB, 2007. Print. Basterra, Gabriela. “Ethics, Perhaps.” In The Ethics of Latin American Literary Criticism: Reading Otherwise, ed. Erin Graff Zivin, 25–44. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Print


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Benjamin, Walter. “Capitalism as Religion.” In Selected Writings, vol. 1, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, UK: Harvard UP, 2004. Print. ———. “Critique of Violence.” In Selected Writings, vol. 1., ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, UK: Harvard UP, 2004. Print. ———. “Surrealism.” In Selected Writings, vol. 2., ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith. Cambridge, UK: Harvard UP, 2005. 207–21. Print. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York: Verso, 2004. Print. Davis, Mike. Planet of Slums. London, New York: Verso, 2006. Print. De Grandpre, Richard, The Cult of Pharmacology: How America Became the World’s Most Troubled Drug Culture. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2006. Print. De Lauretis, Teresa. Freud’s Drive: Psychoanalysis, Literature, and Film. Chippenham and Eastbourne, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Print. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1 and 2, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986 and 1989. Print. ———. Masochism, trans. Jean McNeil. New York: Zone, 1989. Print. Girard, René. The Scapegoat, trans. Yvonne Freccero. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989. Print. Herlinghaus, Hermann. Violence without Guilt: Ethical Narratives from the Global South. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Print. Massumi, Brian, ed. The Politics of Everyday Fear. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. Print. Mouffe, Chantal. “Which Ethics for Democracy?” In The Turn to Ethics, ed. Marjorie B. Garber, Beatrice Hanssen, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, 85–94. New York: Routledge, 2000. Print Moraña, Mabel, ed. Espacio urbano, comunicación y violencia en América Latina. Pittsburgh, PA: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, 2002. Print. Ranciére, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill. London, New York: Continuum, 2006.. Print. Rotker, Susana, ed. Citizens of Fear: Urban Violence in Latin America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2002. Print. Schmitt, Carl. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 2005. Print. Zizek, Slavoj. The Plague of Phantasies. London, New York: Verso, 1997. Print. ———. “Tolerance as an Ideological Category.” Critical Inquiry 34, no. 4 (2008): 660. Print.


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Ur b a n Viol e nc e a n d t h e Pol i t ic s of R e pr e se n tat ion i n R ec e n t Br a z i l i a n Fi l m Marta Peixoto

To define force—it is that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him: somebody was here and the next minute there’s nobody here at all; this is a spectacle that the Iliad never wearies of showing us. Simone Weil

T

he spectacle of force, an age-old presence in the arts, has become far more complicated—and spectacular—these days as new technologies expand venues and media for the exposure of both real and simulated violence. This essay examines questions that arise from the representation of violence in Brazilian films of the last couple of decades. As Simone Weil observes, force “exercised to its limit” is only one of its possibilities; its subtler, more uncertain manifestations have equally devastating effects: How much more varied in its processes, how much more surprising in its effects is the other force, the force that does not kill, i.e., that does not kill just yet. It will surely kill, it will possibly kill, or perhaps, it merely hangs, poised and ready over the head of the creature it can kill, at any moment, which is to say at every moment. In whatever aspect, its effect is the same: it turns a man into stone. (Weil 164–65)

This essay will consider some of the consequences of real violence becoming represented violence in one specific medium and context. Violence is not simple or straightforward, either in its reality or in


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M a r t a P e i xo t o

its representations. Moreover, real violence—if we are not its direct victims or witnesses and even if we are—also reaches us through representations that mediate, shape, or create meaning, and the relation of factual to fictive violence is intricately fraught with political and ethical questions. Since the “retomada” or renewal of Brazilian cinema in the mid1990s, comparable in scope and vigor to the Cinema Novo movement of the 1960s, many films, in line with media coverage, have focused on urban violence. With its potential for gangster or thrillertype plots, urban violence forms the backbone of films such as City of God, “The Trespasser” (O invasor), and Elite Squad, but it also occupies center stage in sober documentary films, such as News from a Personal War and Bus 174. These films arise out of and have an impact on political and cultural processes of Brazilian cities. After the return of democracy following two decades of military dictatorship in Brazil (1964–85), the incidence of violent crime rose in large urban centers. The reasons for this perhaps unexpected development—after all, the political violence of the dictatorship had come to an end—are many and complex. Violence in each city has its own dynamic but it also has broad similarities to that in other major cities in Brazil and Latin America. In Rio de Janeiro, the setting for the films I’ll discuss below, this surge is linked to the illegal drug trade in poor communities (at this writing Rio’s favelas, or shantytowns, are usually numbered at over 1,000) and to state repression that almost invariably oversteps the limits of legality. “In the state of Rio de Janeiro in 2007 alone 6,133 persons were murdered and another 1,330 were killed in confrontations with the police—many of the victims were executed (all of them were poor; the majority of them were young black men” (vi). The three films I’ll consider display and/or interrogate drug-related violence. In the fiction film, Elite Squad (José Padilha 2007), and in two documentaries, News from a Personal War (João Moreira Salles and Kátia Lund 1998), and Babilônia 2000 (Eduardo Coutinho 2001), violence ranges from direct and spectacular to low-key and oblique. Each film offers a diagnosis and may also point to a prescription for a cure. How can different strategies of realistic representation of violence be seen as more or less (politically) effective? What kind of intervention can they have in the conflicts they depict? Since certain kinds of violence appear regularly as successful formulas for consumption while others do not, what presence does each film have in the entertainment marketplace? Rather than claiming at the outset for any of the films the function of paradigms of different modes of representing


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violence—though they are that too—this essay examines the particularities of each one and considers its circulation and the reasons for its success with Brazilian and international audiences. Elite Squad brings out in sharp relief the nexus between a certain kind of representation of violence, commercial success, and political impact as it focuses on glaring public safety issues: the drug trade, police corruption and drug consumption that enable this trade, and the existence of a police force that uses criminal means to repress crime. Like other films that represent urban crises, such as City of God, Elite Squad derives authority from the use of ethnographic material and encourages viewers to almost forget that they are watching fiction. It shows the workings of the elite squad of the Rio de Janeiro state police, an intervention force trained to repress the illegal drug traffic in poor communities of Rio. It is based, though loosely, on a book-length fictional narrative, cowritten by a sociologist, Luiz Eduardo Soares, who once served as national secretary of public safety, and two former officers of the elite squad, André Batista and Rodrigo Pimentel (the latter also a coauthor of the film’s screenplay). In the introduction to the book, the authors highlight, though with some slipperiness, the factual content of the supposed fiction, while defending the necessity of using fiction in the service of fact: The accounts that make up this book are fictional until proven otherwise. Even so, any resemblance to reality is no mere coincidence. If our imagination reflects what has actually happened, it comes from the fact that this book stems from our experiences and our having lived, each in his own way, the reality of public safety in Rio de Janeiro. We can attest, dear reader, that when the narrative doesn’t correspond to actual experiences it is because the latter exceed the former in violence and repulsiveness. (Soares, Batista, and Pimentel, viii)

Both the book and the film trade heavily on their documentary aspect and aim to have the impact of exposés. Shot with jumpy camera work and darkly saturated colors, the film has the appearance of a documentary; many of its actors are nonprofessionals. While aiming at more than mere entertainment by proposing to reveal something of the workings of a violent reality, this fictional police drama’s supposed depiction of reality actually enhances its prospects for boxoffice success. The point of view of the film—in particular, whether it celebrates or condemns the elite squad it shows—has been the crux of controversy in reviews and other kinds of public debates about the film. Featuring the violence linked to the drug trade from the perspective


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of the police charged with its repression, Elite Squad moves at a fast pace and devotes an impressive number of minutes to shoot-outs. The narrative voice, Captain Nascimento, openly espouses the illegal use of torture and unwarranted lethal force, in his view common and necessary practices in the elite squad, a small, highly trained and disciplined unit of black-clad, beret-wearing officers, created “to intervene when the regular police can’t cope,”1 as he explains, often in conflicts involving drug gangs. A set of skillfully interwoven plots foregrounds the targets of this captain’s ire: the drug trade itself, but also the corruption endemic in the regular police force, and the arrogance, blindness, and self-regard of the middle- and upper-class students who work in NGOs in the favelas but consume and deal drugs on the side, seemingly unconcerned that these activities contribute to the violence they decry. The captain criticizes these transgressions sharply, all the while excusing the elite squad’s use of torture and summary execution as the only way to counter the crimes that threaten to deliver the city into the hands of the drug traffickers. The film is set in 1997, at the time immediately preceding Pope John Paul II’s brief visit to Rio de Janeiro (an actual historical event). As the pope will be staying at the archbishop’s house close to a favela, the elite squad receives orders to clear it of drug trafficking so as to protect His Holiness’s safety. But the captain is burnt out after years of service in the squad and his wife is pregnant with their first child. He wants to leave the squad, but who will replace him? “The pope needed the squad, the squad needed me, and I needed to leave the squad. It wasn’t going to be easy.” Like City of God, which makes figurative use of the ill-fitting name of one of Rio’s most violent favelas, Elite Squad takes the aura of moral righteousness of a religious leader as an ironic counterpoint to the unsavory practices deemed necessary to make the city safe for his visit. The film dramatizes a well-known situation: the drug trade in the favelas sustained by a complex system of police corruption and external interests. Rio, a transshipment point for cocaine imported mainly from Colombia and Peru, retains some of it for internal consumption. The film shows a regular police (who earn notoriously low salaries) that represses the drug trade but also covertly aids it by selling state-of-the art weapons to the drug gangs, weapons that will be used in turf wars among competing drug gangs and against the police itself. The regular police that the film displays—a dismal spectacle— demands pay-offs from the drug gangs and engages in a variety of scams, involving the illegal numbers game, prostitution, parking violations, and charging businesses for the protection they should


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receive as a matter of course. Amid this widespread corruption, the film distinguishes the elite squad as the only haven for honest cops who take pride in staying clean and in behaving brutally, almost as a trade-off of one for the other. The captain’s voice-over narration invites the identification of the viewer, whom he addresses with jarring complicity as “my friend,” “buddy,” or “pal.” His pithy, aphoristic turns of phrase lend a confident persuasiveness to his remarks and mirror the squad’s own epigrammatic mottos (“Mission assigned is mission accomplished,” “Men in black go into the favela to kill, never to die”). He believes all means are justified in the war against drug crimes and says defiantly that “only the rich with their social consciousness don’t get it that war is war.” He tortures suspects and others who might have information he wants by suffocating them with plastic bags until they speak, or die, a variant of the infamous water boarding method. He also kills at his whim and with a sense of impunity. In one scene, the captain watches though a telescope a policeman selling a gun to a presumed drug dealer and orders one of his men to kill them both. A sudden cut, however, prevents the implications of these murders from sinking in. We hear the gunshots but do not see their effects. The cut transfers us to the next scene in which the captain opens the door to his dark apartment and in the bedroom pats his wife’s pregnant belly. The film’s fast pace, in fact, leaves little room for reflection, especially reflection critical of the captain’s actions. The suggested identification with the captain’s perspective, the absence of any overt criticism of his views and actions, or of time for reflection, all tend to encourage the viewer in the direction of agreeing with the captain’s position, disturbing though it may be. From his own perspective, the film shows the captain to be a devoted and effective officer, steadfastly committed to the elite squad even as he endures a severe personal crisis. His wife, about to give birth, demands that he leave the troop for a safer job. We see him swallowing pills in the middle of the night, rushed to the hospital with a panic attack, pale and trembling in inopportune moments, or yelling in rage at his wife, who finally leaves him, taking his newborn son. The film does not, however, reveal the exact motive for his distress. Fear of death when his life as a father has barely begun? Repressed remorse for his brutal behavior coming to the surface? He consults a police psychiatrist but remains silent for fear of a possible breach of privacy, so the viewer too stays in the dark as to the specific nature of his troubles. In one scene, the captain feels the tug of remorse when a mother comes to ask him for the body of her


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teenage son, who had been employed by a drug gang to set off warning fireworks. Arresting him during a raid, the captain had beat up and released the boy to his predictable death at the hands of the drug gang. The scenes that follow show that the captain is moved by his own inner pressures rather than any abstract concern for human life, or understanding of the law and of his subjection to it. He decides to find the body for the grieving mother and, in search of information, orders someone else tortured. When the officer carrying out his order asks what to do with the moribund victim (“How about the worm here, captain?”), the captain answers, “Put him on the pope’s tab,” adding a new body to the count and shifting the blame to the circumstance of the pope’s visit. Although the film doesn’t comment on this explicitly, it shows that the captain who brutalizes is also a victim of the power he wields. The private consequence of his wielding of lawful and unlawful violence and of the blurring of the distinctions between the two is a ravaged personal life. But it also casts this suffering in a somewhat heroic light as it proves the extent of the captain’s devotion to the squad and willingness to suffer in its service. The film’s several crisscrossing plots hinge on the captain’s need to find a replacement among new recruits to the elite squad, so his superiors will allow him to leave the front lines. His high opinion of himself makes this task especially difficult. The captain leads with enthusiasm the rigorous and sadistic training session that winnows out elite squad candidates to a proven few. He announces that of all who hope to join the force, usually only five percent endure the initiation training. Several scenes show the particular humiliations and hardships to which the candidates are subjected, including begging to give up and digging the grave for their own (figurative) bodies before they are allowed to leave. “The detachment ceremony was humiliating but it was marvelous,” the captain says. One of the film’s main plots follows the early days of two idealistic rookies in the regular police force, childhood friends and roommates, whose naiveté and misadventures the captain evaluates in his jaded voice. Stripped of their illusions when faced with the manifold corruptions of the regular police force, they decide to join the elite squad and manage to survive to the end of the training. The captain decides that one of the two will have to replace him but each is incomplete. Neto, brave and impulsive, acts before he thinks. André, brainy but too thoughtful and cautious, is divided between the wish to continue as a cop and his law studies at a private university attended almost exclusively by the middle and upper classes. There he befriends


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students who work in an NGO in a favela, and one of them becomes his girlfriend. The captain heaps scorn and ridicule on the social activists: the rich kids who read Foucault and think they are making an important contribution when actually their drug consumption and drug dealing only help keep the gangs in business. For his replacement, the captain chooses Neto, who distinguished himself in the front lines of the incursions that “cleared” the favela for the pope’s visit by killing thirty “crooks” there. When Neto is killed in turn by the drug gang, André, in his rage at the death of his friend, grows in viciousness and single-minded determination. He leaves his naive, do-gooder girlfriend and takes on the full set of the captain’s values. In one scene, he interrupts a march against violence to beat up a university classmate whom he knows deals drugs. As André kicks and berates the fallen student, the captain’s voice intones, “He wasn’t only taking revenge for Neto’s death. He was making himself into a real police officer.” In another scene, André threatens to sodomize with a broomstick (following the captain’s orders) a favela resident who might lead them to the drug lord’s hiding place. In all, he acquires the missing brutality and becomes a fitting replacement for the captain in the captain’s own eyes. As André takes on the captain’s brutal ethos, self-regard, and conviction of his own and the elite squad’s effectiveness, he also begins to follow the path to illegality and dehumanization that the captain had trod before him. The final scene shows André executing (illegally) the drug lord responsible for Neto’s murder, who begs André not to shoot him in the face so as to preserve his looks for the wake (wish denied). The sound of the shot and a blank screen end the film. It’s worth pointing out that the bodily effects of illegal executions by the police are not shown on screen, while three murders by the drug traffickers appear in gory detail. The captain’s viewpoint governs more than the voice-over narration. It also seems to influence fate itself and determine the outcome of the film’s various plots, whose characters (with the exception of Neto) are rewarded or punished depending on how close they hew to the captain’s values. One of the NGO workers who had used the organization as a base for his political campaign—self-serving and self-indulgent like the rest, in the captain’s view—is burned alive by the drug lord in a spectacular scene of cruelty, begging for his life, trapped inside a stack of tires, doused with gasoline. Although the drug trade persists undiminished—the film doesn’t make this clear, but it’s common knowledge that the fallen drug lord’s place will be filled by someone else, and that the civil and human rights violations


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will continue, along with the drug trade and police repression—for the captain the film has a happy ending. He will be allowed to retire in time to pick up the pieces of his broken marriage and will likely live to raise his son, while the elite squad will continue unchanged, with brutal officers who are in turn brutalized by their work. That this approach has not effectively diminished the drug trade and its violent consequences is not something the film addresses. All the players remain poised for more of the same; the enabling forces of police corruption and middle- and upper-class drug dealing and consumption stay in place while the elite squad will reproduce itself and be renewed by André’s courageous viciousness. While the film voices loud and clear the captain’s denunciations— against police corruption, complicit NGOs, and middle- and upperclass collusion with the drug trade—it shows without comment or punitive consequences another set of offenses: the squad’s disrespect toward the poor citizens of the favelas, its routine violations of civil rights and human rights, its use of torture and summary execution as a routine modus operandi. These are merely put on display, accompanied by the captain’s self-congratulatory narrative that excuses his reliance on illegal means. It’s up to the viewer to decide whether the behavior of the elite squad is OK, a little objectionable but justified, or completely unacceptable. Padilha, the director of the film, has declared that “in my scale of values, torture is worse than corruption. I don’t think the film endorses the elite troop it shows” (Padilha). Is it possible to agree with him? In what ways does the film endorse or not endorse the elite troop it shows? If we attend to the overt message, to the opinions the captain selfconfidently espouses in the voice-over narration, and if we observe the teleology that leads to the happy ending, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that the film supports the elite squad. The forces of legality win out, even while acting illegally, and in the end the film leaves the captain in a quite satisfactory position. Supporters of police brutality can follow the captain in accepting such practices as the only way to prevent the continued rise of drug-related crime. Nothing in the film calls this view explicitly into question or puts it in a broader perspective. Several reviews have come to the same conclusion, and, whether agreeing with or deploring the captain’s opinions, consider them identical to the film’s. “Realidade, só a realidade” (Reality, Nothing but Reality), the cover story in an issue of Veja (one of Brazil’s prominent weeklies) that came out soon after the film was released, finds in it a much-needed corrective to the dominant left-wing discourse in the Brazilian film industry that excuses crooks by presenting them as


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victims of social injustice (Especial: A realidade 82). Another review also sees in the film a right-wing, hard-line approach to crime but unlike Veja’s coverage, criticizes it sharply as a “one-note celebration of violence-for-good that plays like a recruitment film for fascist thugs” (Weissburg). To read the film according to the director’s stated intention— Padilha, interviewed by The New York Times, also said he “set out to make a film denouncing violence and torture” (Barrionuevo)—entails a process of interpretation that takes more effort and requires a viewer with a firm, independent perspective. Because the captain’s selfconfident and omnipresent narrative voice guides the viewer through all the incidents and the film’s fast pace almost blocks reflection, viewers predisposed to agree or unsure about where they stand will likely be drawn to the captain’s dubious values. The film’s critique of a police that tortures and kills indiscriminately will perhaps be visible only to those who bring to it their own already formed opinions (such as, perhaps, juries of international prizes). To arrive at this critical message, viewers must disengage from the authority figure that tells the story and find that the captain, like so many fictional characters before him, condemns himself by his own actions and words without ever being aware of doing so. The insistent display of the elite squad’s insignia is emblematic of how the film itself conveys its double message of ostensive endorsement and possible critique. The frighteningly explicit insignia—a skull pierced by a dagger and set against crossed pistols—appears a dozen or more times throughout the film. In the film’s advertisement poster and DVD cover, it replaces the “O” in the title “Tropa de elite.” It flashes onscreen, interrupting dancing bodies, during the outdoor rave in the favela that opens the film. It appears prominently on uniform badges and on the black armored vehicle in which squad members ride (known as a “caveirão,” or “big skull”), and as a huge mural in a conference room at the elite squad headquarters where officers discuss how much violence can be tolerated in the initiation training (a lot). It appears as the tattoo that Neto has on his arm and identifies him as a squad member (to the drug lord’s distress) after he is killed. Finally, it appears in Neto’s funeral, when the captain whips out a flag that bears that emblem and places it over the Brazilian flag that drapes Neto’s coffin. The squad’s “laws,” he perhaps implies, supersede those of the nation. Should the skull-and-crossbones effect of the insignia not be sufficiently clear, captain spells out its implications: “Our symbol shows what happens when we go into a favela, and our uniform isn’t blue, my friend, it’s black.” The film shows that


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squad members take on the identity of the insignia and refer to each other as “caveiras” (skulls) and use the same word, “caveira,” to mean “Yes, sir,” or “Understood.” Lethal force also figures unabashedly in the words the new recruits chant in training sessions, such as, “Man in black, what is your mission? To go into a favela and leave bodies on the ground.” The repeated display of the insignia certainly underlines not only the captain’s proud sense of belonging but also the deathdealing orientation of the squad. It supports his confident and finally triumphant narrative of the renewal of the squad, all the while signaling the film’s promise of violent entertainment. The insignia, however, is the actual symbol of an actual police force, and because of this it also serves other functions in the film. Its frequent appearances make clear that the captain’s perspective and some of his practices, blatantly unconstitutional though they may be, can’t be seen as aberrations but rather as part of the official ethos of a state-run organization that routinely transgresses the laws of that same state. In an effort to control a practice that has persisted after the reestablishment of democracy, Brazil’s latest postdictatorship Constitution of 1988 defines torture as a crime not subject to bail or executive clemency (Caldeira 243). Confronting the Brazilian citizen with the symbol of the elite squad, a commonplace sight in newscasts, in newspapers, and in the streets of Rio but perhaps not usually attended to fully, might prompt necessary questions. Is the squad the captain admires a force we as citizens should want? In what way is the viewer (his buddy, his friend, his pal) actually complicit with the captain’s values? Why tolerate a police force that operates so destructively and with such impunity? The repeated appearance of this insignia, along with the narration and songs that reinforce its message, does more than promise violent entertainment or register the captain’s obsession with the squad. It also calls for reflection, in the scant space and encouragement the film provides for this activity, and at countercurrent to its main thrust as a police drama. At a time when a reestablished democracy has made progress in the direction of diminishing the old Brazilian practices of a differentiated citizenship in which the rights of the poor often go unrecognized (James Holston’s recent book, Insurgent Citizenship, offers an excellent discussion of these issues), police brutality against the poorest citizens still persists in postdictatorial Brazil, and enjoys significant popular support (Caldeira 235). While it’s true that this kind of violence is widespread in other police forces throughout Brazil, as Teresa Caldeira and Nancy Scheper-Hughes have shown in their studies of these problems in São Paulo and the Northeast of Brazil, respectively,


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the film gives police brutality a face and a precise address, with its focus on one notorious force and on the logic of its own defense of these practices in the words of a proud but personally ravaged soonto-be former squad member. The political, legal, moral, and ethical implications are there for those who care to draw them out. Perhaps because of its tricky, forked-tongue approach that allows the viewers wide latitude in interpretation—and also, no doubt, because it is a very well made film—Elite Squad has reached a significant Brazilian and international audience. It had the top box-office success in 2007 in Brazil from among Brazilian films, despite the fact that a prefinal pirated version was widely and cheaply available on the streets of Rio before its release. The New York Times has reported that, according to the polling organization Ibope, it was seen by nearly eleven and a half million people (Barrionuevo). The film also won the top award in the Berlin Film Festival in February 2008 and other awards in Brazil. It’s anyone’s guess what perspective these many viewers have gained concerning the set of current and urgent urban problems in Rio and elsewhere that the film addresses. Since in its surface message the film presents a vigorous defense of the work of a brutal police force, it is likely that many in the audience will leave the theater as the captain leaves the squad at the end, assured that it will continue its ruthless but necessary and effective work. It tends to reinforce in public opinion an already prevalent “linha dura” (hard line) approach to fighting criminal drug gangs and obscures the failure of this approach over the years and the very complex nature of the problem. One paradox that an examination of this film brings out, and that holds true for a range of films like it, is that the exposé-pluspolice or gangster drama approach, which plays up urgent, current, and ethnographically rendered violence primarily for entertainment purposes, may draw large audiences and elicit debates, but its positive effect may be severely limited. At worst these films reinforce the criminalization of the poor and/or the support of police brutality; at best they call attention to problems that the very conventions of the film genres of which they partake prevent them from capturing and addressing in a complex way. Film viewers must look elsewhere— though in sheer numbers few are likely to do so—for a more farranging and nuanced understanding of urban violence. The metaphor of Rio as a city at war, a war that has its battleground in the favelas, is taken for granted in Elite Squad. One of its effects is to help justify (in the captain’s view) illegal police violence. This widespread metaphor for situations of intense conflict or for the determination to vanquish an opponent (cold war, war on drugs, war


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on terror) is not an innocent one, for the metaphor itself tends to define the rules of the game. The drug trade itself in Rio (and elsewhere) also uses this metaphor; those who carry guns, for instance, are called “soldiers.” This image is prevalent in political discourse, in print and television journalism, and in everyday talk. For years, the major Rio daily O Globo has placed articles about the violent consequences of the drug trade under the recurring rubric of “A guerra do Rio” (Rio’s War).2 This slippery metaphor moves easily from the figurative to the literal and back again. Is it a real war? Or only an as if war? The weapons and the deaths, however, remain quite literal. The documentary film News from a Personal War examines the scope and implications of this “war,” in which uniformed police fight heavily armed youths wearing shorts and flip-flops that are not always distinguishable from peaceful residents going about their business. It shows the favela as a war zone and the consequent dangers of this metaphor. If this is a war, who can be surprised at the killing of the “enemy,” rather than the imprisonment of citizens found breaking the law? If innocent residents die as a result of stray bullets or of mistakes by the police, then we have an instance of “collateral damage,” an unfortunate but inevitable consequence of war. Moreover, what is the sense of a personal or private war? Wars are among the gravest and most public activities of a state. If this war is private, what does this say about its legitimacy? Based on interviews made in 1997–98, the film examines the drug wars in the slums of Rio from the diverse perspectives of the participants: the residents trying to get on with their lives amid the violence, the police charged with repression of the drug trade, adult prisoners in penitentiaries, and youths in reform institutions for juvenile delinquents. A drug lord and some young boys involved in the drug trade, disguised by ski masks, sunglasses, and hats, also speak. João Moreira Salles, who directed the film with Kátia Lund (also codirector of City of God), mentions in an interview that he considers the main aesthetic and political contributions of the film to be the long shots of the elite squad officer Rodrigo Pimentel and of the drug chief Adriano and the straightforward and thorough way in which both of them speak. There is a startling evenhandedness in probing at length for the points of view and reflections of both the officer and the bandit, and allowing them to narrate segments of the film, as do the other interviewees, whose voice-overs accompany the images that illustrate what they are saying. The film tells the story of the consequences of the arrival of cocaine on a large scale in the favelas on the hills and outskirts of Rio in the mid-1980s. The labyrinthine disposition of houses, the often very


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steep slopes and narrow paths, as well as the absence of the state in these districts where the residents’ need for employment, education, and health care goes largely unmet make the favelas attractive places for the retail end of the drug trade: there’s a large supply of cheap labor in areas of difficult access for the police. According to the film, the drug business employs some 100,000 people in Rio, about the same number the city government has on its payroll. Although not all of those who distribute drugs live in the favelas, police repression focuses on this area, as does the media. The film also singles out the favelas, side-stepping all that needs to happen for drugs to reach them. Nevertheless, the film presents a complex and many-sided account of the portion of the drug business that it does address. According to Consuelo Lins and Cláudia Mesquita (2008), “this is a crucial film for questions having to do with drug trafficking, arms smuggling, violence and poverty, and their inclusion in the purview of Brazilian audiovisual media” (17). The film’s collage-like style emphasizes topics rather than people. A dark screen bearing the title of each section, accompanied by a clacking sound like that of an old-fashioned slide projector, introduces each of the ten topics: “The Police,” “The Drug Dealers,” “The Dwellers, “The Combat,” “The Guns,” and so forth. This fragmentation, however, at times merely interrupts a scene already in progress, indicating that the sections and their titles introduce perspectives onto a situation that can and should be perceived simultaneously from various angles. In this film, there’s no illusion that the viewer is being afforded an unmediated view of the problem; the filmmakers’ hands in composing this collage is very much in evidence, as are the crew’s presence in a few of the scenes and the interviewers’ voices asking questions. The interviews are intercut with other interviews at a fast pace, sharply juxtaposing different perspectives yet moving fluidly from speaker to speaker. With the exception of one segment, narrated by the writer Paulo Lins about the drug trade from its beginnings in 1950 to 1980, when it became more intense, more profitable, and more violent, the film interviews only people directly involved or affected by the drug business. The film conveys a quality of serious attention to the perspective of those closely, often grievously touched; it uses their words as voice-overs to images that exemplify what they are saying, allowing them to become, in effect, narrators of portions of the film. A woman who lives in the favela considers bad and good sides of the presence of armed drug traders in the favela. On the one hand the drug traders are brutal and dictatorial: they kill the favela people who have


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disobeyed them and leave their bodies as examples to the others. But on the other hand, the police come in more cautiously, instead of shooting from the start and bashing in the residents’ doors. And residents must always be alert, she says, to possible police violence against youths. The camera shows images of one such incident, accompanied by her voice-over narration. Sometimes the police come here not to arrest but to kill. As officers take a young man up the hill rather than to the police station, a bevy of protesting women—mother, sisters, cousins, the resident says—follow closely: “. . . we fight, we cry. They push us around and ask us to step back.” The women persist and eventually the police turn around, taking the youth downhill and into the police car as the women yell and clap. Another victim of and witness to police violence, a ten-year-old boy in an institution for delinquent children, had previously worked as a lookout for the drug trade. The police shot him in the leg; he shows the camera the healed-over, still gaping wound. “I want money for this,” he says giggling. The filmmakers seem to have caught some of those interviewed in a moment of crisis, or even to have precipitated a crisis with their call for reflection. This gives their statements an unexpected edge. Instead of defending police operations, Chief of Rio Civil Police Hélio Luz offers a searing critique. The police forces provide public security for the state and the elite, and repression for the poorest citizens. “It’s a political police. This is an unfair society. We are here to protect this unfair society.” He understands why youth from the favela, who would otherwise perhaps face unemployment, join the drug trade. “It’s not an option, it’s a job.” A statement at the end of the film informs the viewer that three months after the interview Hélio Luz resigned his post as chief of police and later became a state representative for Rio de Janeiro. Rodrigo Pimentel, the elite squad captain who later coauthored the book Elite Squad and the film’s screenplay, here offers a thoroughly disenchanted opinion about that squad’s effectiveness in this endless war (in diametric opposition to the fictional captain’s perspective in the film). He also resigns his post, but much later, in 2001, two years after this documentary film was released. While some of the participants are tired of the war, it’s clear that others will join it or continue in it, such as the young trafficker who says that he will die a trafficker, it’s his fate, the fate he’s chosen. A favela resident observes that the young people in the drug trade are even more violent than their elders, and those interviewed confirm this. Asked how he felt when he set fire to an informer at his boss’s orders, a young man says: “I felt normal, like I feel right now. If I have to kill again, I’ll do it.”


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In the last section of the film, “Weariness,” representatives of all sides of this conflict confess to their fatigue and hopelessness. But given the undiminished resolve of the younger players, this weariness signals not so much an easing of the conflict as a changing of the guard, and points to the dismal view those who have been in the struggle have of its results. The Chief of Police Hélio Luz admits, “The good guys have lost the war. They have been at it a long time and accomplished nothing.” Captain Rodrigo Pimentel concurs. Repeated police incursions don’t add up when an endless supply of poor boys who can earn more in a week than their fathers make in a month wait in line for their chance to join the drug trade. He observes with discouragement, “For two weeks almost every night the elite squad would kill a dealer over there. It would confiscate a pistol or a rifle and kill a dealer. Did it solve anything? It didn’t. It didn’t solve a thing. . . . The police fight a personal war. If we kill a dealer, other dealers will hate the police. They kill a policeman and we hate them. . . . I don’t see an end to it. There’s no light at the end of the tunnel. I see no solution.” Other than the media—and as Jesús Martín-Barbero (2002) has sharply observed, “the media live on fear” (29)3 —and politicians who might gain political capital by espousing an all-out, hard-line approach, it is not clear who profits from framing this conflict as a war. Hopelessness and grief dominate the final sequences that show two intercut funerals, both witnessed by grief-struck mourners: one of a police officer killed by traffickers, to the sound of a live band, and, the other, with no music, of a youth killed by the police, whose coffin is sealed into a niche in a cemetery wall. The inscriptions on the wall register the names, dates, and occupations of the less well-off or even impoverished people whose coffins rest there—street child, trafficker, police-man, metalworker, office worker, soldier. Their names crowd the screen in the last frame, as more and more are added, making the screen an illegible tangle of words and finally entirely black: an appropriate ending to a film that tells the story of an impasse, a lose-lose situation in which deaths pile up and there’s no solution in view. As the film shows, the price of framing the problem of the drug trade in the favelas as a war, and of acting accordingly, among its other harmful effects makes it into a conflict that can’t be won. This film, while pointing to no solution, offers instead multiple perspectives on a sharply defined set of intertwined problems. It encourages the viewer to reflect on other, more effective ways of facing the problems the film presents.4 News from a Personal War was made for and shown on cable television in Brazil and became an influential film for other filmmakers.


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Although it was never shown in movie theaters, it is now widely available as supplementary material in the DVD version of City of God, a circumstance that encapsulates neatly the relative reach of documentary and fiction films. Although in the last couple of decades documentary films have attracted filmmakers, critics, and viewers in significant numbers, not only in Brazil but internationally, their total audience in Brazil is still small when compared to that of fiction films (Lins and Mesquita, 7). A case in point: José Padilha released, a few years before Elite Squad, a well-regarded, prizewinning documentary film, Bus 174, that centers on the critical understanding of a bushijacking incident in a well-off neighborhood of Rio.5 Although it is a feature length film and was shown in movie theaters to great critical acclaim, in terms of box-office success it did not attain anywhere near the commercial success of Elite Squad. Drawn as they are to the “real,” and to a documentary-like aesthetic, especially the kind that offers a perspective on grave urban crises, viewers still prefer the thrills and comforts more readily available in fiction films. Babilônia 2000, directed by Eduardo Coutinho, Brazil’s most respected documentary filmmaker, takes a completely different approach to the question of representing police and drug trade violence in Rio’s favelas. Perhaps because of its understated approach and viewer expectation that films made in favelas must feature violence, Coutinho’s film, though shown in movie theaters when it was released, is not now available in DVD format, a requisite for keeping a film in circulation. Babilônia 2000 does not place violence center stage or confront it head on. It avoids sensationalism, and, with an oblique method, it registers gaps, absences, scars: the marks of past violence on peoples’ possessions, identity, and spirit. In an emblematic scene, a woman, Carolina, touches the bullet holes left in the walls of her house, reflecting on the danger her family had narrowly escaped. The police were chasing traffickers and somehow the shots went in the wrong direction. “It was the police. Rifle shots. Another hole here that the police made, here in the bedroom, here, the girls were sleeping.”6 Babilônia 2000 focuses on a festive moment—the last day of the millennium in two of Rio’s favelas, districts of some 4,000 residents in total, located side by side on a steep hill overlooking Copacabana beach. The film includes no general comments or voices of experts. The only voice-over in the film announces its purpose and method, “Babilonia Hill. Copacabana Beach. Rio de Janeiro. On the morning of December 31, 1999, five crews equipped with digital cameras went up the hillside to film the last day of the year. The crews spread out in


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the favelas Chapéu Mangueira and Babilônia.” With its narrow focus and strict limits of time and place, this film features self-presentations of ordinary people and often singles out those gifted in the art of vivid speech. The interviews that make up the film begin with open-ended questions—“Here we are in the final hours of 1999. What do you plan to do today? What changes do you think the new millennium will bring?”—questions that encourage reflections on the past and the future. The frequent presence of the film crew reminds viewers that they are witnessing specific encounters; the interviewers either appear right along with the characters or ask questions from outside the frame. The film presents a range of vivid personalities, with disparate views and experiences, filmed by different crews. There’s no agreement even on the basic issue of whether it’s good or bad to live where they do, and the presentation of a variety of perspectives is at the heart of the film’s method and purpose. Yet this variety is of course assembled by the filmmaker and bears his signature. Signs of this manipulation are not hidden but displayed. The rough, obvious cuts leave evidence of the editing and selection process, as does the fact that five crews, each filming for some fourteen hours, resulted in only an eighty-minute film. The collage of voices that accompany the final credits, parts of interviews that didn’t make it into the body of the film, also serve as reminders of the choices that gave it shape. The evening’s celebration centers on a spectacular display of fireworks on Copacabana beach, the main event of Rio’s public New Year festivities. Most residents of Babilônia and Chapéu Mangueira watch it from the beach where they are joined by thousands of people from other neighborhoods of Rio. Yet, even amid the exuberance of the day, the wounds of violence come to the fore. Jessica, a girl of perhaps ten, speaks of her brother’s death, showing on her own head and chest the places where the bullets entered his body. Cida, a teacher in the favela, also speaks of her brother. He had been a police officer and was killed by the police: damage control, she says, after he “discovered wrong things that were happening.” The family of Jorge, who as a child had an important role in the film Black Orpheus—a signal event in his life that he recalls with fondness—also suffered a grievous loss. His eldest son, a member of the Brazilian Marine Corps, was killed one evening by a policeman high on drugs (or was it also “damage control”? His father offers one explanation, his brother another), as he climbed up the hill with his mother. After this traumatic loss, two other sons, disillusioned and angry, got involved “in that crooked life,” as the father puts it, and were killed. The statements of the favela residents


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name the police directly as agents of brutality but refer to the drug trade vaguely and indirectly, suggesting the fear of retaliation from the drug dealers and the shadow it casts on their lives. The displacement of drug trade and police violence from center stage is a key element of the film’s positive symbolic intervention in the tangled web of fear and brutality that characterize the drug trade and its repression. In the film, this kind of violence, harsh as it may be, becomes one aspect, one thread among others that make up the fabric of people’s lives. Consuelo Lins, who headed one of the film crews, points out that although Coutinho did not plan to address police violence and drug trafficking, he knew that their presence was inevitable and would appear in the stories the residents told about their lives (121). She also notes that the filmmaker and crew were helped significantly by the Residents’ Association but had no dealings with the parallel power of the “movement” (as the trafficking is known in the favelas): At no time did we have direct contact with the traffickers or the need to ask for authorization to film the “movement.” We ran into tension of this kind only when the father of a trafficker, very well liked in the community, was murdered, but they warned us about this and that day we didn’t go up the hill. Never, either in the research nor in the filming, did we come across armed traffickers. (123)

At the time Babilônia 2000 was made and in the communities it features, violence related to the drug trade was not as much in evidence as Elite Squad (which opens with a rave and a shootout in Babilônia) and other fiction films would have us believe is the normal course of things in Rio’s favelas. One of the men interviewed takes pride in the peacefulness of Babilônia. He insists his neighborhood is not a violent place but gives an example that immediately casts a relative light on this statement: if Babilônia residents hear six gunshot sounds in a row, everyone gets alarmed, it’s so unusual. One or two shots, yes, maybe even five, but not six. In this context, the noise of the festive fireworks heard throughout the film, which to an untrained ear sounds much like gunshots, alludes indirectly to the image of favelas as places rife with shootouts, so vividly depicted in Elite Squad and News of a Personal War. But in Babilonia 2000, no one mentions a figurative war, not even once; if they did during the filming, those words were edited out. What, we might ask, comes into view with the deemphasizing of the kinds of violence that the news media and entertainment industry


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routinely play up? The figure of a war on drugs functions as a kind of phantasm that rivets attention, blocking out other, less explicit violences from view.7 Recent thinkers and researchers in anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies have expanded the concept of violence to acknowledge its workings in ways that are taken for granted and therefore not readily visible. Nancy Scheper Hughes and Philippe Bourgois, in the introductions to their anthology Violence in War and Peace (2004), propose an understanding of violence “that is more than simply the expression of illegitimate physical force against a person or group of persons. Rather we need to understand violence as encompassing all kinds of ‘controlling processes’ . . . that assault basic human freedoms and individual or collective survival. Our task is to recognize the grey zones of violence which are, by definition, not obvious” (22). They propose the concept of a “violence continuum” to recognize violences that have become normalized (19). Also seeking to define a broader range of violence, Slavoj Zizek (2008) posits a nomenclature that includes a “systemic violence: the often catastrophic consequences of the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems” (1). In Babilônia 2000, the everyday violences that mark the life of the residents derive from many factors: unemployment or very low salaries, inadequate education and health care, as well as severely flawed security, judiciary, and penal systems. These deficits in people’s lives can show up as an absence of hope. What will change with the new millennium? Will things improve? No, several of the residents answer emphatically. Things—violence, the economy—will stay the same or get worse. Certainly not better. Moreover, the residents also face symbolic violences (Bourdieu and Wacquant 272), such as race and class discrimination and the stigma of living in a favela, all of which come up often in the interviews.8 This stigma, potentially deadly, criminalizes the poor, especially young men, a widespread phenomenon in Rio and elsewhere. If a disproportionate amount of the repression of the drug trade takes place in favelas, if all young men there are considered possible traffickers, wrongful arrests, and wrongful killing—executions later passed off by the police as shootings in self-defense or of those resisting arrest—the stigma of the favela becomes for some not only a symbolic violence but an omnipresent threat of bodily harm or death. The interview with a young man, Luiz Carlos, refers to many forms of violence we can classify as structural and symbolic, and that have impinged on his life. “I’m not dangerous,” he says. “I’m this way because I’m poor and the poverty is not my fault.” He seems to marshal all his powers to rise to an occasion that demands correct speech


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but even so cannot come up with a clear and coherent statement. His language betrays the lack of formal education he tries to disguise as he tells the story of how he was wrongly arrested by the police. Now he is out of prison and complying with the rules of parole. “I’m back in society and I’m living up to its expectations. . . . I’m behaving like a new citizen, like I used to before.” Was he wrongly arrested and also wrongly convicted? These dismal possibilities are left unresolved, but in any case, he has absorbed a discourse of citizenship rights that gives him comfort, something to hold onto in a very difficult life. “I’m poor and humble, like a citizen,” he says, not entirely aware, perhaps, that it is precisely his citizenship rights that may have been infringed. Coutinho’s films have been characterized as a “cinema of conversation” (Ferreira Dias 105), films that emphasize the spoken word. The cameras register exchanges between the residents and the crew yet these are one-sided conversations, in which the interviewers (in many cases, Coutinho himself) pose questions designed to encourage those interviewed to come forth about themselves and their lives, not so much exchanges as self-presentations. One is reminded, perhaps, of the similarly one-sided conversations of psychotherapy, and the film’s implicit drive toward healing makes this comparison pertinent. But a possible social healing, would, in any case, affect the residents only indirectly, for most of the negative pressures in their lives are far beyond the reach of any film. In an interview, Coutinho puts this clearly: To want to change the world with the cinema is a crazy utopia, but OK, we can all have our utopias. But to want to change the place and the people you are filming, that’s arrogant and absurdly authoritarian. In any case, to change the world, first you have to understand it. (Lins 95)

The film offers the residents a forum or stage to use as they see fit. One of the crews conducted open access interviews available to anyone who cared to speak. Coutinho’s method also encourages artistic expressions. Six characters sing or play music, some of their own composition, and all are quite aware that they are performing for the camera, that they have a chance to cross a social divide and be heard where their voices usually don’t carry. It’s also true, however, that the film treads a fine line. The very gesture of entering a poor community and asking residents to speak about their lives carries with it implications of differential power in the social hierarchy,


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presuppositions regarding who should accede to whose requests. What would happen, what kind of receptiveness would a film crew find, in, say, a gated condominium of the wealthy, in a parallel film showing their celebrations, registering their thoughts about the turn of the millennium? One imagines far less receptiveness, even downright refusals, in interviews for a film made up the social scale rather than down. The danger of class-based condescension goes with the project of filming in a poor community, but Coutinho and his crew are mostly successful in averting it by addressing the residents with warmth and respect. A paradox that stems from the interest that Brazilian documentaries have shown in the experience of the underprivileged is that their bearers have in fact become privileged subjects of the film industry. Babilônia, especially, with its beautiful view of Copacabana beach, has often been the setting for documentary and fiction films (including Black Orpheus in the late 1950s). Film crews visit them every month, Brazilian and foreign, one resident says. The experienced residents ask about the precise use to which their images will be put. Is it for television? For a film? When can they see the final product? They are also, of course, experienced viewers of television, which in some cases seems to serve as a model and incentive for how they speak and what they say. Bárbara, a girl maybe nine years old, says, “I want to thank all of you who are hearing me, who are listening to me, and who will be watching me, God willing, and He is willing.” By not showcasing violence, Babilônia 2000 places it back in the fabric of daily life of people who are deprived but not reduced to their deprivation. The filming in a day of celebration encourages attention to aspects of people’s lives that are satisfactory, even joyous. The leisurely pace of the film allows the viewer time for empathy and reflection. The two favelas appear as friendly places despite the marks of violence they bear, inhabited by people who may be struggling but are proud of what they have achieved in life. Those who live in the favela see the film crew quite correctly as members of the very society down below that stigmatizes them for living in a favela. Yet they treat these uninvited guests with cordiality, offering them water, Coke, beer, a taste of the strawberry mousse prepared for the evening. At the end of the film, a group of men complain to the crew that society has gotten it all wrong, “it’s not true that the hill only produces bandits. No, this is a friend’s house, it’s family.” To prove the point, one of them makes the grand gesture of inviting all of “society” to spend the New Year in the favela, sharing a barbecue with them (he may be a little drunk by now). The crew seems to accept, and one of the


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men orders them to stop shooting—“Enough! Cut! No more!”— and Coutinho uses this sequence to end the film. In this film Coutinho sidesteps the spectacular display of violence prevalent in the media and entertainment industry, replacing it, perhaps a little playfully, with a spectacular display of fireworks. Babilônia 2000 brings favela residents sharply into view, with their diversity of talents, religious beliefs, and coping skills. As an intervention, limited though it may be, in the exacerbated conflicts that have taken place in favelas for decades and show little sign of easing up, this film works to attenuate the image of favela residents as examples of a threatening alterity. The profiling of poorer citizens, especially young males, follows from the metaphor of the war on drugs, a war that turns some of Rio’s citizens into “the enemy.” Countering this image, Babilônia 2000 shows an array of strong, often quite idiosyncratic and appealing personal presences, neither threatening nor particularly “other.” The film suggests, implicitly but unmistakably, that true progress in Brazil’s democracy requires that the kinds of violence they and others in their position suffer be addressed.

Notes 1. Words in quotation marks without attribution are from the English subtitles of the films. I have sometimes compared them with the soundtrack and made adjustments for accuracy. 2. See Leu (2004) for a discussion of the “Rio’s War” trope, based on press coverage of incidents from March and April 2003. 3. Although in this article published in 2002 Martín-Barbero refers specifically to Colombia (“ . . . in Colombia, as perhaps in no other Latin American country today, the media lives on fear” 29), this appraisal is also pertinent to Brazil, and no doubt to other countries. For its relevance to Argentina, see Sarlo. For a reflection on television and the cultural capital of violence in Brazil, see Coelho Netto. 4. That the war on drugs has failed in the way it has currently been waged in the United States and Latin America is now a widespread opinion. See Nicholas D. Kristoff, “Drugs Won the War,” and a statement by the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy, “Drugs and Democracy, toward a Paradigm Shift.” 5. See Leu (2008) for an excellent discussion of this film as engaging in the work of mourning on behalf of the poor and marginalized victims of two incidents of urban violence in Rio, the hijacking itself and the previous 1993 killing by off-duty policemen of eight street kids sleeping outside Rio’s Candelária church. 6. Babilônia 2000 is the fourth of four documentary films by Coutinho set in Rio’s favelas: Santa Marta: Duas Semanas no Morro (“Santa Marta: Two Weeks in the Slums,” 1987) focuses on the residents’ experiences of


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violence, Boca de Lixo (The Scavengers, 1992) interviews garbage workers who work in a dump and live nearby, and Santo Forte (“Powerful Saint,” 1999) considers religious experiences and practices. 7. See Hopenhayn for a definition of phantasm as “something intangible that transcends phenomena and yet emanates from their specificity and at the same time affects the perceptions and actions surrounding them” (83). See his essay for a subtle analysis of drugs and violence not only as real and measurable phenomena but also as phantasms that that circulate with a supplementary life of their own in major Latin American cities. 8. Gendered violence is seldom suggested, while examples of gendered harmony appear often: devoted husbands and fathers, and a festive game of soccer played by young men in drag.

References Babilônia 2000. Dir. Eduardo Coutinho. Riofilme, 2001. DVD. Barrionuevo, Alexei. “A Violent Police, on Film and in Rio’s Streets.” www. nytimes.com. New York Times, October 14, 2007. Web. Bourdieu, Pierre, and Loïc Wacquant. “Symbolic violence.” Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois, 272–74. Print. Caldeira, Teresa. “The Paradox of Police Violence in Democratic Brazil.” Ethnography 3 (2002): 235–63. Print. Cidade de Deus (City of God). Dir. Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund. Miramax, 2002. Filmes and Videofilmes, 2003. DVD. Coelho Netto, José Teixeira. “A imaginação e o capital da violência cultural no Brasil.” Moraña, ed. 37–50. Print. Dias, Verônica Ferreira. “A Cinema of Conversation: Eduardo Coutinho’s Santo Forte and Babilônia 2000.” In The New Brazilian Cinema, ed. Lúcia Nagib. London: Tauris, Centre for Brazilian Studies, U of Oxford P, 2003. Print. Especial: A realidade só a realidade. Spec. Issue of Veja. www.veja.com.br. Veja, October 17, 2007. 80–91. Web. Holston, James. Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2008. Print. Hopenhayn, Martín. “Droga y violencia: fantasmas de la nueva metrópoli latinoamericana.” Moraña, ed. 69–87. Print. Kristof, Nicolas D. “Drugs Won the War.” www.nytimes.com. New York Times, June 13, 2009. Web. Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy. Final report. “Drugs and Democracy: Toward a Paradigm Shift.” www.drogasedemocracia. org. Iniciativa Latinoamericana sobre Drogas e Democracia, February 12, 2009. Web. Leeds, Elizabeth. “Cocaine and Parallel Polities in the Brazilian Urban Periphery: Constraints on Local-Level Democratization.” Latin American Research Review 31 (1996): 47–83. Print.


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Leu, Lorraine. “The Press and the Spectacle of Violence in Contemporary Rio de Janeiro.” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 13, no. 3 (2994): 343–55. Leu, Lorraine. “Spaces of Remembrance and Representation in the City: José Padilha’s Ônibus 174.” Luso-Brazilian Review 45, no.2 (2008): 177–89. Lins, Consuelo. O documentário de Eduardo Coutinho: Televisão, cinema e video. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar: 2004. Print. Lins, Consuelo, and Cláudia Mesquita. Filmar o real: Sobre o documentário brasileiro contemporâneo. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 2008. Print. Martín-Barbero, Jesús. “The City: Between Fear and the Media.” Trans. Katherine Goldman. In Citizens of Fear: Urban Violence in Latin America, ed. Susana Rotker, 25–33. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2002. Print. Moraña, Mabel. Espacio urbano, comunicación y violencia en América Latina. Pittsburgh, PA: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana , 2002. Print. Notícias de uma Guerra Particular (News from a Personal War). Dir. Kátia Lund and João Moreira Salles. GNT/Globosat and Videofilmes, 1998. Included as a special feature in Cidade de Deus. DVD. O invasor (The Trespasser). Dir. Beto Brant. Europa Filmes, 2002. DVD. Ônibus 174 (Bus 174). Dir. José Padilha and Felipe Lacerda. Zazen Produçoes, 2002. Hart Sharp Video, 2004. DVD. Orfeu Negro (Black Orpheus). Dir. Marcel Camus. Disparfilm, 1959. Criterion, 1999. DVD.Padilha, José. Interview. Supplementary material in Tropa de Elite. DVD. Moreira Salles, João. Interview with Rodrigo Fonseca. “O Rio como Dorian Grey.” O Globo, June 11, 2005, Segundo Caderno, 1. Print. Sarlo, Beatriz. ‘ “Violencia en las ciudades. Una reflexión sobre el caso argentino.” Moraña, ed. 205–14. Print. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. “Bodies, Death , and Silence.” In Violence in War and Peace,. ed. Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois, 175–85. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. Print. Soares, Luiz Eduardo, André Batista, and Rodrigo Pimentel. Elite Squad. Trans. Clifford E. Landers. New York: Weinstein Books, 2008. Print. Tropa de Elite (Elite Squad). Dir. José Padilha. DVD Zazen Produçoes, The Winestein Company, 2008. Universal, 2008. DVD. Weil, Simone. “The Iliad or the Poem of Force.” Trans. Mary McCarthy, of “L’Iliade ou le poème de la force,” 1941. Simone Weil: An Anthology,ed. Sian Miles, 162–95. New York: Widenfeld and Nicolson, 1986. Print. Weissberg, Jay. Rev. of Elite Squad, dir. José Padilha. www.variety.com. Variety, February 11, 2008. Web. Zizek, Slavoj. Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. London: Profile Books, 2008. Print.


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C i u da d Juá r e z , Fe m ic i de , a n d t h e Stat e María Socorro Tabuenca Córdoba

The Mexico-U.S. Border has long functioned as a stopping point for restive populations of non-nationalized subjects; but in the current forms of urban violence linked to paramilitary gangs, political corruption, drug trade, and human traffic, the specter of a more acute process of state failure looms large. Alicia Schmidt Camacho (2005) By breaking the silence not only we release our frustration, but we avoid being accomplices of the State. Imelda Marrufo (2008)1

F

or the past eighteen years (since 1993), two faces of crime have thrust Ciudad Juárez into the local, national, and international press.2 On one hand, the sexual serial killings of women and the series of kidnappings, disappearances, rape, and murder of other women that currently total more than more than 900.3 On the other hand, Juárez is also going through a period of organized-crime killings in which from January 2008 to September 20104 nearly 7,000 people, mostly men, have been assassinated by what has been defined as a drugrelated cycle of vendettas, and different businesses—mainly restaurants—have been subjected to acts of arson. It seems we live under siege . . . and perhaps we do . . . Regrettably these events inform numerous interpretations from very diverse points of view concerning how the U.S-Mexico border and its “Black Legend” have been constructed throughout time, including travel accounts, films, soap operas, journalism, and people’s everyday discourse. Regarding this matter I am interested in examining how


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M a r í a S o c or r o Ta bu e nc a C ór d ob a

some of the cultural constructs from the past have had an impact on the phenomenon of the current femicide in Ciudad Juárez.5 Ever since the border’s geopolitical demarcation between Mexico and the United States, it has been the subject of multiple interpretations with generally common concerns. Mexico’s northern border has been regarded as a site of easy cultural penetration, through language, customs, or lifestyles produced by the immediate contact with the U.S; “from Mexico City’s point of view, the northern border is imagined as perhaps the most ‘unredeemable’ of all the provinces’ representations” (Castillo and Rangel 245). In the United States, this image is hardly any more positive, for since the border’s inception, the Unites States’ expansionist movement has converted Mexicans into “the other” (Klahn 29). Mexican otherness was constructed as a cultural nemesis, and it came to define everything non-Anglo-Saxon. Expansionist politics displayed a zeal for civilizing lands distant from the center, through which they needed to control everything that signified barbarism: “sexuality, vice, nature, and people of color” (Klahn 30). These first conceptualizations of the border, along with those of Mexican intellectuals, became perpetuated in texts,6 discourses, and public politics that were based on notions of difference and have since then become lodged within both countries’ nationalist social discourse. In the construction of “perverse cities” and Ciudad Juárez’s border stigma, one of the most pernicious stereotypes, in this case, has been that of women. Before the establishment of the maquiladora industry in Ciudad Juárez,7 women’s occupations were limited to the traditional role of mothering, and outside the home, they were employed by the service sector (as secretaries, domestics, and restaurant workers) or were sex workers. Before the Border Industrialization Program (BIP), women’s possibilities for employment were dictated by their relation to the city’s economic life. These possibilities were well accepted by the city’s residents. The city, in fact, had a clearly marked limited zone of tolerance through which “decent people,” especially the city’s women, did not dare to even pass (Aguilar and Tabuenca 64). Nonetheless, after 1965, with the BIP now in full effect, the city started to become populated by other subjects: women who were incorporating themselves into the city and country’s productive life. Their massive arrival produced a singular phenomenon in the people’s discourse: the maquila was now regarded as a “savior” because it took the women out of the cabaret, but at the same time, there developed a stereotype of the maquila worker as a woman of a dubious reputation, especially in the case of so-called single mothers.


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With industrialization firmly planted in the city, this new social actor began to produce “contesting projects that have decolonization as their object—in the public, economic, and cultural sphere, and have survival strategies, such as informal economies, legal and illegal activities that elude governmental regulation and control” (Yúdice 64). The maquila worker came to transgress different spaces in the city’s (and the nation’s) “uses and traditions.” She shifted from being “the daughter” or “the sister” to now being the home’s provider. It was she who migrated searching for sustenance, since it was she who could have the possibility of finding a better-paying job than the men in her family. In Juárez she adopted new ways of life and new spaces. With certain economic autonomy, she had the possibility, with other women coworkers, to purchase a car,8 improve her formal education, and go out to have fun (Balderas 5). Consequently, before the sexual serial crimes started in 1993, there was already a social construction of the maquiladora worker that somehow has had an impact on public opinion. Women workers’ transgression of spaces and traditions has been critical to the hegemonic discourse’s perverse constructions of the victims, the latter because authorities have evaded their responsibility to solve and stop the crimes against women in Ciudad Juárez. Their investigations have shown a lack of professionalism and commitment to solving the crimes. Likewise, those discourses have created a certain stereotype that most murdered women were very young maquiladora workers, but “in this level of generalization, the different identities of all those women who didn’t fit that description are vanished. Moreover, using stereotypes makes society circumvent male violence against women with the seriousness and importance that it requires” (Monárrez, “Sexual” 88–89). For the purposes of this essay, it is essential to revise those stereotypes, given the constant tension that exists between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic discourses. It is impossible to talk about the murdered or the vulnerable women in Ciudad Juárez and the atmosphere that surrounds them without speaking of class and gender prejudices. Actually, it is almost impossible to speak about gender narratives in Mexico without addressing those prejudices. On the subject of gender prejudices, Juárez, as a border city has been constructed as a space of tension where different narratives tied to cultural identities have emerged. For Pablo Vila (2003), “[o]n the Mexican side of the border, gender is framed in regional and national terms” (74), consequently “there are particular behaviors and attitudes that characterize Fronterizos/as 9 as distinct from Southern


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Mexicans on the one hand and Americans on the other” (74). His research has elaborated on three different narratives that emerge from the area: the libertine Fronteriza/o associated with the “Black Legend” or “city of vice” aforementioned; the liberal fronteriza/o that relates to the tolerance of sexual behavior that Juárez inhabitants would have developed due to the city’s geographical location (in the desert and in the middle of nowhere); and the liberal American and/ or the bossy American women (74). According to Vila, these narratives many times overlap and result in people combining “some of them in different degrees” (75). In addition to these narratives, Vila touches on the issue of the stereotype of the Mexican family characterized as hierarchical, asymmetrical, and authoritarian, and he explains that Del Castillo’s research reveals that working women that have been economically empowered have been able to dislocate the idea of patriarchal hierarchy in the family. Vila’s gender discussion is significant to this chapter because, as we will see, Fronterizas’ narratives will be present in hegemonic discourses regarding the murdered women in Juárez as well as the stereotype of the Mexican family. In this context, I read this stereotype also as a metonymy of the hegemonic, authoritarian, and patriarchal Mexican State and how the victims’ families, activists, and scholars have been able, sometimes, to displace its hegemony. This chapter explores some of the images and discourses that the state10 has produced about Ciudad Juárez, its murdered women, the possible perpetrators, and the women’s families. Upon analyzing the images and discourses, I observe the different strategies that the three levels of government have used regarding the problem of femicide. I comment on the advertisements promoted by the 1995–98 Juárez City Council and the Police Department’s so-called Prevention Campaigns. I also examine some declarations made by three governors of the state of Chihuahua and their respective justice attorneys, and special prosecutors for crimes committed against women. I mention the plots offered by the State Police regarding the “most famous criminals,” and finally problematize some of the reports produced by state and federal authorities. With such a review of the events, I hope to read and interpret a part of my habitus. With this reading, I seek to observe in what way previous discourses and stereotypes facilitate to construct images of possible victims, killers, and spaces in the city where murdered women bodies have been found. I would also like to add that this analysis is part of an ongoing work and some of the reflections here have been presented in various forums.11


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My reflections and analyses are mainly based in the propositions of Norman Fairclough’s Language in Power (1990).12 He proposes a critical study of language in which we can observe the connections between language and unequal power relations. In the case of this study, I also use the connections between language and image. Fairclough’s methodology helps us understand how little we value the meaning of language—spoken and visual—in the production, perpetuation, and change within power relations. In my analysis I pay special attention to the three levels of government discourses and some of their actions and reactions they have taken in dealing with the problem. I will be considering how the construction of certain images, the government’s statements before the press, its silences, and some of the documents it has produced are intertwined to disguise the inefficiency and lack of will—and perhaps their misogyny and classism—to solve the murders. One of Fairclough’s main claims revolves around the idea that in our modern societies the exercise of power is achieved through ideology, in particular, through ideological uses of language and image. That is why it is transcendental to study the language in use and the use of language as personal productions of our “realities.” One aim of this essay is to bring justice, at least in my discourse, to the victims of this silent holocaust and their families.

Femicide In June of 1993 Ciudad Juárez woke up with terrible news. Something inexplicable, unbelievable had happened: nine young female bodies13 were found on the city’s outskirts. All nine deaths had been apparently perpetrated by an alleged serial killer. The most stunning part of the discovery at that time was that there was no indication in modern Mexico’s crime history of any other act of similar nature and magnitude except for those of Goyo Cárdenas, a serial killer in the 1950s, “Las Poquianchis” in Mexico City in the 1960s, and Adolfo de Jesús Constanzo and his followers (called los “narcosatánicos”) in Matamoros, Tamaulipas, at the end of the 1980s. Later in 1993 the feminist group 8 de marzo lead by Esther Chávez Cano started to register the women’s killings based on newspaper clippings that later became Estudio hemerográfico de mujeres asesinadas 1993–1998 with the collaboration of the Gender Studies Division of the Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez and the Independent Committee of Human Rights in Chihuahua City.14 The record of those cases was of extreme importance due to the fact that authorities


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would never give an accurate account of the dead women, especially of what clearly were cases of serial sexual killings. For the situation of Ciudad Juárez, the use of the theoretical term “femicide” arose to establish the difference and types of murders committed against men and women. Dianna Radford and Jill Russell (1992) described femicide as the misogynist killing of women by men and a form of continuity of sexual assault, where one must take into account the acts of violence, the motives and imbalance of power between the sexes in political, social, and economic environments. Consequently, the term started to be used by academics, activists, and the media for the reason that a number of women slayings especially in 1995, 1996, 1997, and 2001 was clearly a misogynist slaughter through sexual violence.15 These systematic crimes against women where extreme violence was performed and where the State—as a hegemonic power and monolithic entity—had an important role in neglecting a fair investigation or created scapegoats, received the name of feminicidio sexual sistémico (systemic sexual femicide) in 2005. Julia Monárrez (2005), creator of the term, defines systemic sexual femicide as: El asesinato de mujeres que son secuestradas, torturadas y violadas. Sus cadáveres, semidesnudos o desnudos son arrojados en las zonas desérticas, los lotes baldíos, en los tubos de desagüe, en los tiraderos de basura y en las vías del tren. Los asesinos por medio de estos actos crueles fortalecen las relaciones sociales inequitativas de género que distinguen los sexos: otredad, diferencia y desigualdad. Al mismo tiempo, el Estado, secundado por los grupos hegemónicos, refuerza el dominio patriarcal y sujeta a familiares de víctimas y a todas las mujeres a una inseguridad permanente e intensa, a través de un período continuo e ilimitado de impunidad y complicidades al no sancionar a los culpables y otorgar justicia a las víctimas. (54) The killing of women who are kidnapped, tortured, and raped. Their naked or semi naked bodies are dumped in desert areas, in empty lots, in the sewage, in trash dumps, and on train tracks. Through these cruel actions, the murders strengthen unequal gender social relations that distinguish the sexes: otherness, difference, and inequality. At the same time, the state, as well as hegemonic groups, reinforce patriarchal dominion and maintain victims’ families and all women in a permanent and intense state of insecurity throughout a continuous and unlimited cycle of impunity and complicities since the culprits are not persecuted and the victims do not obtain justice. (My translation)

In 2006 Monárrez lead a team of researchers from El Colegio de la Frontera Norte and la Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez,


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which concluded an extensive study on gender violence funded by the Commission to Prevent and Eradicate the Crimes against Women in Ciudad Juárez (the Juárez Commission). In the database she has registered 150 sexual femicides from 1993 to 2005. According to Monárrez (2006), 38 could not be considered serial femicides but 112 are sexual serial femicides or systemic sexual femicides because of their characteristics (379). I emphasize on the difference between the serial and non serial femicides because the sexual serial crimes are the ones that first attracted international attention, not only for the violence found in the victim’s bodies, but because of the state of impunity against the criminals, and the silence and negligence of the state (be it municipal, state, or federal). However, it is important not to forget other cases of women that have been killed in Juárez under diverse circumstances, which increases the number to more than 900 by May 2010.16 But who were these women and what did they have in common? Some worked in the maquiladora industry, twin plants (American corporations); several worked in the commercial zone of downtown Juárez, and a number were exotic dancers, sex workers, mothers, and students. All of them belonged to low-income families. Quite a few were working the night shift in order to avoid the poverty conditions in which they subsisted with their families. Most of them lived in areas with insufficient infrastructure and without electricity; therefore, little or no transportation, be it public or private, was available to leave them near or at the doorsteps of their homes. Most of the attacked women were 17 years old.17 Some were assassinated by one or more serial killers; other cases were considered copycats,18 although in some cases it is very difficult to distinguish one from the other. The majority of the women were tortured and raped before being killed. Sometimes they were mutilated or dismembered. A large number of them were found on the outskirts, in open areas, in vast uninhabited lots such as Lomas de Poleo (1995), Lote Bravo (1996), Campo Algodonero (2001), or el Cerro del Cristo Negro (2002–2003). In several cases their bodies were unclothed; in other cases, only remains of skeletons, bones, and pieces of clothes were located. Some of the remains were lightly covered by bushes and sand. Others were exposed and displayed carefully, as if the killer(s) wanted to take a stand, to leave his (their) signature on the grisly grave defying authorities and society. A few were dumped in empty lots in the city, near railroad tracks, in the sewer, or left near their homes. After their atrocious deaths the victims and their families have had to face more tribulations; it has been suggested that the women


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were the ones responsible for their own deaths. Their lives have been misjudged and stigmatized by the authorities, regardless of their political affiliation. Unfortunately, with time, victims’ and families’ constant being bashed by hegemonic discourses, it has produced a negative reaction on Juárez community in general. Juarenses blame activists and victim’s families for the city’s “bad image.”

The State It is widely acknowledged that Mexico was ruled by the same party under different names (Partido Nacional Revolucionario— PNR, Partido de la Revolución Mexicana—PRM, and Partido Revolucionario Institucional—PRI) from 1929 to the year 2000. The party was able to dominate all political positions from the administration of Plutarco Elías Calles—known as the “Maximato”—by controlling the presidency, the congress, and even the judicial branch. The PRI maintained its power based on the collaboration of corporate groups (mainly large unions such as workers, teachers, and popular and peasants groups) and the control of the media and the people through the federal police.19 Even though it was almost a totalitarian state (except for the principle of no reelection), the PRI begun to lose its hegemony in 1989. The party lost the first governorship in the state of Baja California to the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) during the administration of Carlos Salinas de Gortari. Three years later it was defeated in Chihuahua also by the PAN. In 1994 the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) raised an armed revolution against the Mexican state, and finally in the year 2000, the PAN won the Mexican Presidency. These actions were evidence that the nation and the state needed a change that could provide other democratic structures including democracy itself. The situation in a democratic state, according to Karl Held and Audrey Hill (1973), is the following: “Unlike the absolutist state, it does not give preferential treatment to any estate or class. Rather, everyone enjoys all rights and nobody is privileged” (3). Hence, with the PRI no longer in power, one could believe that with that shift to a more democratic state, equal rights for the people were going to be enforced. However, with regards to femicide in Juárez (1993–2008), it seems like the “democratic state” is only an illusion because of the continued levels of violence exercised against women regardless of which party is in power.


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Femicide and the Partido Acción Nacional in Chihuahua As it has been stated, 20 the crimes against women in Ciudad Juárez began to be perpetrated in 1993, during the PAN’s first term of governmental administration in the state of Chihuahua. Part of that moment’s political discourse was that the murderer was someone hired by the PRI to damage Francisco Barrio’s state government (1992–1998) and Ramón Galindo’s city government in Juárez (1995–1999) and to regain power in the 1998 state elections. In view of the fact that the culprit(s) were nowhere to be found and there were no leads by 1995, authorities decided to act in two ways: they hired a Spanish criminologist and an ex-FBI agent who both had experience in profiling criminals and possible victims; and they set forth a “prevention campaign” to reach all women at risk. The “prevention campaigns,” like the authorities’ statements, displayed an ideology based on previous historical discourses on women. These narratives are part of our ideology and are related with the meaning and importance of “morals and good principles” and that were emphasized as “values” in the state of Chihuahua over the last few years.21 In other words, the possible investigations on the crimes against these women in Ciudad Juárez are already obstructed by two types of discourses that are part of our everyday life and our “common sense”: the patriarchal, in terms of how a woman is an inferior being or an object-being, and that of “values,” as the ex-deputy attorney general Jorge López Molinar22 affirmed to the El Nacional newspaper: “All the victims were mischievous and even prostitutes” (7). Such a declaration was also supported by former governor Francisco Barrio Terrazas, and is connected with the representations that I mentioned in the beginning of this essay and that Carlos Monsiváis so keenly sheds light on when saying, “The dead women of Ciudad Juárez are centrally related to the state of sexism and the condition of women in Mexico.”23 Consequently, inasmuch as we believe the nation was changing for the better, in the case of the dead women in Juárez, the misogynist discourse was (is?) still present. The above-mentioned passage is directly related to Fairclough’s point that conventional routine leads us to a discourse based on ideological presumptions that are simply seen as common sense; nevertheless, they substantially reinforce the existing power relations. It is also related to the tendency we have to “search for images and metaphors” (Zimmerman, 294) when we are incapable of conceptualizing what happens in real life and events in theory. Nonetheless,


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social and political implications of his discourse indicate an exercise of power before the identified victims and the “unknown (anonymous) women.”24 But there is a clear tendency to stigmatize the victims both in life and in death. López Molinar seemed to justify the murders given the victims’ occupations, claiming “they were mischievous and even prostitutes” also reduced “decent” women’s spaces to the home, for “looseness/mischief” is not proper in the feminine sphere and it only belongs in the masculine. The use of the word preposition “even” as synonymous with “including” allows López Molinar to emphasize the underlying “they were looking for it” discourse. López Molinar’s words are moreover authorized by criminologist José Parra Molina’s findings, since he claims that victims’ families deny these women were prostitutes or “mischievous” perhaps “because of shame” (Orquiz 1H). These small phrases carry an extreme ideological charge, and they force both the victims and their families to remain in a subaltern state, because “the social phenomenon of prostitution and the lives of the women implicated in it are perceived as marginal with respect to the broader social context” (Castillo and Rangel 242). The narrative of power against the victims of femicide in Ciudad Juárez constructs itself upon notions of difference and the stereotype of “liberal” women as transgressors of the moral and social order, as we saw in Vila’s border narratives. As regards the 58 “unidentified” (anonymous)25 women and sex workers, it would be worthwhile to open a separate line of research on survival, social struggle, and the exercise of power as Castillo and Rangel Gómez suggest in their study on prostitution in Tijuana. The former deputy attorney general’s words, bolstered by the criminologist’s moralist conclusions, are joined in “a society that doesn’t want to know anything anymore . . . [and that is] losing the capacity to be outraged” (Chávez Cano 7); they demonstrate how our commonsense presumptions are used by power structures and ideologies. Unfortunately, in this case, we live in a world of common sense, of the everyday life, which is constructed completely upon the base of presumptions and expectations that control society’s members, such as their interpretations of others’ action (Garfinkel, qtd. in Fairclaugh 70). How do we defy this hegemonic discourse? How do we expect, then, an objective investigation? How can we envision a Juárez population that is interested and involved, when perhaps common sense tells the people—including the law enforcement officers—to think that “she was asking for it” or even that “she deserved it”? The representations of women that appeared in the so-called prevention propaganda, in the deputy attorney general’s narratives, along with the


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Parra Molina’s conclusions and hypotheses (Orquiz 1H), lead me to this interpretation. Within the representations found in the City General Police campaigns and Parra Molina’s conclusions, we find the series of cultural codes that support our perceptions by providing meaning to our lives and our spaces. As Cosgrove and Domosh suggest: . . . the postmodern world leaves us nothing behind which we can hide. . . . Our stories add to a growing list of other stories, not listed in a logic of linearity, . . . but as series of cultural constructions, each representing a particular view of the world, to be consulted together to help us make sense of ourselves and our relation to the landscapes and places we inhabit and think about. (37)

In Ciudad Juárez, the code of the women to whom this campaign is directed fluctuates between “the weak” and “the libertine”—patriarchal discourse’s usual duality: virgin/whore, Mary/Eve. It is the stereotype created about women since the border’s creation; it is the social construction of the feminine gender. Unfortunately, Jorge López Molinar and Francisco Barrio were not the only ones in the anti woman crusade. The prevention campaigns during Ramón Galindo’s office in Juárez (1995–1999) portrayed similar images. The campaigns targeted only one part of the population: young working women, inferring that all possible victims belonged to that social group, 26 as if middle- and upper-class women did not need to be warned because they behave well and cannot be prostitutes or go out dancing. The campaigns emphasized the stereotype of “loose women from the working class” and held them responsible for any aggression that could befall them, especially if they were walking alone at night or dawn on an empty street. The posters designed for the campaign warned young women by telling them that their Guardian Angel was not always there when they needed him, by showing pictures of young, handsome middle-class men having indecent intentions, or by portraying women’s bodies falling into an abyss. The ads also encouraged men to show their machismo by watching over “their” women and to be vigilant about the activities in which “their” women participated. Statements such as “do not talk to nor accept drinks from strangers”; “avoid unknown, empty or dark alleys”; “do not dress provocatively”; “do not go dancing by yourself”; “ask a member of your family to wait for you at the bus stop”; “if you are a victim of an attack, do not ask for help, instead yell ‘fire’ and more people will help you”; “if someone in a


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car asks you something, keep a considerable distance, that way they cannot force you inside”; “trust your instinct, if you think something is wrong or you don’t feel safe, run away or ask for help”; “if you are victim of a rape try to throw up, that way the perpetrator will be sick and disgusted and will stop”; “do not put yourself in danger of being part of the statistics”; “the duty of the Municipal Police is to prevent”; “help us by taking care of yourself.” These statements reemphasized the placement of the blame on the woman, if she failed to follow one or some of the above. The campaigns were unsuccessful in preventing any crimes for various reasons. They were published in newspapers to which the population at risk does not have access. Therefore, they projected to the middle class an image of the victim as being a femme fatale whose movements were driven mostly by her desires, whether she went out dancing, wandered around, or went out of her home. The campaigns never mentioned the socio economical context in which the victims dwelled and moved. It was never stated that women were (are) away from their homes at night or dawn because they work night or early-morning shifts at the factories. No one brought up either the fact that if they were walking alone at such times it was because they did not have a car to drive home or that perhaps they needed to walk a distance before getting to the bus stop or to their homes. They never said that most of the victims were last seen in the afternoon after work, or going from work to school, and not at dusk or dawn after going dancing. The campaigns not only depicted this image but revived the old conservative idea that the best and safest place for women is the house.27 They also denied working women the few hours of leisure time they had. They distorted the idea of having a good time and projected it as an immorality. The campaigns even condemned women by the way they were dressed. Ironically enough, most of the victims were wearing T-shirts, jeans, and sneakers. The underlying discourse beneath this text is that maquiladora workers are not as “good” or “decent” as those women from the upper and middle classes, or those who perform other types of work, and that is why they are killed. This discourse supports and authorizes the statements made by former governor Barrio Terrazas and former assistant state attorney general Jorge López Molinar. Therefore, it would be useful to stop and examine the relation between public officials’ words, their moralist attitudes, and their own and the victims’ social class. The young women are doubly exploited—by an economic system’s “social and political relations of power” (Valle and Torres


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10), and by a social discourse that clings on to the generalized image of them as “girls who go downtown to sell their bodies for money or food” (Bowden 48). As we can see, the women whom the (PGM) Municipal Police’s propaganda is addressing are those who have transgressed men’s spaces and “good social moral values.” They are working-class women who are violated both in their everyday life—facing exploitation in the factory and the home—and symbolically desecrated in these representations of them. Such images have been endorsed, as we have seen, by former governors, former general attorneys, and former district attorneys. Also, the Spanish criminologist José Antonio Parra Molina has reaffirmed these images in the interviews he granted to Juárez newspaper Norte: On the border, women find themselves in a social environment where the feminine sex lives in a completely libertine state since it is but a few meters away from the border with the United States, where women begin their sexual life at a much younger age, and they adopt this way of life, thus leading them to promiscuity. (Orquiz 1H)

Besides upholding the ideas set forth by police’s ads, the criminologist’s conclusions also show that they are based on a stereotyped view of the border—a stereotype that is connected to the stereotype of White American women. The border environment that Parra Molina imagines is that which Norma Iglesias examines in her analysis of Mexican films about the border; using “Ciudad Juárez as a point of reference,” Iglesias argues that films depict “the border as a propitious place for organized crime and prostitution” (29–31). No one denies that there is prostitution and organized crime in Ciudad Juárez as well as in other border and non border cities, but our social reality is much more complex than Parra Molina’s explanations, especially when he asserts that “the feminine sex lives in a completely libertine state since it is but a few meters away from the United States border” (Orquiz 1H). His views are based on the trope of difference or the “other,” and from his assertion we can infer that all Mexican border women are “morally lost” because of American women’s bad influence.28 The so-called prevention campaigns failed from their inception. They did not prevent anything, and only made their misogynist and classist ideology evident. This is precisely why they were removed from newspapers, because of feminist groups, nongovernmental organizations, and academics immediately protested against them.


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In their defense, the authorities argued that “they had been designed by a woman” and that they had “generated them using FBI information.” It is obvious that the woman who designed these ads was fully submerged in patriarchal ideology29 and that the images and metaphors that the Municipal General Police (DGP) and the FBI used to portray the city, the potential victims, and their possible murderers shared a “tenuous relation with any ‘reality’ whatsoever” (Zimmerman 294). Aside from the discursive strategies of blaming the victims, the DA’s office apparently was working on solving the crimes. In 1995, Barrio’s administration presented an alleged perpetrator for some of the serial killings. He was an Egyptian named Abdel Omar Latiff Sharif. For Barrio, Juárez society finally could sleep peacefully. As expected, the murderer could not be a Mexican and could not be from Juárez.30 An interesting narrative/plot was created around Sharif by Chihuahua State’s authorities. For Mexican society, Sharif was the “perfect” suspect. He was a foreign national, did not speak Spanish, had a history of sexual misconduct in the United States, and he was accused by a woman of attempted rape. The trope of the difference was also applied to Sharif. In his case, the state employed the hegemonic discourse of the nation where “the Oriental” and “bad behaved” did not fit. Sharif did not belong to the imagined community of Chihuahua State’s officials and of Chihuahuenses as a whole, and as a result, he needed to be punished.31 But in order to defend even more Sharif’s story, in 1996 the Special Prosecutor’s Office for Crimes against Women in Juárez “charged the “Rebeldes’ gang with thirteen of the killings” (García 4). They confessed having committed some of the murders and testified against Sharif, claiming that while in jail, Sharif had paid them to kill young women to prove his innocence. The Special Prosecutor’s Office insisted on the narrative. That year Chihuahua’s Governor Francisco Barrio declared that the impressive results in Los Rebeldes’ capture were due to the “most expensive and professional investigation in the state” (Washington Valdez 133). The Rebeldes personified another trope of the difference: that of class. The issue of moral values was also employed with them. Not only were the Rebeldes already outcasts for being members of a gang, but they were also from low-income families; they were dressed as “cholos” and most of them were tattooed. Their personas were “deviant” from “normal Juarenses.” For the general public the Rebeldes could easily fulfill the narrative of the sexual predator and serial killer. In as much as the plot seemed awkward and solely circumstantial, evidence was presented and the narrative was


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successful on the judicial power. After spending nine years in prison, on January 6, 2005, los Rebeldes were sentenced to 40 years each for raping and killing four women (García 4; Washington-Valdez 156; Monárrez, Sistema 378). To this day they continue to claim their innocence. In May of that same year the Human R ights National Commission (CNDH, Comisión Nacional de Derechos Humanos) went to Juárez and defined the crimes against women as brutal and an intolerable offense to any human being. It blamed the state authorities for negligence in attending, controlling, and eradicating women’s crimes (CNDH Recomendación 44/98). Between 1997 and 1998 54 more women were found in different Juárez’s locations. Half of them killed presumably by a serial predator. The police did nothing else. The authorities maintain their narratives regarding the victims and the alleged perpetrators. In its annual report the Pan-American Health Organization reported “that homicide was the second leading cause of death of young women in Juárez” (Washington-Valdez 28). At the “Buried in the Border” Conference at New Mexico State University in October of 1999, Javier Benavides, the excommissioner of the Juarez Municipal General Police, claimed that “NGOs were magnifying the cases of murdered women and were neglecting incidences of murdered men, whose cases were also very lamentable” (Delgado 3A).32 Former commissioner Benavides minimized the situation of women in Juárez claiming that the problem was structural. As Carlos Monsiváis explains, “the great problem is that woman has always been victim . . . , when one of them is kidnapped, raped, tortured, and murdered by a man, this no longer disturbs people or fills them with indignation because these aggressions have become customary” (Flores Simental 5A). What is most lamentable about these events, Monsiváis says, is the contrast, because “we know not of any women who equally hunt a man, rape ´him, kill him, and throw him away.” It is interesting to notice that despite the change of party in power (PRI to PAN) in the state of Chihuahua during that time, it seems that the power’s structure did not change. Actually, Benavides was very clear when stating that femicide was a structural problem. Misogyny and class were two characteristics of the PAN’s discourse that remained from the old regime. The hegemonic state maintains old structures of lies and concealment and failed to keep its main duty: the protection of its citizens, especially the most vulnerable such as the low-income women of Juarez.


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The Partido Revolucionario Institucional’s Administration The primary image of Ciudad Juárez, even within the same state of Chihuahua, is that depicted by Vasconcelos or North American travelers during the late nineteenth century, not to mention Parra Molina. Tensions between the center and the periphery in the state of Chihuahua have endured since the foundations of Juárez and Chihuahua, the capital of the state. Chihuahua City is “the cradle of the old aristocracy,” “of ancestral families,” of “old money,” of “good moral values.” Juárez in contrast, is the home “of all people,”33 of “dirty money,” and of “bad girls,” and is a “cove of criminals.”34 The identity politics of the state have had repercussions upon its public policies. During the PRI administration of the Governor Fernando Baeza (1988–92), whose nickname was Ferdinand the Catholic, the state administration restricted the business hours of Juárez restaurants, nightclubs, bars, night spots and entertainment establishments and also constrained the hours of the selling of alcoholic beverages in supermarkets, convenience stores, and small local stores. These measures’ objective was to reduce crime and, at the same time, change the city’s negative image.35 Governor Patricio Martinez García (1998– 2004), also from the PRI, implemented the same measure at the outset of his term under the program of “Zero Tolerance.” In his press statements on November 18, 1998, he expressed the following: “I want Ciudad Juárez to go to sleep early; I want everyone to be at their home by 2:00 A.M.” (El Diario 1A). His statements recall old discourses of Juárez as a “perverse city” and its night life, as if “the nighttime was guilty of the violence and lack of safety; consequently all that is associated with night’s negative image and its black legend is constructed as though it were natural” (Balderas 15). As we can see, despite the fact that political parties in Chihuahua may change, the image of the city and its women fail to change substantially. As a result of the power struggle between state and municipal governments,36 as well as the disagreements over various different police corporations’ roles,37 the government continued to make “others” responsible. On the one hand, Patricio Martinez’s spokesperson, Jorge Sanchez Acosta, stated that “the lack of investigations in the kidnapping and murder of women is the responsibility of Francisco Barrio Terrazas’ administration, [and that] since October 4, when the new government was established in Chihuahua, there has been no more impunity” (Romo Ruiz 7A). On the other hand, Patricio Martinez’ attorney general, Arturo González Rascón, declared that


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during the previous administration, 83 of the 176 cases of murdered women had been left unsolved, and that from the 16 cases that occurred during his term, only two remained open (Rodríguez Vásquez 6A). Reading the declarations made by Attorney General Arturo González Rascón, we find two types of discourse. In one discourse he uses official language, and in the other, he uses everyday language; when it comes time to discuss the topic of the murder of women, he has much more often employed everyday language. In an interview with Armando Rodríguez in which he was asked about the sexual crimes in Ciudad Juárez, he reconstructed the city’s black image, claiming that “it was more than a national problem—it was a cultural and situational problem” (9C). González Rascón rearticulates Vasconcelo’s image of the border as the “no-man’s land of the spirit” despite the fact that he tries to correct himself: “What happens is that right now we are all focused on Ciudad Juárez and if one of these types of events happens in Chihuahua City, one can’t notice, . . . or in the state of Sinaloa, where since January, 96 homicides have occurred but is not perceptible.” This apparent revalorization of the city is reinforced by his same words, for if “one can’t tell this happens in other places,” it is because those places do not share the “city of vice and perdition” image. In this same interview, he returns to the discourse of power employed by Governor Patricio Martínez, “I believe Ciudad Juárez and this border in particular has to rescue the image of security, as a respectable place that all Chihuahua citizens have to give their city and that we are going to transform” (my emphasis). It seems that Patricio Martínez is more worried about the city’s prestige than the solving of the crimes. When González Rascón refers to these kind of “cultural and situational” crimes, he exercises his discursive power just as we observed during the PAN period, only he does so through colloquial speech, “unfortunately, there are women who, because of their life’s conditions and the places where they undertake their activities, place themselves at risk, because it would be very difficult to go out to the street when it is raining and not get wet.” This old saying has two readings; it tries to appeal to the people and it “puts into evidence social problems and the positive or negative valorization of women in society” (Monárrez 90). These perspectives render victims guilty or deserving of death, for even after being immolated, they are desecrated and judged for their actions—for having transgressed the discourse of power. The Special Prosecutor’s Office for the Investigation of Crimes against Women was founded in 1995 under Francisco Barrio’s


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administration as a result of NGOs’ constant pressure. Since its origin, “with five overburdened district attorneys and a shortage in staff and technical equipment, the Office faced great disapproval from the leading protest groups” (Sosa 9B). NGOs’ protests have generally been the same: the authorities’ ineptitude, the ever-so-slow investigations, the inefficiency, and under Suly Ponce’s term (November 1998–August 2001), the arrogance and the wrongful treatment of victims, their family members, NGOs, newspaper reporters, criminologists, special correspondents, experts in criminology, scholars, etc. Suly Ponce was invariably at the storm’s center and constantly in a war of words with NGOs, especially with “Voces Sin Eco,” an organization made up of the family members of missing or murdered women. I will examine but two events to make the case in point. The first example shows how Governor Patricio Martínez and his attorneygeneral Arturo González Rascón understand the police investigations are “conducted efficiently and with a gender perspective”:38 To solve a crime against a woman, the Special Prosecutor Ponce informed that they had more than 100 people under investigation, all of which seemed “illogical” to the Chihuahua Institute of Criminology and to Esther Chávez Cano, director of the Crisis Center “Casa Amiga.” Chávez Cano considered this action as “a demonstration of inefficiency and a mockery of the people” (Fernández and Ramos1B). The result of such inefficacy was that rallies formed in front of the State Attorney-General’s Offices in repudiation; people carried banners and posters that read: “If Suly is the best, poor of us Juárez citizens.” This statement was based on the last demonstration’s events—people had sought to dismiss Suly Ponce from office, but González Rascón had argued that she was the best employee for the job. The second example best complements the discourses of power I’ve already exposed, as it is based on the district attorney’s attitude and responses at the First Binational “Crimes Against Women” Conference: “[Suly Ponce] the Special Prosecutor was upset because she felt attacked and besieged after a woman and her daughter confronted her for hardly giving them any attention when they had gone to her office to report a missing minor. Before the constant questioning, Suly Ponce had scolded the little girl . . . and told her she had not given her any lines of investigation which to follow” (Flores Simental 5A )—as if it was the duty of family members. After another question, Ponce said she would gladly give up her post because “looking around for loose girls” took too much of her time away from her family. As we can see, the special prosecutor’s discourse hardly differs from the PAN authorities’, thus posing a larger problem for studies


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of gender and language in use. The fact that a woman is in charge of designing a campaign directed toward women, or that a female is in charge of a special unit for the investigation of crimes against women, is not a guarantee that she will not be immersed in patriarchal discourse and ideology. Moreover, Suly Ponce’s tirades reveal the incompatibility between her public and private spaces. For this special prosecutor, there is no site of negotiation for her “family obligations” and her obligation and commitment to the community as a public servant that she was. For the authorities they are loose women, worthless whores, bodies without a face, names with no meaning. They are poor, disposable women. Perhaps the best example of the lack of respect for the women is the way Patricio Martínez objectivized them when he was putting the blame in Barrio’s administration for not solving the crimes: “I ask the people of Chihuahua how is it they can today demand we solve the crimes when all we’ve got from the previous administration is 21 bags with bones” (Acura Harrier 10b). Former governor Patricio Martínez also started a discredit campaign toward the families of the victims claiming that they were profiting with their daughters’ deaths and that by denouncing the crimes in international commissions, forums, and/or the media they were discrediting Juárez as a city and Chihuahua as a state.39 Actually, his third-appointed attorney general,40 Jesus Antonio Piñón Jimenez, minimized consistently the women’s murders, even worse than González Rascón. He denied that one of the alleged killers was tortured and he claimed that the serial killings were a myth (as Benavides pretended to do): Piñón said the victims’ families and rights groups have exaggerated the numbers for political purposes. He said that they were “members of the Communist Party” or have “leftist ideologies” and that they want to “give a bad name to Ciudad Juárez and the state of Chihuahua.” “They are inventing that bodies are being dropped in the desert; this is not true,” Piñón said. He said that only 36 women since 1993 have been killed in murders classified as possible serial sexual killings and that almost all of those cases have been solved. He said some of the dead women cited by human rights groups actually died in car accidents, from heart attacks or in falls in the bathtub. (Sullivan 22)

If in Franciso Barrio’s administration we noticed a construction of a “wicked” victim, in Patricio Martínez’ term we distinguish another characteristic: blame the victim’s families and other activists


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for promoting a “bad image” of Juárez at the international level, as we observe in Piñón’s statement. During Martínez’s administration there were other plots/narratives regarding the alleged criminals. In 1999 a survivor from a sexual assault and attempted murder identified her attacker. He was a bus driver from the maquiladora where she worked. His name is Jesús Manuel Gallardo “el Tolteca.” By some means, the DA Arturo Gonzalez Rascón and the Special Prosecutor Suly Ponce associated el Tolteca with three other bus drivers called “Los Ruteros” or Los Choferes 41 and held them responsible for seven serial sexual killings (García 5). In addition, the DA connected El Tolteca and Los Ruteros to Sharif’s conspiracy. In as much as the story was unbelievable, as it happened with Los Rebeldes, El Tolteca received a sentence of 113 years for the rape and assassination of five women. Los Ruteros were sentenced to 40 years in prison for the deaths of six women. To this day, they have denied knowing Sharif or Los Rebeldes, or killing anyone. Once again the hegemony exploited previous stereotypes. In the case of El Tolteca and Los Ruteros it was uncomplicated to continue a previous plot based on a victim’s accusation and the perpetrator’s confession. Lamentably this was not the only plot regarding possible criminals that González Rascón and Ponce delivered to the public. In November 2001 eight women’s bodies were found in the city in a large abandoned cotton field, practically across from the headquarters of the Maquiladora Association. Víctor Javier García Uribe, “El Cerillo,”42 and Gustavo González Meza “La Foca” were the scapegoats this time. After several days in custody, they stated that they had to confess because they were tortured.43 In early February, 2003 Gustavo González Meza La Foca was found dead in his cell after having a hernia surgery.44 The attorney general’s office reported that the autopsy results did not show evidence that the surgery was linked to the cause of his death. We can observe that the authorities’ discourse has maintained a similar narrative in all alleged perpetrators. Most of them are from low-income households, the majority is from out-ofstate, and in many cases they didn’t have anyone who could fight for them.45 Patricio Martínez’s government was characterized for being hostile against anyone who questioned or even mentioned the problem of femicide in the state.46 However, on September 23, 2002, the state government and the Instituto Nacional de las Mujeres (INMUJERES— Women’s National Institute) established two task forces. These groups included victim’s families, NGOs, scholars, activists, and authorities.


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Their purpose was to coordinate actions and propose different means to solve the crimes. Martínez received the proposals and committed himself to putting the government to work toward solving the killings. At the end of the ceremony he wished to “find the best way and a solution to a problematic that has been tarnishing the city’s image” (Rosales Rodríguez 1B). It was clear for many of those present that Martínez was trying to get close to the community, after stating that the activists were discrediting the city and the state. His discourse also had an underlying message: he was not interested in solving the problem for the sake of the victims and their families, but to polish the city’s image. The working groups were part of the incipient actions taken by Vicente Fox. They were motivated by the recommendations of the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). The presence of Patricia Espinosa Torres, the national president from INMUJERES, had two purposes: one was the actual creation of the working groups and the other was to support the establishment of the Instituto Chihuahuense de la Mujer. There were obvious political interests on both state and federal governments to create an image of articulation between the two regarding the femicide. The most notable absence was the municipal government, which at the time was governed by the PAN.47 This exclusion exhibits not coordination but a clear concession between political powers at a higher level. INMUJERES had the representation of Vicente Fox from the PAN. Consequently, both the federal and state government had negotiated to leave out the municipal government. A peculiar situation emerged from those groups. It was the presence of Victoria Caraveo, a wealthy activist who in the past had questioned and criticized Martínez. Interestingly enough she was the only person who was able to participate in both groups. After a maximum of four sessions from each group, there was no success as no prevention program was organized, no follow-ups were made, and no conciliation was achieved between the state government and the activists. Once the State Congress approved the formation of the Instituto Chihuahuense de la Mujer, Victoria Caraveo was appointed the director.48 For some of the participants, the groups were a platform for Caraveo’s appointment.49 The past administration under Governor José Reyes Baeza (2004– 2010) from the PRI had done the opposite of his predecessor. He had tried to show a friendlier face and a true interest in investing in Juárez. Governor Reyes did not directly appoint the attorney general as was


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done traditionally: instead he formed a committee to find the “most qualified” person for the position. When the selection was made, he appointed the former Attorney General Patricia González the “Iron Lady.” He made declarations regarding the need for ending violence in general and providing restitution for the damage against the women’s families. Reyes Baeza has also adopted a reconciliation position. During his speech at the Marcha de las Mujeres on April 2005, he mentioned that the governor of the state has always the doors open for the women to go see him and prevent them from being on the streets. His words and attitude underlie his patriarchal and authoritarian discourse. On the one hand, he was trying to prevent activists from giving statements in the national or international arena, and on the other hand, he wanted to keep the women off the streets. He proposed to take a public problem to the private arena. In his attempt to restore the damage to the victim’s families, he created a “multidisciplinary task force” to follow up different areas concerning the families’ needs. I was part of the multidisciplinary task force,50 and they assigned me to the section of housing. In the first meeting I noticed the tension between the families and the attorney general. If indeed she did not mention anything negative about the victims or their families, she did not mention anything at all. Some of the victims’ mothers complained that she never paid attention to them and that she was not following any of the former cases. According to García, “[t]he Reyes Baeza administration has been able to close relatively simple cases. . . . It has also been willing to execute arrests warrants for past murders where no new investigations are required. However, there is still a lack of investigative capacity at the state level to handle current and past cases that involve in-depth investigative work” (García 23). The following three meetings I attended were an eye-opener for me. I noticed that the friendlier face of the government was mostly a form of co-opting some of the families. By giving them housing, low prices on materials to expand their homes, condoning taxes, or old debts to the state, or the municipality, the government was gaining some of the families’ silence and even gratitude. I quit participating, and after a while they stop scheduling meetings. They didn’t need them any longer. Up to a point, they could declare “mission accomplished.” I wonder which strategy is more perverse: coercion or co-option? Which government is an accomplice: the one that fabricates criminals, tortures, and perhaps murders its scapegoats and enemies, or the one which pretends to be working in solving the crimes but allows impunity to continue?


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Shockingly enough, the discrediting campaign that Patricio Martínez started and that has continued through an intensive campaign from state authorities to entrepreneurial organizations and other politicians to “cleanse” the image of the city has been wining. They have been devoted to denying the problem, minimizing it, or ignoring it. Even the 2006 Mexican Federal Attorney General’s Office Report on the Women’s Murders reiterates that the crimes were exaggerated, denies the serial murders, and states that family violence was the main cause for them and that most crimes were solved. In the case of certain mothers’ organizations—the ones that have not been co-opted—they have been subject to a lot of criticism, exclusion, and threats. Juárez citizens, in general, while understanding the problem and feeling sorry for the victims’ and their families, have not been able to continue demonstrating their solidarity and have chosen to remain silent. Is it because the women murdered were poor? Is it because we are tired of seeing our city being bashed nationally and internationally? Is it because we have started to perceive violence as a part of our lives? Is it because we have assimilated the hegemonic discourse of the State? Although at times NGOs, activists, and scholars get frustrated of participating without seeing much progress regarding the problem of femicide, according to Imelda Marrufo it is important to continue participating. Regardless of whether the working or multidisciplinary task forces are successful or not, they open spaces to negotiate. If we stop participating, there is no space for negotiation. “The groups are a contention between the government and the civil society. The groups alleviate the existing anomalies. We knew that with Patricio we would have hostility all the way but now we do not know which ground we are stepping on.”51 Marrufo also stated that judiciary advances are part of the multidisciplinary groups and that NGOs have now a concrete agenda of eight points that include criminal reform and the law on violence. Having a concrete agenda would help civil society to see if the government is complying with the law and/or how long it would take to comply with it. Fortunately, for many of us interested in seeing that justice is brought to the victims and their families, on November 16, 2009, the Interamerican Court of Human Rights held the Mexican State responsible for the deaths of Esmeralda Herrera Monreal, Claudia Ivette González, and Laura Berenice Ramos Monárrez in the case known as “Campo Algodonero,” where eight women’s bodies were found in November 2001. Due to the fact that the families do not see the Mexican State interested in solving their cases, they had to appeal to an international court and had to


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wait nine years to finally achieve some justice. At present, the case of María Sagrario Flores Bonilla continues in process. As we have seen, Juárez as a border city has played an important role in Mexico. It is one of the most important cities in the nation and has played an essential role in the country’s fight for democracy. However, the changes expected from a monolithic state-party to a democratic state have resulted in a failure. The constitutional rights for its citizens, especially for the women of Juárez, have been denied because of the fact that “as a maxim of state sovereignty, the state grants its private citizens protection against violent attacks from each other” (Held and Hill 4). In Juárez, since 1993, the state not only has denied them that protection, but has denigrated them even after their atrocious deaths regardless of the political party in power. For political parties, Juárez is mainly a political booty, and their policies in the case of femicide have been misogynist and classist, as the Mexican State has always been. Regrettably, with the state of violence since 2008 we are experiencing in the country, and specifically in Juarez, femicide has been put aside, even though NGOs and police records show that women continue to be kidnapped, raped, and killed.52

Final Reflections In November 2007 I went to the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. and saw the horror of Nazi Germany and other fascist regimes. I read their propaganda. I understood how people were convinced of the need for extermination. I noticed the concern of the regime’s opponents. I heard the survivors’ testimonies. I walked by a pile of hair and shoes. I entered a wagon going to the extermination camps. I was overwhelmed by the names and numbers. I feared homogenization, racism, class prejudice, xenophobia. There was not a single moment in my walk through the museum that I stopped thinking of the ghost dance of the murdered women in Juárez and in the injustices and impunity that has prevailed to this day. I kept thinking in this silenced holocaust, in this undersized civil war we are living in Juárez, and as I left I hoped. I hoped and continue to hope for the day that this horror stops. And I hope for the day an International Court will judge53 police officers, investigators, forensic experts, prosecutors, deputy attorneys, attorney generals, governors, and presidents for their crimes of state. In closing, I’d like to share with you the words of a priest who celebrated mass in Campo Algodonero in memory of the murdered women in Juárez on November 2, 2004: Let the victims rest in peace, but let us not rest peacefully until justice prevails.


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Notes 1. Personal interview. August 21, 2008. 2. I would like to thank María Helena Rueda and Gabriela Polit for their sound comments to this essay, and to Matt Desing for his corrections to my English. Part of its content was presented at the seminar Violence in Latin America: New Realities, Emerging Representations in New York City on April 18–19, 2008. I am very grateful to East Carolina University for providing me with the support that allowed me to write this paper. I am solely responsible for the ideas and errors contained in this essay. 3. I use statistics from the “Sistema socioeconómico y geo-referencial de la violencia de género en Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. Análisis sobre la violencia de género en Ciudad Juárez: propuestas para su prevención,” multidisciplinary research directed by Julia Estela Monárrez Fragoso for the Comisión para Prevenir y Erradicar la Violencia contra las Mujeres en Ciudad Juárez (CPEVCMCJ) during 2005–6. The researchers were Luis Cervera, Raúl Flores Simental, César Fuentes, and Rodolfo Rubio. The Sistema is an electronic publication (CD) edited by El Colegio de la Frontera Norte and CPEVCMCJ in 2006. 4. There has not been an “official” document on these cases. However, local and national news register the count. Unfortunately, almost every day, the newscasts report a minimum of eight victims. There have been days in which the number has increased to 28. From January 2008 to September 2010 the number of people (men and women) who have been killed sums 6,939, according to Molly Molloy, librarian from New Mexico State University (NMSU) and Frontera Norte/Sur electronic news bulletin from NMSU. Molloy gathers her information from different Mexican newspapers. 5. This article was initially written before the violence in Mexico, but specifically in Ciudad Juárez and its municipality, escalated to such a point that—according to national and international news—it is now known as “the most violent city in the world.” The information regarding the Juárez landscape refers to a city where people in general could still walk, drive, and go out without fear of being kidnapped or killed at random. Unfortunately, after January 2008, drug cartels and other common criminals have taken advantage of the state of impunity that has reigned in the city since the femicide started. At present there exists a generalized sense of insecurity (if not fear) and the city’s infrastructure looks decayed. Consequently, when making several observations regarding the city’s landscape, it is because in 2007 it was still a very “liveable” and secure city for most people. 6. Besides Norma Klahn, other people who have written on this subject are Gabriel Trujillo Munoz, Víctor Zúñiga, Carlos Monsiváis, Jorge Bustamante, Guillermina Valdés-Villalva, José Manuel Valenzuela Arce, Claire Fox, and Tim Given, among others.


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7. The Maquiladora program was fully established as the capstone to the Bracero Program; it was believed back then that documented workers in the United States would return to Mexico and that, above all, border cities would be established. The Border Industrialization Program (PIF) did not end up making the workers leave, for the majority of them stayed in the United States as undocumented workers. Nonetheless, what the PIF did do was attract specialized workers, especially women, from other parts of Mexico—from places south of the Border States. 8. The population in Mexican border-belt cities can buy cars for better prices in the United States and then acquire special (border) license plates that can only be used 30 km south of the border. Before the peso’s devaluation in 1994, groups of young working women would buy one car so that they could get to work in the maquiladoras and then share it on the weekends. 9. Fronteriza or Fronterizo is the Spanish translation for border dweller. 10. I will be using “state” to refer to a combination of concepts. One is Max Weber’s (1994) definition of state as an organization that has a monopoly on legitimate violence over a specific territory; and the other is political power, which Ofsche (1973) explains as the ability to influence the behavior of others with or without resistance. 11. “Image of Victims and Murderers,” paper presented in the International Women’s Day Forum, organized by the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juárez, Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, on March 9, 1995. “The Representation of Women in Ciudad Juárez,” paper presented in the 1st Regional Symposium on Women, organized by the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juárez, the Chihuahua State Congress’s Commission on Gender and Equality, and the NGO Coordinator, on March 8, 1998, and “Baile de fantasmas en Ciudad Juárez al final y al principio del milenio” (Muñoz and Spitta 57–73). 12. Fairclough bases his methodology taking into account the theories of Gramsci, Habermas, Bourdieu, de Saussure, van Dijk, and Foucault, among others. Fairclough suggests as his methodology the observation of sociolinguistic conventions because through them we can study language in its social context. In his project he also includes linguistics, pragmatics, cognitive psychology, and discourse analysis. 13. In Julia Monárrez’s article, “Serial Sexual Femicide in Ciudad Juarez: 1993–2002,” there is a table in which she distinguishes between the serial and non serial femicides. 14. The database for the Estudio hemerográfico now has information until the year 2003 and can be found in www.casa-amiga.org. 15. I am not saying that the rest of the murderers did not present those characteristics, but the years mentioned here are the ones that present more cases of sexual femicide or serial femicide. For more information on the data, see, by Sean Mariano García, “Sistema socioeconomic y geo-referencial” and “Scapegoats of Juárez. The misuse of justice


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17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

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in prosecuting women’s murders in Chihuahua, Mexico.” www.lawg. org. According to Julia Monárrez database [“Base de datos Feminicidio,” archivo particular de investigación, Ciudad Juárez, Departamento de Estudios Culturales, Dirección General Regional Noroeste, El Colegio de la Frontera Norte], which is updated daily, by May of 2010, the number of women killed was 904, and of them, 122 could be considered as sexual serial femicide. This number is taken from Monárrez’s “Sexual Serial Femicide.” However, the chart that is recorded in “Sistema” shows an average of 26.1 (359). Monárrez (2005) separates and defines sexual serial femicide into two categories: organized and disorganized. The first one is the femicide carried out by an organized group of killers who use a systematic method over an unlimited period of time and whose victims are women or children. The disorganized is an act of femicide carried out by one person in a finite period of time in which the assassin might or might not know the victim (490). An interesting discussion regarding the State-Party and its relations with drug-trafficking is elaborated in Luis Astorga’s essay “Mexico: drug trafficking, politics and violence” in the book Seguridad, traficantes y militares. 2007 An elaboration of this study has been published in my article “Baile de fantasmas en Ciudad Juárez al final y al principio del milenio” (Boris Muñoz and Spitta 57–73). With the arrival of the National Action Party (PAN) to the Chihuahua State Government in 1993, Francisco Barrio Terrazas—Secretary of the Controller during the Fox administration—began a “recovering values” campaign. This campaign was highly criticized by progressive academics and people from the left for its conservatism. This type of discourse continues to be used by the party. As another example, I mention the controversy that took place when former labor secretary Carlos Abascal ask the principal of his daughter’s high school to forbid Carlos Fuentes’ Aura to be taught in literature classes. López Molinar passed away on December, 2005. It is not established publicly if he confessed knowing anything about the killers. However, some journalists believe he was involved in them. “Los crímenes contra la democracia.” Paper presented at the I Simposio Binacional sobre címenes contra Mujeres en Ciudad Juárez. Organized by El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, New Mexico State University and Coordinadora de Organismos no Gubernamentales, Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, November 4–6, 2000. During López Molinar’s term as assistant general attorney, 100 women were registered as murdered. Of these 100, 21 were declared “unidentified/unknown.” See Monárrez (1998).


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25. He has termed them as “unknown” because no one has claimed them or identified them. From this, one can gather that they were migrant women. 26. I am aware that the majority of the sexual serial femicides committed during the Barrio/Galindo era were mainly from low-income families; the concept of targeting only that part of the population reinforced the stigmatization of the victims. 27. To give an example, in the case of Juárez, until 1999, 34 victims knew who the murdered were, because they were next of kin, friends, or neighbors (Monárrez 2000: 113). 28. Parra Molina shows a similar discourse of Anglo women as that found in Vila’s research regarding Juárenses’ perceptions (Orquiz 1H). 29. There is a notable difference between a woman who is aware of her gender and a woman who is not. Awareness of gender construction is what leads to deconstruct patriarchal ideologies. 30. We should not forget that in the history of Mexico until that time there were only six serial killers, and all of them were not from Juárez—a very important issue for Juarenses construction of identity. 31. By the year 2000 DNA results from previous years showed that the body of a victim allegedly killed by Sharif did not belong to her. “Other irregularities marred the case against Sharif. He was charged at one time with the death of Elizabeth Ontiveros. The ‘victim’ responded in person to the Chihuahua State Police to prove she was very much ‘alive’ ” (Washington–Valdez 134). Needless to say, to the day of his passing, Sharif continued to claim his innocence. 32. Those cases are indeed lamentable and definitively need to be solved. However, a considerable number of those crimes involved male victims who were involved in drug-trafficking, gangs, or other criminal activities. The women I am referring to, whom we talk about when we talk about femicide, were not involved in any criminal activity. In these cases the exercise of power is very different than the one exercised among delinquents or organized crime. 33. I borrow this from Néstor García Canclini’s title Tijuana: The Home of All People. 34. This is one of the characteristics the film Espaldas mojadas (1949) gives in its description of Juárez. 35. Never in Juárez’s history was its image more “positive.” The 1980s maquiladora boom created an atmosphere of confidence. Nightclubs in the city’s downtown streets shared their space with the middle class and the working class, although there were respective nightclubs for each social class. The city’s former image of “vice and prostitution” was displaced by an “economic bonanza,” especially after 1985. See César Fuentes Flores’s “Industrial Maquila Growth—Development Strategy? Maquiladora Workers and Nurseries: The Case of Colonia Toribio Ortega in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua” (author’s photocopy).


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36. Despite the fact that the PRI regained the state governorship, PAN continued to be in power in Juárez’s city government until 2004 when PRI regained power. 37. The responsibility of the Municipal Police is prevention; the obligation of the state police is to investigate and prosecute the crimes against common law, and the function of the federal police is to investigate and prosecute federal crimes. 38. I am paraphrasing González Rascón’s words when he announced the new special prosecutor’s name. (El Diario, November 7, 1998: 7C) 39. For more information on this events, see Melissa W. Wright, “El Lucro, la democracia y la mujer pública” (Monárrez Fragoso and Tabuenca Córdoba 2007: 49–82). 40. González Rascón was removed from office and appointed to another position. José de Jesús Solís Silva was appointed as attorney general. Rumors were that he had links with drug lords and that he was a drug lord himself. He was the one who accused David Meza of killing Neyra Azucena. He had to resign after 17 state police officials were implicated in the drug-related murders of a dozen people who were found buried in a backyard in Juárez. 41. Their names are Agustín Toribio Castillo alias “El Kani,” José Gaspar Ceballos Chávez alias “El Gaspy,” Bernardo Hernández Fernández alias “El Samber,” and Víctor Moreno Rivera alias “El Narco.” 42. Víctor García Uribe had been arrested in 1999 along with Los Choferes, but he was released, according to Sean Mariano García (6, 14). 43. The warden, Carlos Gutiérrez Casas, confirmed they arrived into the prison with bruises in their bodies. A few days later he was fired. Óscar Máynez, the chief forensics expert for the state, resigned after refusing to fabricate evidence against La Foca and El Cerillo, and claiming there were many irregularities in the investigation. The SPO (Special Prosecutor’s Office) persisted on its story. 44. The general public did not believe the story and thought he had been killed inside the prison. 45. In 2004 the Commission to Prevent and Eradicate Violence against Women in Ciudad Juárez promoted to apply the Istanbul Protocol to El Cerillo. Although “the federal authorities determined that García was tortured . . . Chihuahua State officials did not charge anyone in connection with García and González’s irregular detentions” (WashingtonValdez. 157). On October 14, 2004, Víctor Javier García Uribe was sentenced to 50 years in prison. On July 14, 2005, he was released “because there were not enough proof to charge him with the criminal offenses against the eight women” (“Summary” 2005: 3). As for Sharif, he died of a heart attack in 2006. He had been transported from the prison in Chihuahua City to a medical facility. He had been sentenced to 50 years, but his sentence was reduced to 20. He spent 11 years incarcerated. Till the day he died, police were unable to prove any


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46. 47. 48.

49. 50.

51. 52.

53.

M a r í a S o c or r o Ta bu e nc a C ór d ob a of his suspected crimes. His case was based on circumstantial evidence and racism. “His lawyer José Antonio Nieto said his release was imminent [sic]. A judge was going to rule on Sharif a federal amparo [habeas corpus] within a week or two of the day he died” (Washington-Valdez, 139). In 2003 femicide spread to Chihuahua city and more alleged criminals were imprisoned and later released, as was El Cerillo. Patricio Martínez invested hardly any money in Juárez. It was his tactic to pave the way to recover Juárez for the PRI. An interesting analysis on how hegemonic groups claimed justice for family victims is “El sufrimiento de las otras,” by Julia Monárrez (Monárrez Fragoso and Tabuenca Córdoba: 115–38) In my interview with Imelda Marrufo, from the NGO Mesa de Mujeres, on August 21, 2008, we agreed on that situation. The group was composed of victims’ families, different, governmental institutions, nongovernment organizations, and academic institutions working or interested in the problem of femicide. I was asked to participate because I was the dean of the North West Region of El Colegio de la Frontera Norte. Personal interview, August 21, 2008. The number of murdered women has also escalated, and, at present, in some cases is very hard to tell whether those crimes were perpetrated because the women were involved in drug-related activities or not. My hope is for individuals as well as for the state (as it was done in November 2009).

References Aguilar, Ricardo, and Socorro Tabuenca Córdoba. Lo que el viento a Juárez. Testimonio de una ciudad que se obstina. Las Cruces NM: UIA-Laguna/ Editorial Nimbus, 2000. Print. Col. Papeles de Familia. Print. Acura Harrier, Alnico. El Norte 10B [Ciudad Juárez], 20 de junio de 1999. Print. Astorga, Luis. Seguridad, traficantes y militares. El poder y la sombra. México: Tusquets, 2007. Print. Balderas Domínguez, Jorge. Mujeres, antros y stigmas en la noche juarense. Chihuahua: Instituto Chihuahuense de Cultura, 2002. Print. Colección Solar, Serie Horizontes. Bowden, Charles. “While You Were Sleeping. In Juarez, Mexico, Photographers Expose the Violent Realities of Free Trade.” Harpers Magazine, December 1996: 44–52. Print. Castellanos Guerrero, Alicia, and Gilberto López Rivas. “La influencia norteamericana en la frontera norte de México.” In La frontera del norte: Integración y desarrollo, ed Roque González Salazar, 68–84. México DF: El Colegio de México, 1981. Print.


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Castillo, Debra, Gudelia Rangel Gómez, and Bonie Delgado. “Vidas fronterizas: mujeres prostitutas en Tijuana.” In Nuevas perspectivas desde/sobre América Latina: El desafío de los estudios culturales, ed. Mabel Moraña, 233–260. Pittsburgh, and Chile: IILI-Editorial Cuarto Propio, 2000. Print. Cosgrove, Dennis, and Mona Domosh. “Author and Authority: Writing the New Cultural Geography.” In Place/Culture/Representation, ed. James Duncan and David Ley, 25–38. London, New York: Routledge, 1994. Print. Delgado, Cristina. “Magnifican los crímenes contra mujeres.” El Norte 3 [Ciudad Juárez], October 1999: 3A. Print. Espaldas Mojadas. Dir. Alejandro Galindo. México: ATA Films and Atlas Films, 1953. Film. Esther Chávez Cano. N/T. El Norte [Ciudad Juárez], August 2, 1998: 7. Print. Grupos de Estudios de Género de la Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez, Comité Independiente de Chihuahua de los Derechos Humanos, and Grupo 8 de Marzo de Ciudad Juarez (n.d.). “Estudio Hemerográfico de Mujeres Asesinadas 1993–1998.” www.casa-amiga.org. Casa Amiga Centro de Crisis. Web. Fairclough, Norman. Language and Power. London, New York: Longman, 1990. Print. Fernández, Tania, and Roberto Ramos. “Cuestionan a fiscal de mujeres.” El Diario [Ciudad Juárez], January 23, 2000: 1 and 11B. Print. Flores Simental, Raúl. “Suly Ponce: en vivo, sin máscara, y por Internet.” El Norte [Ciudad Juárez], November 12, 2000: 5A. Print. Fuentes, Julio. “Patricio reitera tope de horarios a licores.” El Diario [Ciudad Juárez], October 31, 1998: 1C. Print. García Canclini, Néstor. Tijuana, la casa de toda la gente. México DF: INAH-ENAH/Programa Cultural de las Fronteras, 1989. Print. García, Sean Mariano. “Scapegoats’ Scapegoats of Juárez. The Misuse of Justice in Prosecuting Pomen’s Murders in Chihuahua, Mexico.” www. lawg.org. Latin America Working Group Education Fund. 2005. Web. Held, Karl, and Audrey Hill. “The Democratic State. Critique of Bourgeois Sovereignty.” www.gegenstandpunkt.com. GegenStandpunkt, 1993. Web. Iglesias, Norma. Entre yerba, polvo y plomo: Lo fronterizo visto por el cine mexicano. México, Tijuana: El Colegio de la Frontera Norte/IMCINE, 1992. Print. Klahn, Norma. “Writing the Border: The Languages and Limits of Representation.” Travesía: The Border Issue Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 3, no. 1–2 (1994): 29–55. Print. Marrufo, Imelda. Personal Interview. 21 August 2008. Monárrez Fragoso, Julia. “Feminicidio sexual sistémico, víctimas y familiares 1993–2005.” Dissertation. Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana Unidad Xochimilco, 2005. Print.


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Monárrez Fragoso, Julia. “La cultura del feminicidio en Ciudad Juárez, 1993–1999.” Frontera Norte 23, no. 12 (January–June 2000): 87–118. Print. ———. “Serial Sexual Femicide in Ciudad Juarez: 1993–2001.” Debate Feminista, 13th ed. 25, (April 2002). www.womenontheborder.org. Women on the Border. Web. Monárrez Fragoso, Julia Estela, and María Socorro Tabuenca Córdoba, eds. Bordeando la violencia contra las mujeres en la frontera norte de México. México: El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, Miguel Ángel Porrúa, 2007. Print. Monárrez Fragoso, Julia Estela et al. “Sistema socioeconómico y georeferencial sobre la violencia de género en Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua: Análisis de la violencia de género en Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua.” www.colef.mx. El Colegio de la Frontera Norte 2006. Web. Monsiváis, Carlos. “Los crímenes contra la democracia.” Paper presented at 1a Reunión Binacional: Crímenes contra mujeres. Organized by El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, Coordinadora de Organizaciones No Gubernamentales, New Mexico State University and Semillas. November 3 and 4, 2000. Print. Muñoz, Boris, and Silvia Spitta eds. Más allá de la ciudad letrada. Pittsburg, PA: Biblioteca de América, 2003. Print. Ofsche, Richard J. “Coercive Persuation and Attitude Change”. Encyclopedia of Sociology. 1. New York: Macmillan, 1973. Print Orquiz, Martín. “Asesinatos de mujeres: la amenaza latente.” El Norte [Ciudad Juárez], August 1, 1998: 1H. Print. Quintero, Alejandro. “Urgen investigar a fondo crímenes contra mujeres.” El Diario [Ciudad Juárez], November 5, 2000: 3B. Print. Radford, Jill, and Diana Russell. Femicide: The Politics of Women Killing. New York: Twayne Publishiers, 1993. Print. Rodríguez, Armando. “Son ‘situacionales’ los crímenes, dice el procurador estatal.” El Diario [Ciudad Juárez], February 24, 1999: 9C. Print. Rodríguez Vázquez, Luis. “Procurador de justicia. Desmienten a ONG’s.” El Diario [Ciudad Juárez], August 10, 1999: 6A. Print. Romero Ruiz, Alejandro. “Politizan casos de mujeres.” El Diario, July 18, 1999: 7A. Print. Rosales Rodríguez, José. El Norte 1B [Ciudad Juárez] 24 de septiembre de 2002. Print. Schmidt-Camacho, Alicia “Ciudadana X: Gender Violence and the Denationalization of Women’s Rights in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.” The New Centenial Review 5.1 (2005): 255-292. Print. Sosa, Luz del Carmen. “Fiscalía en entredicho.” El Diario, March 4, 2001: 4B. Print. Sullivan, Kevin. “In Mexico, a Question of Guilt by Protestation.” Washington Post Foreign Service, October 10, 2004: A22. Print. “Summary of the Report ‘Murders and Disappearances of Women and Girls in Ciudad Juárez and the State of Chihuahua.’ ” Document presented to


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the UN Committee against Torture, 37th session. Mexico, March 2005. www2.ohchr.org. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights 2005. Web. Téllez, Alejandro. “También procurador desmiente a experto.” El Norte [Ciudad Juárez], July 15, 1999: 6B. Print. Valle, Víctor M., and Rodolfo Torres. Latino Metropolis: Globalization and Community. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 2000. Print. Vila, Pablo, “Gender and the Overlapping of Region, Nation, and Ethnicity on the U.S.-Mexico Border.” In Ethnography at the Border, ed. Pablo Vila, 73–106. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 2003. Print. Cultural Studies of the Americas, 13. Washington Valdez, Diana. Harvest of Women. Safari in Mexico. Los Angeles: Peace at the Border, 2006. Print. Weber, Max. Political Writings. Ed. Peter Lassman. Trans. Ronald Speirs. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. Print. “X-X.” El Nacional [México D.F.], May 14, 1998, Monthly Supplementary Section: 7. Print. Yúdice, George. “Postmodernidad y capitalismo transnacional en América Latina.” In Cultura y postpolítica: El debate sobre la modernidad en América Latina, Néstor García Canclini, ed. Mexico: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1991. Print. Zimmerman, Marc. “Fronteras latinoamericanas y ciudades globalizadas en el nuevo desorden mundial.” In Nuevas perspectivas desde/sobre América Latina: El desafío de los estudios culturales, Mabel Moraña, ed, 345–62. Pittsburgh, PA, and Chile: IILI-Editorial Cuarto Propio, 2000. Print.


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C h ron ic l e s of E v e r y day L i f e i n C u l i ac á n, Si na l oa Gabriela Polit Dueñas

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ourteen journalists were killed in Mexico during 2010, and not a single one of those crimes was punished.1 Journalists are among the many professionals who stand in the crossroads between the authorities and the narcos. They are the ones who have to decipher to which side do local politicians, state officials, civil servants, etc., belong. In a war in which the ostensible use of dead bodies as personal messages has become a trend, the journalists who cover the news on the war occupy a vulnerable position. This chapter explores the work of Javier Valdez, a journalist from Culiacán whose personal and institutional trajectory shows the risks of working as a journalist in contemporary Mexico. When I met Javier Valdez in January 2007, we had breakfast at the San Marcos Hotel, in downtown Culiacán. While we ate, Javier, who has a long experience as journalist, spoke about his work as an urban chronicler and reporter. He also shared with me his aspirations of having his work published in other venues. He had sent his chronicles to editors in Mexico City and had not heard of them. His frustration stemmed not only from the fact that his book was not published, but most of all, because the editors gave no explanation for their rejection of his work. Javier thought that his texts swelled the archives of publishing houses in Mexico City.2 In this essay I analyze approximately 80 Malayerba chronicles by Javier Valdez.3 The chronicles I analyze have been published since current Mexican president Felipe Calderón decided to declare his war on drugs, on December 2006.4 While the main argument in this essay is that Valdez’s weekly chronicles give account of the subtle ways in which violence appears as the backdrop


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of everyday life in Culiacán, it also shows that the devastating effects of the war on drugs paradoxically is what brought Valdez’s work to light. In my visit to Culiacán in 2007, the culichis 5 did not talk about the arrival of the army as a novelty; neither did they see their presence as a threat, although the military contingent announced by Calderón was significant.6 Years of disenchantment with speeches given by previous central governments, which discussed the need to end the illegal drug trafficking, showed that for the Sinaloenses, the army’s latest arrival was seen as a symbolic and repeated empty gesture. Calderón appeared to be just like many of his predecessors who had spoken about the illegal nature of the drug business while simultaneously getting rich off of it. No one ever imagined that what would occur in the coming years would far exceed the traumatic mark left by Operación Cóndor, the last violent incursion of the army in the Sierra Madre Occidental, that took place in the 1970s.7 Felipe Calderón declared his war on drugs right after he took office in 2006, in a climate of general skepticism regarding the legitimacy of the elections. For many the war on drugs was initially used as a political strategy to build consensus on Calderón’s mandate, but after four years of devastating effects, and an outrage of violence exercised and inhumanly exhibited by the armed groups, that explanation is not longer valid or, at least, it is deemed incomplete. The overwhelming number of deaths, the news about executions, the way they are performed and exhibited by different groups in Culiacán as well as in many other cities, has put the country under a state of siege— something that President Calderón did not expect when he declared his war, let alone the Mexican citizens who now feel that the violence unleashed by the government is carried out with absolute impunity and with no limits. The forms of death that this war has produced have led the attorney general’s office to create a new system to classify the victims.8 The dead bodies are also messages that need to be deciphered. The victims are beheaded, tortured, burned in acid; some bear messages on their bodies, have their fingers cut off, and others are even carved into quarters. In some areas of the country the perpetrators can be easily identified by their particular way of killing. Violence is not only the act of assassinating, but it has become a sign, which has to be identified, interpreted, and decoded. Under these circumstances, the reporters who write about the executions, also do a hermeneutic work by interpreting and delivering the messages displayed in each body. This situation has put them at high risk. In spite of the fear this task implies, journalists—consciously or not—have become part


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of the symbolic machinery in this macabre universe of signs.9 Javier Valdez is a long-time reporter from Culiacán, who works for the weekly Riodoce, and writes his chronicles in this stressful context. His stories, however, instead of merely reporting the number of consummated executions, bring us closer to the humane experience of violence. I saw Valdez again, in October 2009, during a workshop, “Violencia y narcotráfico en la ciudades de América Latina. Retos para un Nuevo Periodismo,” organized by the Fundación Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano under the leadership of its brainchild, Cristian Alarcón.10 Since our last meeting, many things had changed, not only in Sinaloa but also in his own work. In almost three years since we last saw each other, Javier was not only about to publish an anthology of his chronicles in a book called Malayerba, with a prologue by Carlos Monsiváis, and a launching in the Guadalajara International Book Fair, but he was also planning to publish Miss Narco, a book about the role of women in the illegal drug trafficking.11 But Javier’s joy for finally having won the recognition he sought for several years in his nation’s capital was overshadowed by the burden and the stress of working as a reporter of the war in Culiacán, and by the pain of witnessing the extreme levels of violence exercised and displayed in his hometown. My experience at the workshop in Mexico City changed dramatically my perception of the work of reporters who plumb the labyrinths of political power and illegal drug trafficking. It also gave me perspective on Valdez’s work. At the meeting, almost every journalist—those living in Mexico were more explicit—complained about isolation and distress as immediate effects of working as reporters. Many live between the pressure of their editors and a violent reality that demands a new language to be described: a reality that challenges them to create new narrative strategies and that is constantly placing them in vulnerable positions. Mexican reporters complained about the indifference and the lack of protection, both on the part of the media (newspapers, radio, or television) for which they work and on the part of the authorities themselves. Some explained that they do not sign some articles as a way of protecting themselves. But they commented that it is usually their own colleagues at their workplaces who serve as informers—revealing the name of the author of every article and the source of the investigation. Listening to these journalists, one gets the impression that they are carrying out their work in a society not unlike those described by George Orwell. In contemporary Mexico, however, while the identity of the informer could be certain, the source of


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terror seems to be everywhere. For many Mexicans it is impossible to know which is the side of the authorities and which one is the side of the narcos. People know that perpetrators are among local police officers, the army officials, and the narcos’ security forces. This is not to say that all these forces are equal. As Diego Osorno, journalist and reporter for the Grupo Milenio, says: Es cierto que el Estado mexicano aún posee valores políticos, éticos y morales que no tienen los cárteles de la droga, pero en la residencia presidencial quieren que todo se vea forzosamente como una lucha del bien contra el mal. . . . El gobierno ha tratado de crear alrededor de “la guerra contra el narco” una fábrica de sueños para respaldar su deficiente e ineficaz realidad en otros asuntos públicos, . . . Sin embargo, la fábrica de sueños de “la guerra contra el narco” no está siendo eficaz: ¿Dónde están los héroes de esta “guerra contra el narco?, ¿por qué no se ven por ningún lado? (316–17)12

The lack of authority turns many into possible perpetrators. And despite the fact that the president declared the war against all narcos, not a single businessman or politician has been arrested or caught with charges. The ones that are dead and in prison are those who occupy the lower ranks in the police force, in the army, and in the drug dealing rings. Only a few capos have fallen and their dead had served to legitimate the government’s actions.13 The majority of the victims belong to the most vulnerable sectors of the population, and several are not even part of the illegal business.14 In this scenario in which truth is blurry, journalistic objectivity is at jeopardy, and it becomes impossible to write a chronicle of a murder or a violent event, without compromising someone in power (it could be local politicians, men from the economic elite, state authorities, narcos, police officers, army officers). In the need to avoid risks, the work of journalists has been reduced to that of accountants: reporting the numbers of dead people, counting the bodies, without delivering the story behind those casualties.

Riodoce My first encounter with Valdez dates back to 2006 when Luis Astorga told me that to understand narcotrafficking in Culiacán, I should read Riodoce, an independent publication whose objective is reporting on narcotrafficking without any political or corporate pressures. So I began to read the Malayerba, without having met Valdez. During our breakfast in Culiacán, he told me the story of the weekly:


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We were in Noroeste, a paper that began in Culiacán and that has the local second highest circulation. But there were differences in terms of the editorial line, so we decided to resign. We talked about the possibility of starting another local paper, a magazine or a weekly that would do investigative journalism. This was in September 2002, and in February of the following year the first issue of Riodoce was published. We chose that name (“twelve rivers”) because in Sinaloa there are eleven rivers, and we are the twelfth, perhaps a brook, a pond, a trickle of water and life and change. We print about 7,000 copies weekly, which practically sell out. The four of us, Ismael Bojórquez, who was the news editor of Noroeste and is now the director of Riodoce, Alejandro Sicairos, Cayetano Osuna, and I are the founding partners and own the majority of shares. But the shareholders include people from all the political parties, others with no affiliation, friends, family, intellectuals, etc. At the beginning we didn’t pay ourselves a salary, and the first time I received anything from Riodoce, it was 500 pesos, (US$ 40 approx.) when we were approaching the end of our first year. The state government during the last term, when Juan Millán Lizárraga was governor, started a boycott against us, and there were businessmen who after having said they were going to buy shares went back on their word, because authorities pressured them. Nevertheless, despite the hoops and harassment and the attempts by the government to destroy us, we continued on. At least the current governor, Jesús Aguilar Padilla, does not bother us and eventually advertised just like other offices. (Valdez, Interview)15

Riodoce continues to publish every Monday with the same circulation; it also has an average of 35,000 visits monthly to its Web site. In September 2009, in the early morning hours, a grenade exploded in the offices of the weekly. Given the hour of the explosion, there were no injuries or deaths. When we met in Mexico City a month after the explosion, Valdez was still reeling from the impact of this violent attack. His remarks during the presentation he delivered at the workshop revolved around the trauma caused by that recent experience. He explained that right after the explosion he and his coworkers at Riodoce decided to print 1,000 more copies of the weekly. They thought that in this way they would respond to their fellow citizens, residents of Culiacán, friends, and family who would buy extra copies to learn what had happened and would in this way, express their solidarity. To Valdez’s (and the Riodoce crew’s) amazement, they were left with all the extra copies. Sales did not increase that week, nor did they do in the weeks that followed. There were not any expressions of solidarity, not even curiosity among culichis. Never, explained Valdez—his voice faltering—had he felt so alone in his profession.


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The objectives that led to the creation of Riodoce, a weekly with atypical characteristics, must be also understood in the general context of threat in which Mexican journalists work nowadays. This explains why the four founders serve as editors, reporters, columnists, and administrators of the weekly. No other person works for Riodoce. This allows them to sign all the articles they publish. The articles, the editorials, the columns, the news are all their responsibility, and only the four of them establish the editorial policy that censors delicate information. This is also a way to keep their unconditional mutual support for the articles they decide to publish. Regarding the grenade, Javier said that the investigations have led nowhere. The members of Riodoce —he told me—kept a close eye on their publications over the last few months, trying to detect which sector of society might have felt threatened by their recently published articles. But they did not find anything noticeably different from what has been coming out since the beginning of the weekly’s circulation. Everyone knows that the authorities’s investigation will not lead anywhere. The journalists of Riodoce knew that despite the adversities, they had to continue working.

Malayerba The stories of Malayerba are real; although I have seen them, I disguise them to throw people off, for my safety and that of the person who tells them to me. Many times I bump into them in the street, at work, when I am reporting, but others arrive through readers, through people that say to me on the street, hey! I have a Malayerba for you, and I look into it, and it turns out to be true. I always get nervous when I start a new one . . . although I avoid the obvious information, people, readers, especially on the website, realize who I write about, and about what. (Valdez, Interview)

Each Malayerba has about 3,400 characters. From a literary perspective, the chronicles maintain the structure of the short story in which, as one of its greatest architects defines it: “All high excitements are necessarily transient.” Edgar Allan Poe, in his essay about the short story, talks about its brevity, totality, unity of plot, mystery, and the philosophy of its composition as indispensable elements of its beauty. This, for Poe, makes a short story only comparable to a poem (30). Valdez’s chronicles contain these elements: unity of plot, totality, and mystery. His characters are lovers in a suicidal flight who are trapped by their enemies. They are killers who kill as a way of life;


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they are farmers who respond to violence with violence; girls who fall in love with the wrong men; police officers who take bribes with the same passivity that they take lives; and soldiers who did not comply with orders. They are all ordinary people, struggling against the current situation in Culiacán, surviving a war that will not put an end to the presence of narcos and that is not leading the country to a better place. The immediate effect of the Malayerba is that the allegedly senseless everyday violence in Sinaloa shows its significance. And although it seems paradoxical to read the Malayerba as simple units of beauty, every story in its own way is. Valdez is a storyteller who knows how to capture this spark of collective reality to make it his own and then return it to its place of origin. Thus the name of his column, Malayerba (bad weed), is both suggestive and appropriate. Weeds grow everywhere without supervision. So do these Malayerbas, Valdez seems to say, because everyone recognizes him or herself or recognizes a friend, a relative, or a friend’s acquaintance in these stories. They reproduce themselves by word of mouth. They are also short descriptions of Culiacán. A place where everyone has a relative, a friend, someone they know who participated in the illegal business: an old classmate, a former boyfriend, or an old domestic worker. In this universe of 800,000 inhabitants, no death is anonymous, despite the terror of claiming a body or the fear of mourning a loss.16 In his nostalgic evocation of storytellers, Walter Benjamin affirms that experience shared via word of mouth has been the source for the greatest stories. The best writers are those whose words follow closely the oral versions of the stories (84). That is what Valdez does using the vernacular expressions—ordinary culichi—in his chronicles, recreating the dramas of ordinary people’s lives in the simple language of everyday life. Valdez, however, creates works of fiction that originate from cruel realities only to come back as texts, precisely for the reality they describe. In the process of this transformation, Valdez shows other sides of violence, some that are seldom visible. The narratives are moving; they challenge us readers in unexpected ways, because although they put into common words different acts of violence, they also bring us closer to the experience of death and to the dead ones, in subtle and sometimes paradoxical ways. From a literary point of view, the stories show a bold and risky undertaking that demands accuracy and precision. These characteristics have nothing to do with objectivity but rather with the skill of describing cruel realities,


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sinister characters, and events of extreme violence, while showing their human side, the suffering involved, and the inestimable social toll of the war. It would be difficult to continue this analysis of the Malayerba without giving the reader at least an overview of the descriptions. I include three below, which show a few of the characters. La esclavita Qué tiempos aquellos en los que su hermano era tranquilo. No dejó de ser noble y solidario. Tampoco generoso, jovial y divertido. Pero se echó un chapuzón en las arenas movedizas del narco. Y nunca salió. Ni siquiera pudo. No se dio cuenta de que la vida le pasaba enfrente. Y también la muerte: con la guadaña en alto. Fueron meses. Cinco o seis bastaron. El ejemplo del padre, tal vez. Que andaba en la movida y alcanzó la riqueza rápidamente. Y así murió. De un infarto. (January 2007) The little slave Those were the days in which his brother was calm. He never failed to be noble and supportive. Nor generous, jovial, and fun. But he took a dip in the quicksand of drug trafficking. And never got out. He couldn’t. He did not realize that life was passing him by. And also death: with the scythe raised. It was months. Five or six were enough. The father’s example, perhaps. Who was on the move and quickly rose to wealth. And so he died. Of a heart attack. La venganza del poeta El pleito empezó con palabras. Pasó hirviente a los gritos, los reclamos, las palabras aventadas como piedras. Era una fiesta. Una peda, más bien. La cerveza estaba disponible en forma de caguama. Salchichas, papitas y cacahuates se habían agotado. Festejaban la inauguración de una exposición de escultura. El poeta era uno de los asistentes y había pintores, escritores y demás fauna del mundillo cultural de la ciudad. Por una de las chavas habían llegado dos tipos. Fachada de buchones badiraguatenses: camisa de seda con el rostro de Malverde estampado en la espalda, huaraches de cuatro puntadas y devoradores de sílabas y del líquido de los botes de aluminio. (n.d.) Revenge of the poet The fight started with words. It boiled up to shouting, crying, winnowed words like stones. It was a party. A drunken bash, rather. The beer flowed. Sausages, chips and peanuts were gone.


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They were celebrating the opening of a sculpture exhibition. The poet was in attendance and there were painters, writers and other personalities from the city’s cultural scene. Two guys who were after one of the girls, arrived. The looks of wealthy thieves from Badiraguato: silk shirts with Malverde’s face printed on the back, sandals with four stitches and devourers of syllables and the liquid of aluminum cans. No disparen Él estacionaba el carro. Vio a los niños de lejos. Se alegró. Las risas y los gritos. Ese balón rodando. Los vecinos en las sillas y otros sentados al borde de las banquetas. Unos tomaban café. Otros refresco. Unos platicaban. Otros sólo observaban. La calle inundada. El movimiento. Los ruidos y juegos. Todo eso lo aliviaba. Le restaba peso. Borraba aunque sea un poco las arrugas de la frente. Distendía los músculos, los pliegues en el entrecejo. . . . Subieron las armas a nivel del pecho y le apuntaron. Cortando cartucho se acercaron más y más y más. Sin muecas ni palabras ni ademanes. Y cuando los tuvo cerca, al fin, con los dedos en los gatillos, reaccionó. Aquí no, por favor. No disparen. Hay niños, están mis hijos. Vámonos. Llévenme. (January 23, 2009) Don’t shoot He parked the car. He saw the children from afar. He was glad. The laughter and shouting. That ball rolling. Neighbors in their chairs and others sitting on the edge of the sidewalk. Some drank coffee. Others fruit juice. Some talked. Others just watched. The street flooded. The movement. The noise and games. All this made him feel relieved. Took the weight off. Erased a few of the wrinkles on his forehead. Muscles relaxed, the crease between the eyebrows. . . . They raised the weapon to chest level and pointed. Cocking the gun they came closer and closer and closer. Without faces or words or gestures. And when he had them close at last, with fingers on the triggers, he reacted. Not here, please. Don’t shoot. There are children here, my children. Let’s go. Take me.

In the universe of representations of illegal drug trafficking and its ominous violence, the dilemma, for some reporters at least, is how to present the news without reproducing the same perceptions of crime and criminals that dominate the political and official media discourses. This requires reporters to enter into the symbolic universes of those who are much closer to the values driving the drug business.17 Valdez takes this challenge. The crossroads at which he stands makes it more complicated to handle the tension


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between the pressure to inform (write a headline news) and the need to narrate. In his reflections concerning the dichotomy between storytelling and informing, Benjamin found a limited space for art and literature in the modern era. For the German philosopher, informing and narrating became incompatible when the shape of modern life made the former ways of approaching storytelling no longer useful. For Benjamin, the tension between narrating and informing was fundamentally established by the new value of experience. For never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power. A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath those clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body. (84)18

For Benjamin, the height of the mechanical reproduction of art leaves little room for the narrator because the devaluation of experience renders his voice obsolete. In Mexico’s current context, however, we can follow Benjamin’s line of thinking: “That human body detained in this field of torrential forces and destructive explosions” is picked up by the press as a message, a sign in the mist of the war. And it is integrated into the world of representations not as the subject of a narrative, of a story, but as a number: as the object of headline news. The bodies appear wrapped in blankets, carved up, mutilated, decapitated. Each one of these forms of deaths reveals the assassin, as the bodies carry a message, which, at the same time, is branded by a prefix that defines the war: the bodies become narco-messages. The body is the direct object of this massive reproduction of death in which symbolism and spectacle have become as important—if not more so—as the crimes themselves. Those dead bodies are what society should see so that the war is effective. Only insofar as society recognizes the narcotics trade as a common threat (in which the enemy is not easily recognized), this war retains its political legitimacy. The bodies, of course, do not have any story other than the deaths they suffered, which also marks them as guilty, or at least, as suspicious. That is what makes them different from us viewers and readers who consider ourselves innocent, and thus the ones who deserve to live. Fear as political device19 also has the perverse effect of making us indifferent to death, because these unrelated deaths are, in this macabre scheme, necessary


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for our survival. This is perhaps one of the most challenging ethical effects of Foucault’s description of biopolitics.20 Once the possibility of solidarity is gone, violence is almost seen as a necessary evil. In response, reclaiming the role of narrators to restore humanity—to the dead bodies in the street, the missing men and women, and those rotting in the morgues because their families are afraid to pick them up—seems to be a brazen demand. In a way, it is. Not because it’s not important to recover the stories, to the contrary, because it is not easy to find people sensitive enough to recognize the stories of the people. Moreover, it is even more difficult to find reporters brave enough to write about those lives and return some legible sense to those otherwise misunderstood cruel destinies. That is what Javier Valdez accomplishes every Monday in his Malayerba.

Habitus of Violence When Norbert Elias wrote The Civilizing Process, he wanted to document how the regulation of our instinctive and emotional life becomes something stable through mechanisms of self-control that develop during a long historical process. Elias notes that this process was not planned or intentional, nor was it the result of a transformation by a random sequence of chaotic changes. It is simple enough: plans and actions, the emotional and the rational impulses of individual people, constantly interweave in a friendly or hostile way. This basic tissue resulting from many single plans and actions of men can give rise to changes and patterns that no individual person has planned or created. From this interdependence of people arises an order sui generis, an order more compelling and stronger than the will and reason of the individual people composing it. It is this order of interweaving human impulses and strivings, this social order, which determines the course of historical change: it underlies the civilizing process. (444, emphasis in the original)

The basic fabric described by Elias can be viewed as the order sui generis established by violence. Valdez’s stories are situated in the gap that exists between practices and structures, and show a series of events, values, and mechanisms by which individuals act not as planned nor with intention, but neither in a chaotic and unstructured fashion. It is not that the chronicle represents a record of a paradoxical process of decivilization by which men and women claim the privilege of using violence to confront a government that apparently has neither the capacity nor the will to prevent it. No. What I argue is that the


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chronicles evince that institutions operate in much more ambiguous ways and that the daily actions of the subjects reflect this opacity. As narratives of daily life, the chronicles do not explain or give account of a “process” in the teleological sense. Instead, they summon readers to participate, collaborate, and interpret them so that violence is no longer seen as a series of isolated acts, as events that interrupt an otherwise peaceful daily existence in which the drug dealers are the only culprits and the only ones who add the total anonymous dead bodies. Violence is the common backdrop that paralyzes and dehumanizes common people: it is also the silent acceptance of the death of others to prevent ours, it is also the fear of dying. This explains the lack of expressions of solidarity with the journalists of Riodoce after the grenade explosion. It could be argued, then, that chronicles narrate the habitus of violence. That which Bourdieu defines as [a system of] durable, transportable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them. (53)21

Perhaps for that reason the most disturbing aspect of the stories is how violence seems so natural and yet it is dramatized in the way the characters relate to one another, and to their environment. Sometimes Valdez translates this reality into a sentimental—almost tear-jerking—language. In others the technical jargon and reporting style give a distant view of the events and the characters. All of them, however, keep the recurring rhythm of the vernacular cadence. There are even some stories whose language appears to be less emotionally driven and more cynical. One might think that these differences emerge with the passage of time, that cynicism appears more frequently in the later chronicles, but that is not the case. All of the elements vary from Monday to Monday, as if the stories were a weekly struggle over who would play the role of witness, victim, family member, authority, executioner, and what does violence mean for each of them. The undercurrent in the Malayerba, however, is the ease with which daily practices become norms, prescriptions, and even destinies. It is difficult to approach this body of literature without conceptualizing its content as a catalog of historical facts about a period of


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time, similar to legal documents, official correspondence, or common newspaper articles. But the chronicles, although realistic, are in fact literary works. Moreover, I argue that it is precisely the fictionalization of reality that allows them to become expressions of a habitus of violence. The stories do not explain their protagonists, nor do they accuse or justify them; they show how their live stories are product of that everyday violence. It is the art of making fiction about the cruel reality lived in Culiacán that allows Valdez to write as a journalist. Otherwise this reality would swallow him, as it has swallowed and killed many of his professional colleagues.22

The Perverse Virtues of the Drug Culture I cannot conclude without returning to its various moments that made possible the writing of this essay. The first moment is January 2007, when Javier Valdez shared with sadness his frustrating search for a publisher. The second moment is the description of that unique position occupied by Culiacán since Felipe Calderón sent the army to Sinaloa in January 2007. The third one is our meeting in 2009, when I heard Valdez’s euphoric news about his book publication and its launching at the Guadalajara International Book Fair the following November. Perhaps the sequence of these moments show how drug trafficking had to become a fashionable topic for writers like Valdez to move from anonymity to fame; from Culiacán to Mexico City through the rite of passage of the fair in Guadalajara. In the world of art, and of literature in particular, this reality has its own meaning. The drug-trafficking formula has certainly opened the doors for previously ignored writers, such as Valdez, who have been writing for years but whose stories about narcos were not attractive. Only now when the war is spread in all Mexico, publishing houses show interest in authors like him and make them available for us to read. When browsing titles on narcotrafficking in Mexico, we might have to read a lot of other loathsome chronicles and literature written to satisfy a demand, written without soul and perhaps, without running risks, but eventually we will find a well-crafted prose. As Jorge Volpi says: El arte no podía escapar a esta tendencia: más allá de la popularidad de los narcocorridos, la “literatura del narco” se ha convertido en el nuevo paradigma de la literatura latinoamericana (o al menos mexicana y colombiana): donde antes había dictadores y guerrilleros, ahora hay capos y policías corruptos; y, donde antes prevalecía el realismo


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mágico, ha surgido un hiperrealismo fascinado con retratar los usos y costumbres de estos nuevos antihéroes. (2009)23

The important thing is to continue reading critically, because, paraphrasing a wise remark by Élmer Mendoza: “Sinaloa (and Mexico) is bigger than its troubles.”24 The meeting of journalists in Mexico City made me write these pages with a certain urgency. The fear I sensed among the young reporters contrasted with the skepticism among the more seasoned reporters. The fleeting separation between fiction and chronicle appeared to me to be the place where fear and skepticism could meet. The fear of the youngest journalists was not only of the cruelty of narcos but that of the powerful (local authorities, politicians, economic elites). And the skepticism of the elders was not a lack of ideals, but rather incredulity in the face of the official rhetoric around the war on drugs. The violence of the current war on drugs demands a diversity of perspectives, theoretical analyses, and most of all, it demands human solidarity, to be deeply understood. We all need a new language to name it. Valdez concluded his remarks, at the Rufino Tamayo Museum, in poignant fashion. He read a chronicle written in May 2008. With a section of this chronicle I conclude this analysis: Culiacán tiene día soleado pero no lo parece: las nubes son de plomo, de material hirviente e hiriente, y llueven proyectiles. Nublan la bóveda celeste culichi. El saldo en apenas una semana y media es de cerca de 40 ejecuciones, entre ellas las de una decena de agentes locales y federales, uno de ellos decapitado, cuatro reporteros agredidos por uniformados y más de diez narcomensajes colocados en diferentes puntos de la ciudad. Es la guerra, el terror. La sicosis vistiendo el primaveral cielo culichi, asolando las calles, metiendo candela en los rincones, las casas, los comercios, las plazuelas. El miedo como forma de vida: oíste la balacera, la de anoche, pregunta una señora a otra, frente a unos niños que parecen sus nietos. Chupan bolas de nieve, en el interior de un establecimiento de helados y paletas. Hay arrugas en esas voces, intersticios del pavor en ese andar, en las miradas, en los cruceros de automóviles, mientras se espera el turno en el semáforo. Los agentes no quieren circular en sus patrullas y muchos de ellos, adscritos a áreas de investigación, se trasladan en camiones del servicio de transporte colectivo. Es para despistar, camuflarse, dicen.


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Los padres no quieren que sus hijos jóvenes anden cotorreando en los centros nocturnos. Ya no. No hay permisos para llegar a casa de madrugada. Nada de recorrer el malecón nuevo los sábados y domingos. El miedo se respira, se habla y se transpira. Nadie quiere toparse con una patrulla de alguna corporación policiaca en el carril de junto. Ni madres, no vaya a ser que nos toque. Guadalupe Pulido, una joven madre de familia, evitó llegar a una carreta de tacos cercana a su casa. Tenía hambre. Las once de la mañana no es buena hora para desayunar. Pero vio ahí a unos agentes comiendo. Mejor no, dijo, en silencio, y se retiró. Apenas una noche antes, en la plazuela Rosales, frente al edificio central de la Universidad Autónoma de Sinaloa, tronaron cuetes. Era el inicio del festival universitario, por los 135 años de la casa de estudios. Todos escucharon las detonaciones y algunos se echaron al suelo. La ciudad huele mal: a muerto y a pavor. El miedo está fermentado y mata, oxida, envenena y enclaustra. Las puertas y ventanas de las casas cierran temprano. Las cortinas de acero de los negocios lucen encadenadas, con candados. Las luces han sido apagadas. Las llamadas telefónicas se multiplican en los celulares, las oficinas, las casas y las centrales de las corporaciones de seguridad: que colocaron una bomba en el mercado Garmendia, que van a volar el Colegio de Bachilleres, que el turno es para un colegio privado ubicado por el malecón viejo, que mataron a dos ministeriales cerca del río. Pero todo es falsa alarma. Y los timbres suenan y suenan y suenan. El miedo no tiene fin. Lo copa todo. Los ciudadanos comunes se mueven entre dos frentes. De un lado el ejército y sus hummer artilladas. Del otro lado los dueños de los gatillos y cañones oscuros, de esos que escupen fuego. Y en medio la gente: no hay para dónde hacerse. Un joven quiere salir a caminar. Voy aquí cerca, al parquecito, a hacer ejercicio. Ella, su esposa, lo mira y se pone seria. Órale pues, le contesta. Y le advierte, con un comentario que quisieran tomar como juego: llévate un chaleco antibalas. Él sonríe. Sabe que lo dijo de broma. Pero dentro, muy dentro, también sabe que es la sicosis. Broma macabra. Y la ciudad sigue despertando, temiendo no hacerlo. Hay mantas nuevas con nuevos narcomensajes. Nuevo saldo de ejecutados, levantados. Nuevos números del terror, ese que no se puede medir. Menos en una ciudad con cielo gris, de plomo, en la que llueven balas. (May 2008) It is a sunny day in Culiacán, but it doesn’t look like it: the clouds are made of lead—a boiling material—and missiles rain down. The Culichi’s horizon is cloudy.


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The toll in just a week and a half averages about 40 executions, among them a dozen local and federal agents, one of them beheaded, four reporters assaulted by soldiers and more than ten narco-messages placed in different parts of the city. It is the war, the terror. The psychosis covers the culichi spring sky, ravaging the streets, starting fires in the corners, houses, shops and the plazas. Fear as a way of life: you heard the shooting, the one last night, one lady asks another, in front of children who look like their grandchildren. They suck on snowballs inside an ice cream shop. There are wrinkles in those voices, in the interstices of dread walking, in the looks, in the intersections, while waiting their turn at the light. Agents do not want to drive their patrol cars and many of them, assigned to investigations, move about in collective transportation vehicles. It is to mislead, camouflage, they say. Parents do not want their teenagers to hang out at night. Not anymore. No one has permission to come home at dawn. Not to visit the new boardwalk on Saturdays and Sundays. Fear breathes, speaks and exhales. Nobody wants to encounter a patrol of any police in the next lane. Not even mothers, lest it be that we touch. Guadalupe Pulido, a young mother, avoided the taco wagon near her home. She was hungry. Eleven o’clock in the morning is not a good time for breakfast. But she saw some officers eating there. Better not, she said, quietly, and left. Just one night earlier in Rosales Square, in front of the central building of the Autonomous University of Sinaloa, fireworks thundered. It was the beginning of the academic festival celebrating 135 years of the university. All heard the gunshots and some fell to the ground. The city smells bad, of death and dread. Fear is fermenting and it kills, oxidizes, poisons, and cloisters. The doors and windows of the houses close early. The stores’ steel curtains are chained with padlocks. The lights have been turned off. Calls multiply in the mobile phones, offices, homes and offices of corporate security: that they planted a bomb in the Garmendia market, that they are going to blow up the high school, that now it’s the turn for a private school located by the old pier, that they killed two cabinet members near the river. But it is a false alarm. And the bells ring and ring and ring. The fear is endless. It consumes everything. Ordinary citizens move between two fronts. On one side stand the army and its artillery-armed hummers. On the other stand the owners of the trigger and dark canons, the kind that spit fire. And in the middle are the people, with nowhere to go.


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A guy wants to go for a walk. I’m going close by, to the park, to exercise. She, his wife, gives him a serious look. Fine, then, she replies. And she warns him with a comment they wish were a joke: take a bulletproof vest. He smiles. He knows she said it kiddingly. But inside, deep inside, he also knows that it is the psychosis. A macabre joke. And the city continues to wake up, afraid not to. There are new blankets with new narco-messages. A new toll of executed, lifted. New amounts of terror that cannot be measured. Except in a city with the gray sky, of lead, where it rains bullets.

Translated by Pamela Neumann with the author

Notes 1 “14 periodistas asesinados en México.” 2. This work is part of a broader research, which is a comparative analysis of the representation of the traffic of illegal drugs in Medellin (Colombia) and Culiacán (Mexico). The book, tentatively entitled Fictions of Drugs, combines textual analysis, archival research, and ethnographic observations in order to understand the cultural fields where these works were produced. I met Valdez in my first visit to Culiacán, and our first conversation and following encounters gave me a broad perspective of the impact the narcotics trade has within the local cultural field. 3. “Malayerba” is the name of Javier Valdez column in the weekly newspaper Riodoce. For this analysis I read them weekly on the Web. By the time I finished this article, however, some of the chronicles appeared in an anthology prepared by the author and published by Jus in a book called Malayerba. Crónicas del narco (2010). 4. Calderon’s declarations during his inauguration are quoted by Osorno (2009). At the beginning of December 2006, Calderon established that all the institutions of security would be “vitales para recuperar la fortaleza del Estado y la convivencia social.” He also stated: “Sé que reestablecer la seguridad no será fácil ni rápido, que tomará tiempo, que costará mucho dinero, e incluso, y por desgracia, vidas humanas” (310). (I know that it will neither be easy nor fast reestablishing security, it will take time, it will cost a lot of money and, unfortunately even human lives.) 5. Name given to the people born in Culiacán, capital of the state of Sinaloa. 6. “Suman 9 mil 54 los efectivos militares en Chihuahua Durango y Sinaloa.” 7. Operación Cóndor began in Mexico in November 1975, although it was carried out in Sinaloa only until 1977. According to Luis Astorga (2006), this was the biggest antidrugs campaign ever carried out in the region, until the current war on drugs.


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8. Not only do they have to make distinctions between crimes related to the traffic illicit drugs and other kind of crimes, and they have to classify its victims (i.e., police officers, army officials, narcos, innocent civilians), but they also have to describe the grotesque kinds assassinations. See, “PGR y CISEN aclaran ‘diferencia’ en la cifra de muertos por la violencia.” 9. As a response to this situation, in a public ceremony at the National Museum of Anthropology, more than 715 media organizations agreed to establish editorial criteria to cover the news on narcos. The initiative aims to protect journalists, and prevent an involuntary participation in the distribution of the narco’s messages. See “Firman medios acuerdo contra la violencia.” 10. The Fundación Nuevo Perdiodismo Iberoamericano was funded by Gabriel García Márquez in 1995; among its distinguished professors are Alma Guillermoprieto, John Lee Anderson, late Richard Kapuchinsky, and late Tomás Eloy Martínez. 11. This book granted Valdez a nomination for best book in the “Semana Negra,” an event organized by Paco Ignacio Taibo II to celebrate novelnoir writers; it takes place in Gijón, Spain, every year. 12. It is true that the Mexican state still possesses political, ethical, and moral values that the drug cartels do not, but in the presidential house they want it to seem like it is purely a struggle of good against evil, . . . The government has tried to create around this “war against drugs” a dream factory in order to draw attention away from its deficiencies in other areas . . . However, the dream factory of this “war against drugs” is unsuccessful: Where are the heroes of the “war against drugs,” why don’t we see them anywhere? (Our translation) 13. An example is the case of Arturo Beltrán Leyva, whose capture and assassination had an important repercussion because they happened in December 16, 2009, right before Christmas holidays. 14. When reading Riodoce every week, it is not uncommon to find news of innocent people killed, especially those living in the rural areas of northern states such as Sinaloa. 15. This and other references to Valdez’s words are taken from our interviews, the translation is ours. 16. Valdez´s report on Arturo Beltrán Leyva’s funeral is an insightful description of the absence of men in funerals. The fear of being linked to the deceased (in this case the Boss) prevents men and women from attending funerals. The fear of attending a loved one´s funeral is becoming more and more common. See “Funeral de miedo” in Riodoce, December 21, 2009. 17. The narratives closest to the universe of narcos are the “narcocorridos.” There are several authors who have studied corridos thoroughly. Besides Astorga (1994), see Ramírez-Pimienta (2004), Valenzuela, and (2002) Wald (2002), among others..


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18. Benjamin’s ideas have been applied to the analysis of Latin American culture by Hermann Herlinghaus. See in particular: “Desafiar a Walter Benjamin desde América Latina,” in Moraña, ed. 157–68. 19. See especially: Rossana Reguillo, “La construcción social del miedo,” in Rotker, ed. 185–201. 20. “Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are movilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital” (Foucault, 137). 21. The “habitus is inextricably linked with imprecision and ambiguity” because it obeys a “practical logic, that is, that of vagueness and approximation that defines the relationship with the ordinary world” and that is the logic to the degree to which the logical deviates from the practical.” Quoted in Loïc Wacquant (2005). 22. In 2009, 16 journalists were assassinated and not one of their cases was investigated. 23. Art could not escape this tendency: beyond the popularity of the narcocorridos, the “narconarrative or literature of narcotrafficking” has become a new paradigm of Latin American literature (or at least Mexican and Colombian). Where before there were dictators and guerrillas, now there are gangsters and corrupt police, and where before a certain magic realism prevailed, now there is a hyperrealism fascinated with portraying the manners and customs of these new antiheroes. 24. These words are the epigraph that Mendoza wrote in Alejandro Almazán’s novel Entre perros (2009).

References “14 periodistas asesinados en México durante 2010.” wradio.com.mx. WRadio [Mexico], September 16, 2010. Web. Almazán, Alejandro. Entre perros. Mexico: Random House Mondadori, 2009. Print. Astorga, Luis. El siglo de las drogas. Mexico, Plaza y Janés: 2006. Print. ———. La mitología del narcotraficante en México. Mexico: Plaza y Janés, 1994. Print. Benjamin, Walter. “The Story Teller. Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov.” In Illuminations. Essays and Reflections, 83–109. New York: Schocken Books. 1969. Print. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993. Print. ———. The Logic of Practice. Stanford, CA: Stanford U. P., 1990. Print. Elias, Norbert. The Civilizing Process. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. Print. « Firman medios acuerdos contra la violencia.» www.eluniversal [Mexico]. March, 24, 2011. Web


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Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Vol. I. Transl. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books.1988. Print. Moraña, Mabel, ed. Espacio Urbano. Comunicación y violencia en América Latina. Pittsburgh, Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, 2002. Print. Osorno, Diego. El Cartel de Sinaloa. Una historia del uso político del narco. Mexico: Random House Mondadori, 2009. Print. “PGR y CISEN aclaran “diferencia” en la cifra de muertos por la violencia”. CNN. [Mexico] August 5, 2010. Web. Poe, Edgar Alan. “El arte del cuento.” In Cuentos de Edgar A. Poe, ed. Alberto Cedrón. Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, 1973. Print. Ramírez-Pimienta, Juan José. “Del corrido de narcotraficante al narcocorrido: Orígenes y desarrollo del canto a los traficantes.” Studies in Latin American Popular Culture 23 (2004): 21–41. Print. Rotker, Susana ed. Ciudadanías del miedo. Caracas: Editorial Nueva Sociedad, 2000. “Suman 9 mil, 54 los efectivos militares en Chihuahua, Durango y Sinaloa.” www.jornada.unam. [Mexico] January 22, 2007. Web. Valdez, Javier. “Culiacán tiene día soleado . . . ” Riodoce [Culiacán], May 2008. Print. ———. “La esclavita.” Riodoce [Culiacán], January 2007. Print. ———. “La venganza del poeta.” Riodoce [Culiacán], n.d. Print. ———. “No disparen.” Riodoce [Culiacán] January 23, 2009. Print. ———. Personal interview. January 2007 and October, 2009. “Ya no solo se mata. Se impone el terror.” www.riodoce.com.mx. Riodoce [Mexico] July 8, 2008. Web Valenzuela, Juan Manuel. Jefe de jefes. Corridos y Narcocultura en México. Barcelona: Tusquets, 2002. Print. Volpi, Jorge. “Cruzar La Frontera.” Milenio Online, October 24, 2009. Web. Wacquant, Loïc. “Habitus.” In International Encyclopedia of Economic Sociology, ed. Jens Beckertand Milan Zafirovski, 315–19. London: Routledge, 2005. Print. Wald, Elijah. Narcocorridos. New York: Harper Collins, 2002. Print.


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A n A est h et ic E v e n t : R ic a r do Wi esse’s C a n t u ta s a n d Pol i t ic a l Viol e nc e i n P e ru Víctor Vich

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he story may be well-known, but it is worth the effort to rehearse it once more: the self-coup d’état took place on April 5, 1992. On this date, the pact between Alberto Fujimori and Vladimiro Montesinos was signed, and the militarized state began to display the characteristics that would result in what we would all see several years later. At this time, Sendero Luminoso had a strong presence in Lima, and on June 16, we bore witness to the Tarata Street bombing in the heart of Miraflores. For an illegitimate government such as that one, the situation was delicate. Then, an agreement was reached to radicalize the “dirty war” by a strategy inherited from the worst years of the 1980s, that is during Fernando Belaúnde Terry’s administration: the violence of Sendero Luminoso was to be met by even greater statesponsored terrorism. This is why the next day, between the night of June 17 and the morning of June 18, a commando from the “Colina Group” lead by Captain Martín Rivas entered the Enrique Guzmán y Valle National Education University (known as “La Cantuta,” for the flowers of the same name that flourish there) and detained nine students and one professor. They killed them all that same night. An investigation carried out by Sí magazine lead to the discovery of some of the bodies in the hills of Cieneguilla one year later. The scandal destabilized the Peruvian political scene for quite a while—and only ended in 2009 with Fujimori’s incarceration—but on June 4, 1995, after three o’clock in the morning, the government once more took decisive and


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obscene action: it approved an amnesty law for all military officers accused of having violated human rights.1 How did Peruvian society respond to such acts? What was the position of the citizens faced with such political degradation? How could the sense of life be restored in the middle of a context scarred by such violence and loss of significance? This essay comments one answer, perhaps one of the most beautiful.2 I am referring to Ricardo Wiesse’s artistic performance on the hills of Cieneguilla, a few days after the amnesty law left the door open to more state crimes. His project consisted of drawing ten cantutas at the foot of the clandestine graves with the aid of a large cardboard stencil and red powder (figure 8.1). Six people participated in the project: Ricardo Wiesse, Augusto Rebagliati, Carlos Vallenas, Jorge Gutiérrez, Ronnie Béjar, and Herman Schwarz. They arrived in Cieneguilla at four o’clock in the afternoon. Days before, Wiesse had scouted out the location and, while doing so, was stopped by the authorities and advised that no one was allowed on the property. Consequently, the group opted not to park their truck on site and the driver kept a safe distance; he would pick them up a few hours later. However, during the time it took to complete the project all seemed calm. Neither the police nor anyone affiliated with the Armed Forces appeared. Wiesse drew on the side of the small mountain and Herman Schwarz (who joined the group at the last minute) took a series of wonderful photographs.

Figure 8.1

Ricardo Wiesse at work on the Cantutas


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Ricardo Wiesse is well-known in Peru as an artist who has always tried to link landscape with historical memory, and who has let the landscape become saturated with a particular culture in its material characteristics and symbolic density. Wiesse has painted the desert of the Peruvian coast from an abstract perspective, taking in as the principal source of influence pre-Hispanic Peruvian art, especially that from the Palpa and Nazca geoglyphs: lines and colors moving at random, but that somehow, in countless ways, seek to reach a resolution. His paintings are always fragmented and austere: broken grooves that manage to bring together multiple elements.3 But Wiesse has been a painter interested in affecting the urban landscape as well; an artist who has decided to imprint his work on the city in order to construct new ideas of community. The ceramic mural of the Vía Expresa (today deteriorated and unimportant to the local government), that of the Barranco jetties, and that of Santa María beach, but especially the great but unfinished project of the San Cristóbal mountain, reveal the artist’s constant desire to interrupt typical forms of seeing and to seduce the inhabitants through new politics of perception. As Veena Das (2003) points out, “naming” political violence is especially challenging. By naming violence, we must produce something different from it, we must attempt to construct a language that symbolizes violence and at the same time establishes a new representation, one that should be situated beyond the traditional codes of understanding. I believe Wiesse’s performance had such a purpose in mind. In this regard, it is important to note that in the 1995 Peru, all forms of representation had been “hijacked” by the dictatorship and all attempts to name violence were systematically censured. The policies of Fujimori and Montesinos were forcibly implemented by some of the major media outlets that denigrated everything they broadcasted. I n addition, the political discussion was destined to fail, and so it did without leaving any chance for a truly democratic dialogue.4 It was then necessary to intervene in some other way. As shown in figure 8.2, the sinister place was printed in color and the beauty and composition were not uniform; the cantutas were inscribed on the materiality of the landscape but at the same time attempted to transform it. Contemporary art, as it is known, does not refer to the anxiety of producing an object but rather to the wish of occupying a place. The cantutas, in effect, were placed in different positions, as if the artist had wanted to cast them over the entire landscape. The alternating movements (some were placed facing upward,


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Figure 8.2

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The cantutas inscribed on the landscape.

others downward, some to either side) intended to overarch aesthetic interest: ten tombs, ten different positions, ten identical flowers, but each one individualized by its intimate positioning.5 In such a way, the artist’s action “revealed” the sacred dimension of this place. These cantutas are actually tombs, and with them Wiesse intended to honor the dead, and to make visible something hidden, that is, to recuperate collective memory in a country traumatized by violence and impunity. The objective was to reveal the buried bodies and construct for them a proper burial. From that point of view, the cantutas were also a form of symbolic closure: as inscription, writing, and drawing, they seek to repay a debt and found a utopia. The cantutas repair, correct, and neutralize a desecration, while sacralizing those lives violated by power. From this perspective, the artist has not only produced an “object”; he has produced an act. The photos reveal that the drawing was not the only relevant event; also of interest is its human staging, its dialogue with history, the ethical act of completing this drawing, on the side of the mountain, in that particular moment. Thus, these cantutas were the agents of a mute aesthetic where silence does not name vacuity, but rather, above all else, a presence that aspired to disturb with the intensity of its questions: Why were they killed and hidden? What was happening in Peru? Were there other murders?


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The point I want to make is that these drawings made the trauma visible while at the same time founding a new language. That is, faced with the use of the mountains as a dump for human bodies, faced with the brutality of the state, the aesthetic shift, to which these drawings committed, was a resounding method of political response. In other words, when faced with the horror of violence, these cantutas were an attempt to produce a new representation of social life. They attempted, in effect, to introduce color to the arid landscape, beauty to the tomb, to make visible that which is invisible and to introduce history and beauty as agents capable of restoring social connectivity amid state and civil degradation. Nevertheless, in this case, beauty is not a disinterested and autistic object; it is, rather, an event that leads to a rupture: something that is crystallized in a completely new way—a characteristic that is emphasized, a method of display—and that aspired to promote the need for adopting a new perspective. In this sense, these drawings are not only a “work of art.” They are also a mechanism for political subjectivity, that is, a way of appealing to culture as a way to encourage new responses to horror. These cantutas are identified with history (they recover the ancient Andean flowers) and attempt to resignify them in a particular context. As one might expect, the cantuta (cantua buxifolia) is not just any flower, but the most representative flower of the Andean landscape. Its presence in Andean iconography is constant, and it is prominent in many ancient Q’ero vases used by the Incas during ritual ceremonies. Garcilaso de la Vega, for example, describes it on two occasions as “very beautiful in form and color” (6:6), because they were considered an almost sacred object, destined to adorn the principal roads of the Empire. Even today, some Andean communities utilize the cantutas in offerings for various rituals.6 Today Badiou (2001) believes in the urgency of affirming once and again certain truths regarding different orders of knowledge and human experience. In his approach, mathematics, politics, art, and love are spaces from where we can access truth, the one that he defines as a kind of exception that generates an event. An event “appears” and reorganizes experience, transforming the ways of feeling and thinking. An event makes us political subjects, in the measure that it promotes a new positioning before the world, and subverts the existing hegemony. In other words: in the mountains of Cieneguilla, the artist introduced the notion of cultural history and of aesthetic beauty as an attempt to affirm a truth that had to be restored. In this case,


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however, beauty—one of the faces of truth, or a density of meanings, as Lotman (1988) put it—is subversive not only because it mixes up long-standing or deeply rooted perspectives but also for its historical pertinence. These cantutas are beautiful, they are “true,” and they are “ethical.” They do not produce a disinterested pleasure and even less a simple game of signifiers. In reality, these cantutas are never completely themselves: they connect with the Incan past, and with the crimes perpetrated by the dictatorship that was in place during that time, which demanded some type of political response. In an astounding and clever manner, these cantutas brought together beauty and politics, and they presented us with such conjunction as an event and a truth. The cantutas, in effect, were intended, above all, to be a form of political denunciation: their purpose was to inscribe in the soil, where the murders were perpetrated, the irrefutable truth of what had happened. This act broke the prison that at the time deprived Peruvian life of the possibilities inscribed in the acts of saying and naming. Naming horror in a different way, the cantutas bore witness to what had happened, and they did it in a way that offered sharp contrast to the hole where state agents had placed the bodies after shooting them. Wiesse’s artistic intervention in Cieneguilla was disseminated through a poster made by the Legal Defense Institute (Instituto de Defensa Legal). It was as powerful as the drawings themselves or the photographs taken by Schwarz.7 Designed by Manuel Figari with the help of Carlos Rojas, the artistic intervention was able to reach an audience, recovering Antigone’s old gesture; if the state hid what happened and did so by imitating the practices of those against whom it fought, the goal of this symbolic event that I am discussing—which involves Wiesse, Schwarz, and Figari—was to produce the true “burial” for those killed, in a political context that forbid it. The poster intervened in the public sphere—making public what happened and symbolizing grief—with the same weapon used in Cieneguilla: the weapon of aesthetics. In this respect, it is interesting to note the following: in the decade of the 1970s, Jesús Ruiz Durand had demonstrated in Peru the importance of posters as mechanisms to help construct greater citizenry. His wonderful images, which spurred agrarian reform, were converted into the allegory of a country open to modernity (in pop art) yet integrated in its own local traditions. Saturated by intense color, Ruiz Durand’s posters were utopian mechanisms, frenetic desires to summon an intense forthcoming reality.


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In 1995, however, the movement was reversed. We were faced first with a massacre, then with the discovery of clandestine gravesites and the shameful amnesty law, which was followed by the drawings on the mountains, the photographs, and, finally, the distribution of the printed poster. That is, two decades later, the poster was no longer the “desire” for a reality to be supported, but rather a painful testimony of a horrifying present. This poster could no longer move anything forward, but it did seek to mobilize the citizens against political impunity; it was a way to denounce the dictatorship and to reconstitute the collective meaning amidst a generalized brutality.8 The aesthetic force of the poster’s design should be highlighted. It is composition consisting of a frontal image of Wiesse’s cantutas, with one of them erupting from the picture, magnified with a singular beauty (figure 8.3). The mountain is imposing, and the human intervention is also imposing, as is the sign that proves that this entire project was a response to the horror of social life. The background of the poster is black, and within it is printed, in watermark, the text of the recently passed amnesty law. All is precise. In addition, the poster shows Wiesse dwarfed by the work that he has just completed. It would seem to insist in the following: the mountain was symbolically occupied, but at the same time an artist ended up possessed by the mountain. In this new object there is a remarkable dialogue between a tragic will, a mythic desire, and an intense political interest. Putting things together, all along this intervention the challenge was not solely naming violence and bringing it to light. It also consisted in perpetually denouncing the state, realizing that at that moment (as in any) violence cannot be life’s horizon, and other responses must be activated. In this public intervention there was mourning, but it ended up coded in a profound lyricism, an aesthetic choice that emerged seemingly from nowhere with immensely provocative powers. If in Peruvian history the mountains are Apus—sacred places that exchange gifts with men—these cantutas were intended as an offering to them, over a sense of urgency with regard to the present. They, as agents of mourning, wished to restart life from other paradigms. Judith Butler puts it this way, in her book Precarious Life: Certain faces must be admitted into public view, must be seen and heard for some keener sense of the value of life, all life, to take hold. So, it is not that mourning is the goal of politics, but that without the capacity to mourn, we lose that keener sense of life we need in order to oppose violence. And though for some, mourning can only be resolved through violence, it seems clear that violence only brings on more loss,


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Figure 8.3

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Poster with the image of the cantutas

and the failure to heed the claim of precarious life only leads, again and again, to the dry grief of an endless political rage. (xviii–xix)

One of Schwarz’s photographs exemplifies very well the above citation. It shows the artist after having finished his work. The emphasis


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Figure 8.4

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Wiesse’s hands colored by the dye used in the paintings.

is placed on two planes: first, on the cantutas drawn on the mountain and, second, on Wiesse’s hands, colored by the dye he used (figure 8.4). The message thus delivered aspires to become even clearer: if the state has stained its hands with blood, the artist imitates and


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reproduces this official act (by also staining his hands red), but in order to produce something completely different.9 I believe then that it is with this image that one of the most significant gestures in contemporary Peruvian art culminates: these cantutas named what occurred, and they are also a wager on history and aesthetics as the final braces of social reality. They reconnected the dead with the living and aspired to give back to Peruvian society the ability to respond to its circumstances. In reality, this gesture was not meant to be merely one of civilian indignation. It is, however, an act that in its own humility and modesty, attempted to garner a new power. Moreover, Ricardo Wiesse’s piece was important because it made connections between art and politics in an atypically complicated way. The aesthetics that the cantutas promote summon what is “universal,” but they exist in a specific time and place: one that risks proposing an aesthetical experience from its own political particularity. That is, the artistic object becomes “politicized” but it does not change its form; it continues being a form (literally a cardboard cutout), though now situated in a political place. The cantutas remain flowers, but flowers that interrupt into the public space: an inscription in the soil that seeks a projection beyond itself. The opposition between two types of art, the romantic or sublime, and the one involved in the here-and-now, has been generally understood as the opposition between an art aiming at the real as sign of what is not symbolized—and, in that sense, of the existential change implied in naming what does not yet have a name—and another art that intervenes in the symbolic level (in the already constituted reality) to carry out from there a political action. I believe, as Rancière (2005) does, that Ricardo Wiesse’s intervention dissolved such opposition in the measure that both interests (the sublime and the political) converged under one same objective: to interrupt ordinary time, in an attempt at reconfiguring what is sensitive and granting access to the surfacing of a truth that is, at the same time, aesthetic and political. For this very reason, Wiesse’s cantutas are located outside of artistic circles. His great gesture was thus to avoid any type of media-induced sensationalism, and any market value. The cantutas were painted in Cieneguilla, but they are no longer there. They were erased by the wind in less than a month. Today only the poster reminds us that they existed. The photograph, then, bear witness to that which was lost; it is a trace of the dead and a trace of the very work of art that is resignified by other mediums.


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What was the purpose of completing a work of art with such characteristics? What was the impact it had on Peruvian society? Do we find ourselves before an artistic intervention whose political effects were null or insignificant for its supposedly elitist character? I think we should not conceive of the impact of Wiesse’s cantutas as something measurable, but rather as a new political responsibility—a “happening”—projected toward the future. In other words, we are the ones—the critics, the professors, and society in general—who should construct, in the future, the true impact of these cantutas in Cieneguilla. Gustavo Buntinx (1995) insists on a decisive strategy in contemporary Latin American art: the cosmopolitan loss of aura generates a need for its restoration in the peripheries. Beyond all the changes contemporary society has undergone, in this intervention we observe the defense of certain truths, which invested with a utopian substrate, intend to grant access to what is real and true. I therefore believe that the question about what is aesthetical, that is, a product holding special value in a culture, is once again pertinent, in order to allow for the restoration of a new set of existential needs and political demands. What I attempt to say is that faced with a profoundly cynical social system that controls all significance, it is imperative that we propose new objects that continue to question reality, and propose further transcending forms and meanings. Heidegger, in effect, understood art as a place where the truth happens. After all these years, I am sure that from the arid mountains of Cieneguilla Ricardo Wiesse’s cantutas remain, obstinately, in that ephemeral place that the wind erases, but which refuses to disappear. Translated by Joseph Pierce

Notes 1. A detailed description of these events can be found in Ricardo Uceda’s Muerte en el pentagonito and in the various testimonials that the agents of the Colina group have carried out during the Fujimori trial. An excellent overview of the “uses of memory” has been written by Pablo Sandoval. 2. Wiesse’s is not the only response. Among others, that of Eduardo Villanes titled “Gloria evaporada” (Evaporated Glory) deserves a separate essay. 3. About his work, see also the articles by Luis Agusti and Jorge Wiesse Rebagliati. 4. About Fujimori’s policies and the mass media, see Carlos Iván Degregori. 5. Interventions in mountains have a long tradition in Peruvian plastic arts. The pre-Hispanic drawings in the outback of Palpa and Nazca are the


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most important in this respect (and as I have said, Wiesse extracts from these locations much of his linear experimentation). In contemporary art, we can also note, for example, the “Sarita Colonia” made by the E. P. S. Huayco Workshop in 1980 and also the work of the members of Sendero Luminoso when they lit up the hills of some cities with the image of a hammer and sickle. The cantuta flowers annually, preferably in temperate climates, but also in warmer locations. Their abundant presence in and around the university has made it more well known as “La cantuta” than its original name. For more information, see www.peruecologico.com.pe/flo_cantutaa_1.htm. Founded in 1993, the Legal Defense Institute (abbreviated Ideele in Spanish) legitimizes the intervention of civil society in the construction of a more participative and democratic society. During the political violence and the years of the Fujimori dictatorship, it was very active in defending human rights, in helping establish the rule of law, and in providing various services to individuals and local communities. It is interesting to note how the photograph documents the intervention and later the graphic design intervenes in the photograph to produce the poster. That is, each medium transforms the initial project and adds new aesthetic possibilities. The project itself in its secrecy (access to these mountains was prohibited) also reproduces the same official gesture, and the poster is here the element that inverts it as a response.

References Agusti, Luis. “Abstracción y figuración en la obra de Ricardo Wiesse.” ArtMotiv 1 (2007). artmotiv.com. Web. January 28, 2008. Badiou, Alain. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Trans. Peter Hallward. London: Verso, 2001. Print. Buntinx, Gustavo. “The Power and the Illusion: Aura, Lost and Restored in the Peruvian Weimar Republic (1980–1992).” In Beyond the Fantastic: Contemporary Art Criticism from Latin America, ed. Gerardo Mosquera. London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 1995. Print. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, 2004. Print. Das, Veena. “Trauma and Testimony: Implications for Political Community.” Anthropological Theory 3.3 (2003): 293–307. Print. Degregori, Carlos Iván. La década de la antipolítica: Auge y huida del Alberto Fujimori y Vladimiro Montesinos. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2000. Print. Garcilaso de la Vega. Comentarios Reales de los Incas. Ed. Angel Rosemblat. Vol. 6. Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1945. Print. Heidegger, Martin. Caminos de bosque. Trans. Arturo Leyte and Helena Cortés. Madrid: Alianza, 2000. Print.


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Lotman, Yuri. Estructura del texto artístico. Trans. Victoriano Imbert. Madrid: Ediciones Itsmo, 1988. Print. Rancière, Jacques. Sobre políticas estéticas. Trans. Manuel Arranz. Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2005. Print. Sandoval, Pablo. “El olvido está lleno de memoria: La matanza de los estudiantes de La Cantuta.” In Jamás tan cerca arremetió a lo lejos: Memoria y violencia política en el Perú, ed. Carlos Iván Degregori. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2004. Print. Uceda, Ricardo. Muerte en el pentagonito. Bogotá: Planeta, 2004. Print. Wiesse, Ricardo. Papeles del vacío: Arte y paisaje en el Perú. Lima: Fortunata Barrios y Ricardo Wiesse Editores, 2005. Print. Wiesse Rebagliati, Jorge. “Sobre Ricardo.” Babab 17 (2003). babab.com. Web. May 13, 2010.


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S ou n d, Viol e nc e , a n d Pol i t ics: C r i t ic a l P e r spe c t i v e s f rom C on t e m p or a r y R io de Ja n e i ro Samuel Araújo

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ounds of violence in the contemporary world are just too many and loud enough not to merit careful consideration by the humanities. They constantly define the extreme contours of a hardly inaudible daily struggle in people’s lives that is defined less by socially orchestrated power than with individual physical survival and minimal emotional integrity. Here and there, violence, be it in the form of massive discharges of hopeless rage or subtle, silent, and apparently innocuous interferences in banalities permeating the social space, appears both as day-to-day personal management tools and as eventually sellable commodities in the market of individualistic indifference and despair. This chapter will explore a few theoretical perspectives and challenges to interdisciplinary studies of sound and meaning emerging in and through an ongoing participatory action research project begun in 2003 in marginalized contexts of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Departing from a necessarily synthetic overview of conceptual issues intrinsically linked to practical challenges this research has either faced or raised, I shall examine a few selected examples of how these concepts are manifested in the context itself, amid the local and global political puzzles that largely condition the possible responses to the forms of violence highlighted here. With this approach I hope to contribute to a collective discussion on efforts to develop new forms of praxis toward the intricacies of violence in Latin America and the world in its multifaceted forms and representations.


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Violence and Research Praxis: Conceptual Premises One important point of departure in the perspective outlined here would be recognizing that violence takes many forms (cultural, symbolic, political, economic, social, ethnic, domestic, neocolonial, etc.). Until recently, at least in anthropology and related disciplines such as ethnomusicology,1 too little attention has been given to violence’s cultural or symbolic forms that have a more pervasive and (dis)orienting effect on the daily lives of ordinary people, even those not directly involved in extreme conflicts. This appears as socially conceived categories (music being one rich area to investigate them) that are naturalized and put into action in complex ways (as theorized, respectively, by Marx, Gramsci, and Bourdieu among others). Second, it is important to acknowledge, as has been painstakingly undertaken in the social sciences, the relevance of looking at society and culture as sites of disorder and conflict (e.g., Balandier 1997). This concept challenges the very foundations of disciplines that have long been preoccupied with internal laws or rules of conduct, eschewing violence as pathologies or deviance from order. As noted in a previously published collective article resulting from our research experience in Rio (Araújo et al. 2006a), this way of thinking about society as springing from an intrinsic tendency toward order seems in coherence with natural law principles forged in eighteenthcentury Central Europe. To carry the dramatic conceptual turn in the twentieth-century social sciences even further, the same article called attention to anthropologist Pierre Clastres’s predicament that to know violence badly is to know society badly (see Araújo et al. 2006a: 295). A third crucial consideration is to embed the contextual analysis of particular forms of violence in macro conditionings—meaning political, historical and ideological, both local and global—without which the notion of context itself would remain, in our view, useless but for an impressionistic picture of no doubt impressive actions, events, and relationships. Such impressionistic attempts often lead to theoretical dead-ends and/or idealizations of “nonviolent” social forms that are just as problematic as the “violent” ones the former will supposedly replace. The latter is clearly seen today in Brazil as one can find a growing number of sources, not only academic and literary but also audiovisual and para-academic, 2 drawing rather impressionistic pictures of spectacular aspects of violence forms and/or attempting to project solutions or attenuation based on “art and culture.” Critical


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appraisals of the latter have been based on contemporary Western political philosophies, highlighting academic standards of distancing, neutrality, and objectivity (Bobbio 2000), but both stances seem to have failed to produce concrete alternatives to violence in its extreme forms. One relies on idealized solutions that do not recognize longstanding and macrostructural circumstances, while the other does not recognize the role of human agency in overcoming and even subverting the macro conditionings it identifies. This dichotomous frame has resulted in a paralyzing and very dangerous tautology leading us to my last and perhaps more provocative conceptual argument revolving around the following ideas: (1) this tautology will only be surpassed by considering violence be grasped as a structurally central part of social forms, and therefore treated as an actual concept to be theorized upon, and not as an a priori denial of or an exception within society; (2) the preceding comment may demand acknowledging positive aspects of certain kinds of violence, even when they seem to (and perhaps particularly when they do) threaten the world order as we know it; (3) academic research frameworks that may claim relevance to this conjuncture will have to modify themselves profoundly at the expense of compromising their status as such. In our particular research work, we have taken up these challenges, first of all by attributing to favela (shantytown) residents the role of knowledge subjects who would formulate from the start the basic research themes, issues, and even methods. This required the academics involved to engage in new roles and limiting themselves to acting as mediators between locally accumulated experience and knowledge, and the academic legacy favela residents were socially denied, that is, to bridge a two-way violence hardly recognized as such (local knowledge despised as social power vis-à-vis socially legitimized, although often noncritically, external knowledge). In adopting such a perspective, we have engaged ourselves with a long-standing philosophical tradition of viewing theory and practice as anchored in one another, as praxis, in the sense of a reflexive manipulation of both natural and social phenomena, from their empirical manifestation and perception to their practical effects and critical discourses produced through all these processes. This stance is aimed at transcending the boundaries of the category “music” in order to deal with a totality that (1) strategically focuses on the sound aspects of human activity, without isolating them from other aspects of the same activity, and, particularly its political dimension, that is, action that proposes alliances, mediations, and ruptures; and (2)


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integrates what often appears as dichotomic, or even contradictory, categories of knowledge on sound in the academic milieu (theory and practice, sound and meaning, order and disorder, etc.). Highlighting sound praxis also means to emphasizing the subtle articulation of discourses, actions, and policies concerning sound, as it appears, quite often subtly or unnoticeably, in the daily experience of individuals (professional and amateur musicians, cultural agents, entrepreneurs, legislators, among others), groups (musicians’ collectives, organized publics) and institutions (school systems, enterprises, labor unions, both governmental and nongovernmental policy agencies)—in our case, against the backdrop of state-centered politics and power struggles in contemporary Brazil.

Reconsidering Sound Praxis in Ethnomusicology The emergence of new conceptual and practical interactions between academic researchers and researched community’s demands has occupied a narrow, but unquestionably growing, space in ethnomusicological literature and practice. There are several factors that may have made this issue increasingly visible. One of these is the anthropological critique of ethnographic practice as an instrument of neocolonial domination in the current context of world political economy (e.g., problems posed or reawakened by the so-called postmodern anthropology such as the crises of representation, ethnographic authority, etc.). A second factor is the increasingly common assimilation of research techniques (sometimes learned from academic researchers) by carriers of cultural traditions, which articulate scholarship and creation, in order to maintain control of the reproduction or reinvention of their respective worldviews. Thus, the case studies presented in the literature may perhaps be roughly subdivided into two main tendencies: (1) collaborative efforts developed by academic researchers and/or researched community members in order to recover and preserve the memory of tradition, which are made viable through access to archives and collections housed outside the community space, through oral history, access to and storage of iconographic, phonographic, visual or audio visual records, the formation of musical groups, educational projects, etc.; and (2) creation of community’s teaching and research institutions, as well as databases maintained by the communities, with or without partnerships with governmental or nongovernmental institutions. A common element in all of these possible situations has been the relative distancing from research models


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oriented toward goals defined exclusively or at least ultimately by the outside researcher (see Ellis 1994), and an epistemological turn toward perspectives in which community control over the generated knowledge is always at stake—although not always congruent with mainstream academic discussions. In fact, ethnomusicology has always been punctuated by collaboration between researchers or academic institutions and musical communities in specific projects of interest to those communities, such as commercial recordings, public presentations in new contexts, etc. As short-term experiences, such activities have usually depended on the establishment of collective trust in the researcher, often stemming from a previous longer-term project with goals defined by the researcher himself (frequently a thesis). The second type of situation mentioned above, however, may demand from the ethnomusicologist an involvement of unpredictable duration and may increase the risk of raising issues not welcome in the academic sphere. Needless to say, this positionality could easily jeopardize a research career evaluated by standard professional criteria such as number of publications.

Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy and Ethnomusicology Both anthropologists and more recently a few ethnomusicologists have developed participative strategies in their research activity by adopting Brazilian educator Paulo Freire’s ideas on dialogic knowledge building. Freire’s approach distinguishes between situations in which the student remains the self-conscious subject of the cognitive operations making possible the emergence of knowledge, where the teacher acts as a mediator of the process, and another one in which the student remains primarily an object of the teacher’s knowledge transference, a knowledge produced by a distant Other, in many cases one foreign or even hostile to the student’s cognitive system (Freire 1970, 1996). Applying this distinction to the field of ethnomusicological research, it is imperative to scrutinize more carefully the forms of musical research still based on modes of ethnography made “conventional” in the colonial world, or even the so-called reflexive work done in the postcolonial context. This questionable legacy, which entails legitimizing the discourse of academic interpreters while reducing the focused people’s power to resist their transformation into objects, has been basically translated as (1) fetichized musical products and processes, that is, defined and naturalized in terms of ideologies that are


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usually foreign to the focused communities; (2) a slight reconfiguration of academic authority without challenging standards of authorship; and (3) public policies (e.g., on world and national heritages, research agendas, training programs, etc.) which stress the hegemony of academia, attributing to its agents (i.e., researchers) the responsibility of defining, preserving, and promoting musical diversity. To develop a contrasting legacy constitutes an enormous challenge. Invoking Paulo Freire once again, we remind ourselves that musical processes and products are permanently mediated by power relations, demanding constant action/reflection, to prevent stable theorizations on the basis of part-time interactions by individuals in search of academic authority. Concomitantly it becomes clear that reviewing radically the process of knowledge production requires an extreme level of engagement in order to make public policies more favorable to social movements that empower and reinforce the native voice. This will require, as already practiced in various places around the world (1) the creation of opportunities that enable communities marginalized through the effectiveness and extended duration of symbolic violence processes from the knowledge produced on themselves to interact with and to participate in the academic music establishment; (2) the formation of joint research teams comprising natives and non-natives as well as academics and nonacademic personnel; (3) new forms and uses of musical documentation, fostering public debates on the history, identity, and values of peoples; and (4) development of new capacities amid communities previously deprived of access to those capacities (e.g., audiovisual documentation, idealization, and management of sound archives, use of computers, etc.), and the strengthening and/or building of diffusion centers of local knowledge and repositories through community-based organizations and institutions.

Sound Praxis, Violence, and Politics: A Study Case The research experience highlighted here investigates sound praxis in and around Maré, a marginalized residential area of Rio de Janeiro, not too far from downtown, known in popular discourses as a favela conglomerate, hence Complexo da Maré, a term all too often employed in the pages of local newspapers reporting on drug traffic. About 132,000 people live in Maré, having to simultaneously endure the harsh reality of socially orchestrated violence as well as of centuryold social prejudice and stereotypes associated with the estimated 600 marginalized areas labeled favela.


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As reported elsewhere (Araújo et al. 2006a, 2006b), Ethnomusicology Lab of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro has established, since 2003, a partnership with CEASM (Center for the Study and Solidarity Actions of Maré), an NGO created by residents amid a population consisting of relocated slum populations of Rio and unskilled migrant labor (the majority of which come from northeastern Brazil), and a population of about 1,000 Angolan young students and middle-aged war refugees. High rates of unemployment and the profitability of drug-trafficking delineate the broader social contours in the Maré area, leading to a harsh routine of police raids, corruption, territorial drug wars between factions, and trafficdictated curfews. Our partner organization was, by 2003, one of the most highly visible community-based NGOs in Rio, with a considerable infrastructure (classrooms, well-equipped administrative offices, computer rooms, library, and various types of databases) and a strong focus on the preparation of Maré youngsters for the yearly admission exam in public universities (reputedly the best in Brazil and free of charge). Its main focus, as articulated by its representatives (middle-aged, university-trained residents or former residents of Maré), is ensuring that exam-centered skills be complemented by other skills that may enrich the experience of youngsters. CEASM’s particular expectations from our joint project were that the formation of local youngsters to document Maré’s musical output, which would eventually lead to the creation of a local musical reference center, might reinforce both the subjects’ self-esteem and experience in another musical program or other related areas such as dance, history, storytelling, etc.

The Project A first version of the project was prepared by a university-based team of two teachers, one former graduate student, and three currently enrolled graduate students. The main points of departure were (A) the positive feedback (in ethical, dynamic, and even epistemological terms) from the previous small-scale experiences in alternative modes of ethnography, with focuses jointly defined by university researchers and members of the focused societal groups, and the involvement of some of the latter in several stages of the research proper (e.g., as interviewers, “fieldworkers,” “translators” of local linguistic variations, etc.); (B) emphasis on whatever locally based musical resources are available; (C) the considerable accumulated experience in subfields fields termed “applied,” “advocacy,” and “participatory” within the


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social sciences, ethnomusicology included (e.g., Ellis 1994, Impey 2002), and the availability of an increasing related literature; and (D) the institutional support from the university and also from some of its business partners (e.g., the giant state-owned oil company) within a political context of heightened awareness of the disparaging social, political, and economic imbalance between the very rich and the poor in Brazil (which led the first industrial worker ever to win presidential elections in the Americas to take charge in 2003). Intense discussions with NGO representatives (educators, historians, and administrative personnel) led to the development of a oneyear research project restricted to two subareas of Maré and involving three basic stages: (1) twice-a-week encounters with a group of 20 Maré-resident youngsters selected among second-grade student volunteers, aimed at the development of a conceptual basis as well as of research focuses and tools. Following participatory action models (but particularly the one proposed by Brazilian educator Paulo Freire), the university researchers act in this case as mediators of discussions among the youngsters on relevant musical subjects and categories for music research; (2) the actual audio and audiovisual documentation of musical practices and interviews with representative individuals; (3) the building of a public database within Maré, located at the NGO headquarters, and the development of outreach programs aimed at its residents and at the general public (each one involving certain specificities such as questions on the range and type of diffusion). Once assimilated the basis research principles, all participants, both residents and external mediators, would work as a single collective in documenting local musical practices, an activity that would nurture a locally based public access reference center as well as the promotion of public presentations on the documentations made and the questions they raised. It is worth noting that, in one of the country’s largest and more important universities, concurrently developing many other outreach initiatives, this is the only outreach project in which the nonacademic public are engaged as subjects in research activities, interrogating violence, citizenship, and the hegemonic politics as a key equation. During four months of debates on the project design, always held within the NGO main building at Maré, the university participants could meet other local activists as well as other residents, watch video documentations previously made by residents, and visit other facilities maintained by the same organization elsewhere in the surrounding area, thereby knowing more about the educational programs developed by CEASM. Amid the dismantling of public education in the


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country, the state, and the city in question, 36 percent of Maré’s school-age population is not attending school, configuring the highest absentee rate in the city of Rio de Janeiro. Among many other initial impressions, one caught the university team’s attention at once. Our first interlocutors were local leaders who had created a pioneer institution to respond to the state’s absence. They had done so against great odds, such as the violence stemming from the drug wars and the usually low self-esteem of a stigmatized population. These leaders recognized past vestiges of significant musical activity within Maré, but their overall assessment of local music was rather pessimistic: they saw little potential for musicoriented research, deeming it as hardly interesting for music research. As soon as the local team of project participants was assembled this was clearly a factor inhibiting public dialogue in the initial meetings, and even more so as the university mediators did not attempt to teach or even to present any a priori definitions or techniques. They tried, on the contrary, to allow the development of informal conversations on issues that looked distant from “music” but soon showed unique links to an even more diversified spectrum of sound practices than first imagined.3 But obviously the social differences among participants were perceivable and deployed as crucial tools in the difficult communication process at the beginning stages of the new experience. It is worth highlighting too that, despite the local leadership’s cooperative attitude toward the university, a few leaders continue to express concerns about the Freirean principles, particularly those that ascribe great autonomy to youngsters regarding the formulation of problems and the design of their own responses to them. This may sound contradictory in light of the respect and admiration the same people manifest toward Freire’s figure and work, but it seems consistent with the organization’s desire for quantifiable practical results in their main educational mission—the preparation of local high-school graduates for the highly competitive university entrance exams. This becomes even more dramatic when one takes into account that the tougher exams are the ones to the public universities, not only the best academic alternatives but also the only ones free of charge. The annual admission statistics, in turn, become a touchstone in the negotiation of both public and private financial support for the NGO, maintaining a continuously high pressure on teachers and students. In other words, when adopting a research praxis that assumes that it is impossible “to interpret” reality without engaging it in the political sense of the term, one works, amid contradictory movements,


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under the hegemonic perspective of the continuous and pseudocritical justification of a given social order (Bobbio 2004). Oftentimes, as in the case being discussed, the same social actors who label this order unjust and endorse symbols of its eventual overcoming, such as Paulo Freire’s pedagogy or certain political parties, are the ones who cannot help but reinforce the deeper mechanisms that reproduce injustice and inequalities. The progressive transformation the research group went through (and I am referring not only to the young residents but also, and perhaps mainly, to nonresident participants) had to neutralize—but obviously without managing to overcome completely—the invisible and perverse obstacles of symbolic violence: the persistence of strong conditionings leading to a hierarchical relationship between owners and nonowners of knowledge, in other words, university students and high-school students; difficulties in conceiving the longer-term objectives of the project as anything meaningful or useful, even taking into account those have always been collectively and progressively constructed, since they are not seen (and in fact they are not) as immediate ways to professionalization or, much less so, to an academic career; difficulties in operating with basic concepts and techniques, reflective of both a virtually nonexistent public education and the absence, for reasons anticipated since the project design, of family support networks, too fragile in the face of little resources and the adversities socially undermining family structures, such as state and drug-related violence, precarious health care, and symbolic and physical destruction of the public school system, among many others. However, the social conditionings of this situation are not specific to the Brazilian case. In a recent article on the linguistic universe of Spanish workers more vulnerable to the somber spectrum of unemployment, sociologist Ana Maria Rivas Rivas stresses a few significant distinctions between the social experience and linguistic practices of different generations. On the one hand, older generations frequently refenced concepts and ideologies related to job stability, working-class solidarity, and professional or political struggles; on the other, younger workers expressed contrasting notions stemming from neoliberal ideologies of an individualistic and fatalist character, similar to what we have found so often in our collaborative experience in Maré: Their narratives lack key concepts through which other generations, including that of their parents, and the majority of industry and construction workers, built up their labor experiences: solidarity, justice,


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equality, workers’ struggle, and activism, replaced by other terms such as success, failure, formation, luck, fortune. (Rivas Rivas 2005:15)

Nothing substantially divergent from what Paulo Freire more than four decades earlier conceived as the linguistic experience of the oppressed, between what he termed “significant silence” and the imposition of categories formulated under the world of workers’ alienation, of obedience and subordination to the commodity form. Our university team has been aware since the beginning that to break with these underlying beliefs would always be an almost impossible task, even through the different participative strategies we have employed, following the course of continuous mediation through a relatively long period, many times frustrated by generalized physical and conceptual violence, inflicted daily on populations marginalized by the “net benefits” of virtual capitalism. Maybe the only sign that we have not failed entirely is the fact we have managed to remain alive and meeting at least twice a week, since 2003, to think over our dilemmas through the sound praxis interfering with them. This effort has resulted in various reflections presented in local spaces, political and academic forums, including two publications (Araújo et al. 2006a, 2006b) that seek to define and highlight the importance of violence as a concept, and not merely as a descriptive category, exploring sound praxis as a central dimension of social relations and, consequently of power and politics as well. In the first article (Araújo et al. 2006a), we discuss the implications of diverse forms of violence, from the ideological to the lethal ones, to the processes of recognition and discursive elaboration in sound practices, including those categorized as “music.” In the second article, a modified version of the first, residents analyze public policies directed to the marginalized youth, criticizing their elitist design that assumes the cultural backgrounds of their targeted public are empty a priori of meaning, and that usually attempts to compensate for their “exclusion” from the benefits of wealth accumulation. When questioning both the contents and results of such policies, they have attempted to simultaneously think and constitute, as an alternative sound praxis, ways of counteracting the more degrading and long-lasting violence. Nothing that can be completely effective under the circumstances described here, since this would only amount to fulfilling expectations of social elevation under the alienating conditions. Nor could we truly claim to threaten the status quo, but it is its denial, as proposed originally by the philosophy of praxis, that is the ultimate evaluation


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criteria. Here we arrive at a true conundrum since this denial may not succeed if it rejects the use of violence.

Final Remarks Raising issues concerning the articulation of sound praxis, violence, and politics, based on a collaborative research experience in Rio de Janeiro, this article attempts to develop a research praxis that, contrary to perspectives that (consciously or not) limit themselves to interrogate or explain the contemporary social drama in Brazil, dares to rehearse collectively a nonutopian future transformed by solid social relations of a new kind developed in research on sound praxis. In lieu of a conclusion, I would reiterate that it is imperative to scrutinize more carefully forms of musical research that are still based on the modes of ethnography made “conventional” in the colonial world, or even the so-called reflexive work done in the postcolonial context. This questionable legacy, which entails legitimizing the discourse of academic interpreters while reducing the focused peoples’ power to resist their transformation into objects, has been basically translated as (1) fetichized musical products and processes, that is, defined and naturalized in terms of ideologies that are usually foreign to the focused communities; (2) a slight reconfiguration of academic authority without challenging standards of authorship/ownership; and (3) public policies (e.g., on world and national heritages, research agendas, training programs, etc.) that stress the hegemony of academia, attributing to its agents (i.e., researchers) the responsibility of defining, preserving, and promoting musical diversity (see, for instance, Gonçalves 1996). As not a few of our colleagues already know, to build up a contrasting legacy constitutes an enormous challenge. Invoking Paulo Freire once again, researchers must continuously remind themselves aware that musical processes and products are permanently mediated by power relations, demanding constant action/reflection that does not allow for stable theorizations in the course of part-time interactions by individuals in search of academic authority. Concomitantly it becomes clear that reviewing radically the process of knowledge production requires extreme application, in the sense of politically conscious engagement, to changing public policies in favor of social movements that may be able to build a new knowledgeproducing praxis. This will require, as already in practice here and there around the globe (1) the creation of opportunities to enable communities currently marginalized from the knowledge produced


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on themselves to interact with and to participate as active interlocutors in world forums, (2) the formation of newly designed research teams that may question profoundly knowledge hierarchies, (3) new self-critical forms and uses of musical documentation, fostering public debates on the history, identity, and values of peoples, and (4) development of new capacities amid communities previously deprived of access to those capacities (e.g., audiovisual documentation, idealization and management of sound archives, use of technologies, etc.), and the reinforcement and/or building of diffusion centers of local knowledge and repositories through community-based organizations and institutions.

Notes 1. One highly significant contribution is the collective work organized by Ana Maria Ochoa (2006) for the Transcultural Music Review. 2. By para-academic I am referring to both punctual collaborations between academics and nonacademics, usually the former providing a scholarly, reflexive perspective and the latter a “factual” field report (e.g., Soares, Bill, and CUFA), or to openly nonacademic accounts that, even so, still conform to expectations and appeals to “nonviolence,” “good sense,” “civilization,” etc. 3. The questions asked by the mediators were disconcerting: What do you listen and what do you choose to listen to? What sounds do you hear at home day by day? Does everyone in your home listen to the same things? Could you make a list of sounds you listen to at home or in its surroundings? How?

References Araújo, Samuel et al. “Conflict and violence as conceptual tools in presentday ethnomusicology; Notes from a dialogical experience in Rio de Janeiro.” Ethnomusicology 50, no.2 (2006a): 287–313. Print. ———. “A violência como conceito na pesquisa musical, reflexões sobre uma experiência dialógica na Maré.” Transcultural Music Review 10 (2006b): n. pag. Web. Jan 23, 2008. Print. Balandier, Georges. A desordem: elogio do movimento. Trans. Suzana Martins. Rio de Janeiro: Bertrand Brasil, 1997. Print. Bobbio, Norberto. Teoria geral da política. Ed. Michelangelo Bovero. Trans. Daniela Beccaccia. Rio de Janeiro: Elsevier, 2000. Print. Ellis, Catherine J. “Introduction. Powerful Songs: Their Placement in Aboriginal Thought.” The World of Music 36.1 (1994): 3–20. Print. Freire, Paulo. Pedagogia da autonomia. São Paulo: Paz e Terra, 1996. Print.


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Freire, Paulo. Pedagogia do oprimido. São Paulo: Paz e Terra, 1970. Print. Gonçalves, José Reginaldo. A retórica da perda: os discursos do patrimônio cultural no Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: Editora da UFRJ/IPHAN, 1996. Print. Impey, Angela. “Culture, conservation and community reconstruction: Explorations in advocacy ethnomusicology and participatory action research in northern KwaZulu Natal.” In Yearbook for Traditional Music 34 (2002), ed. Samuel Araújo, 9–24. Print. Ochoa, Ana Maria, ed. “Dossier: Música silencios y silenciamientos: música violencia y experiencia cotidiana.” Transcultural Music Review 10 (2006): n. pag. Web. Jan 23, 2008. Print. Rivas Rivas, Ana Maria. “El neoliberalismo como proyecto lingüístico.” Política y Cultura 24 (2005): 9–30. Print.


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(I n) v isi bl e C on n ec t ions a n d t h e M a k i ngs of C ol l ec t i v e Viol e nc e Javier Auyero and Matthew Mahler

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his chapter explores the often (in)visible connections,1 in what we call the gray zone of politics, between official political actors and unofficial political actors who are entrusted with the more unseemly “dirty work” of politics in contemporary Argentina, such as inciting episodes of collective violence, “paying off” youths with drugs and alcohol for their work of attending political rallies, and making physical threats against opposition parties and candidates. After a brief review of existing literature on the relationship between clandestine political connections and collective violence, this chapter uses an ethnographic reanalysis of existing data to construct three detailed accounts that highlight the role the gray zone plays in contemporary Argentinean politics. We argue that the laundering of political acts through these (in)visible channels constitutes a crucial dimension of politics that must be empirically dissected and theorized to better understand routine political activity writ large before concluding with a brief consideration of the analytical and methodological implications of such a framework.

Scenes from the Gray Zone Villa El Cartón, City of Buenos Aires, February 8, 2007: A blazing fire that began in the early morning hours of February 8, 2007, destroyed the homes of 300 families in the Villa El Cartón (the Cardboard Shantytown), located beneath Highway 7 in the city of Buenos Aires. According to newspaper reports, emergency rescue vehicles assisted 177 residents of the shantytown while 31 residents were hospitalized with diverse injuries. The following day the fire


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chief from the federal police told reporters that he was investigating “arson . . . as many a neighbor denounced.” Weeks later, Gabriela Cerruti, then minister of human and social rights of the city government, confirmed, in a press release, the fire chief’s suspicions, and denounced the “political intentionality of the fire.” A barrage of accusations then erupted between different political factions (some within the city government, others from within the federal government) with each accusing the other of “manipulating the poor,” or “using the poor to advance positions,” and with each group decrying the purported connections between the arsonists and “people in power.” Other officials familiar with the events of February 8 confirmed the premeditated nature of the fire. For example, the chief of police sardonically intoned, “Can you imagine, not even a drunkard was caught off guard (desprevenido)? So, [clearly] most people in the shantytown knew about this beforehand.” La Matanza, province of Buenos Aires, December 19, 2001: Hundreds of residents from La Matanza (one of the poorest districts in metropolitan Buenos Aires) looted dozens of local supermarkets and convenience stores. But the residents of La Matanza were not alone. With the rate of unemployment hovering around 20 percent, poverty rates surpassing 50 percent, and a federal government paralyzed by internal disputes, between December 14 and 21, 2001, Argentina witnessed a sudden explosion of food riots. Thousands of citizens took part in the riots, known locally as “los saqueos.” Twenty persons were killed and hundreds more were injured in one of the most violent episodes in contemporary Latin America. Among those who were visible at the lootings in La Matanza were activists from the Peronist Party, the largest political party in the country. But with the exception of a few police agents protecting a gas station and a home appliances store, the forces of law and order were generally absent from the scene. What do the sad episodes of Villa El Cartón and the 2001 food lootings have in common? They are two snapshots from what we will argue is “the gray zone” of politics—the area of often clandestine and (in)visible connections between established political actors and instigators of collective violence and other forms of political dirty work who hold no official political positions. In their excessiveness, these extreme events, allow us, as Marcel Mauss reminds us, to better “perceive the facts . . . in those [other] places where, although no less essential, they still remain small-scale and involuted” (10). Most political analysts—focused as they are on the “respectable,” “civilized” (in Elias’ sense of the term—i.e., devoid of violence), and easily


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visible side of politics, which takes place in government houses and parliaments, and is broadcast through mass media outlets—tend to disregard this gray zone of politics, this area of (in)visible ties and (in) visible acts, and view its existence as either evidence of the general sordidness of politics and the corruptive influence of power, or as a sign of the “backwardness” of less than democratic regimes. Although this gray zone of politics may lack the prestige of a legitimate object of political analysis, we will argue—by way of demonstration—that the laundering of political acts through these (in)visible channels constitutes a crucial dimension of politics that must be empirically dissected and theorized to better understand routine political activity writ large. Public debates that followed the “incendio en la villa” pointed, unambiguously, to this key but understudied dimension of politics. Just days before the fire broke out in the villa, a local official threatened to “burn down all the shantytowns” if one of his colleagues was fired from his post in the city government. Shortly thereafter the real news broke out: the fire in the villa was hardly an “accident.” Existing evidence points to coordination and, what is more important to the argument that will follow, to connections, albeit largely (in)visible ones, between those damage-making actors and official politicos. The “incendio en la villa,” according to all available evidence, was another arson on the long list of “fire accidents” that affect shantytowns and slums throughout the world; 2 yes, it was an “accident,” but one with distinctly political motivations and origins. Similarly, although the food riots of December 2001 may have appeared to be nothing other than a “spontaneous outbreak” of violence brought on by dramatic structural changes, they were hardly spontaneous, and their distribution across geographic locale was hardly random. The visibility of Peronist activists and the (in)visibility of police forces in La Matanza was hardly accidental. After a brief summary of existing scholarship exploring the role of clandestine connections in politics, this paper presents three cases that bring into relief the role that the gray zone and these (in)visible connections and (in)visible acts play in routine Argentine politics. We begin by exploring in greater detail the fire in Villa El Cartón and its (probable) origins in local political exigencies. We then follow the story of one unofficial political hand in the Argentine Patagonia and the effect his (ongoing) relations with official political actors had on his life and his on theirs. Finally, we turn to the weeklong food riots of December 2001 and examine how the efforts of Peronist activists helped to incite (and direct) these episodes of collective violence.


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The empirical evidence, upon which these three anecdotes are based, was produced through an “ethnographic reanalysis,” in which we jointly revisited data including field notes, interviews, and newspaper accounts produced by the first author during previous ethnographic fieldwork3 and from a reanalysis of other extant qualitative research on the gray zone of politics in Argentina. Finally, we conclude with empirically grounded speculation about the challenges that the workings of the gray zone poses for political analysts. The main analytical implication of this chapter is the following: political analysts should do a better job at integrating “gray zone” actions and relations into the study of “normal” politics. Inattention to these clandestine connections has analogous effects to the inattentiveness to “informal institutions” noted by political scientists Gretchen Helmke and Steven Levitsky. In both cases, political analysis “risks missing much of what drives political behavior and can hinder efforts to explain important political phenomena” (725–40). Rather than dismissing such acts as aberrant phenomenon or denouncing them on moralistic grounds, the challenge for a proper sociological analysis is to incorporate such acts into our standard models of political action. The main methodological implication is that if we are to pay serious attention to the gray zone, we need on-the-ground and embedded political ethnography. It is such ethnography that can unearth the practices that are otherwise largely hidden from view and identify the social necessity, meanings, and intentionality (in the phenomenological sense) that are both cause and consequence of these gray acts and gray ties. Furthermore, we will argue that it behooves political ethnographers to collaborate with others (investigative journalists and attorneys were particularly helpful for analyzing the episodes of collective violence in Argentina discussed in this particular chapter) who often have access to and/or information that sheds light on the backstage of politics denied to academic observers.

The Role of Clandestine Ties in Politics and Collective Violence During the last decade, investigative reporters and social scientists have frequently documented the ways in which power-holders have relied on their illicit links with party members and/or other types of grassroots activists to conduct the “dirty work” of politics. This dirty work includes everything from the intimidation or public shaming of election opponents (known in the local parlance as “contrapiquete”) and the use of shock troops in the eradication of


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illegal settlements to inciting and directing large-scale violence as in the events of December 2001. So much so that it would not be farfetched to argue that Argentinean politicos (past and present officials of mainstream political parties with all their democratic credentials in order) conceive of poor people’s violence (or the threat thereof) as a specific weapon with which to advance their position(s) in the political field. Collective violence, and what is more, the possibility thereof, is a form of political capital that circulates within the field of official politics. The more physical damage one can (potentially) create, the more other political actors must take you into account. Although far from being a clearly delimited area of inquiry, the relationship between clandestine political connections and collective violence has been the subject of increasing scholarly attention. For example, research on the origins and forms of communal violence in Southeast Asia has highlighted the hidden links between partisan politics and collective violence.4 Paul Brass’ notion of “institutionalized riot systems” appositely describes these obscure connections. In these riot systems, Brass points out, “known actors specialize in the conversion of incidents between members of different communities into ethnic riots. The activities of these specialists, who operate under the loose control of party leaders, are usually required for a riot to spread from the initial incident of provocation”(12). Sudhir Kakar’s (1996) analysis of a pehlwan, wrestler/enforcer who works for a political boss, further illustrates this point: the genesis of many episodes of collective violence is located in the area where the actions of political actors and those specialists in violence secretly meet and enmesh. Steven Wilkinson’s Votes and Violence (2004) is perhaps the most systematic study to date of the connections between party politics (electoral competition) and collective violence (ethnic riots). Wilkinson convincingly shows that ethnic riots, far from being relatively spontaneous eruptions of anger, are often planned by politicians for a clear electoral purpose. They are best thought of as a solution to the problem of how to change the salience of ethnic issues and identities among the electorate in order to build a winning political coalition. (1, emphasis added)

Throughout his detailed and insightful study, Wilkinson calls attention to the instances in which political elites “cause,” “foment,” or “instigate” riots “in order to win elections” (236). His study brings to the fore what is often the state’s complicity in failing to prevent violence: “[T]he response of the state government is the main factor in


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determining whether large-scale ethnic violence breaks out and continues” (62). The state’s response, he argues, is very much conditioned by the “instructions” that politicians give to other state officials telling them “whether to protect or not protect minorities” (65, 85). According to Wilkinson, “the number of Hindu-Muslim riots seems to vary dramatically depending on the orders given by the political party in power” (65). Political elites and organizers often “incite” violence and prevent repressive forces from responding once riots break out. Why? Wilkinson’s conclusions are straightforward. Political leaders in some Indian states “impress upon their local officials that communal riots and anti-Muslim pogroms must be prevented at all costs” (137) because of electoral incentives. As he puts it: States with higher degrees of party fractionalization, in which minorities are therefore pivotal swing voters, have lower levels of violence than states with lower levels of party competition. This is because minorities in highly competitive party systems can extract promises of greater security from politicians in return for their votes. (137)

Historical accounts of “race riots” in the United States also point to a similar dynamic between members of established political parties and in the instigation (or not) of collective violence. Janet Abu-Lughod (2007), for example, documents the attacks committed by the Ragen’s Colts—young party hacks who were financially supported by Frank Ragen, a well-known Democratic Cook County commissioner—on African Americans during the 1919 riots in Chicago. Years later, during the 1943 riots in Detroit, whites who attacked blacks could count “on police protection and even assistance” (148). That party leaders and/or state officials might be “behind”—rather than against—such episodes of collective violence should hardly surprise students of Latin American politics. In a detailed study of “la Violencia”—the wave of political violence that killed 200,000 people in Colombia in the 1940s and 1950s—historian Mary Roldán shows that in the state of Antioquia “partisan conflict provided the initial catalyst to violence” (22). She argues that not only did state bureaucrats “promote” the violence that shocked the region but that police and even mayors themselves actively participated in the partisan attacks. Political elites, she points out, did not simply tolerate or instigate the violence; they were its perpetrators. While party members organized attacks on places and peoples, the police acted as partisan shock troops.5 In words that should ring true to those studying political violence in other parts of the world, Roldán states that, “while


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many citizens attributed the escalation of violence to the absence of official forces, these forces were so often the perpetrators of violence between 1946 and 1949 that one wonders why anyone bothered to suggest that the presence of the authorities could have been of much help” (82). Historian Laurie Gunst (1995) and sociologist Orlando Patterson (2001) unearth the relationships between local patronage networks in Jamaica, or what the latter calls, “garrison constituency,” and gang violence. Patterson points out how these gangs, which were “initially formed for political purposes, now also serve the drug trade . . . [and have] increasingly worked to generate unrest as a political tactic” (71). Gunst, meanwhile, argues that the origins of Jamaican drug gangs in New York can be traced to these same posses, native to Jamaica itself, which were armed by party members linked to Prime Minister Seaga or Prime Minister Manley. Goldstein’s (2003) and Arias’ (2006) recent ethnographies of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas (shantytowns) provide further evidence of the collusion between state actors, members of political parties, and violent entrepreneurs such as gang members who are associated with the drug trade. Finally, Luis Astorga’s (2005) historical reconstruction of the intertwining of the political field with the field of illicit drug production and trafficking in twentieth-century Mexico offers another excellent example of the (concealed and often illegal) connections between actors inside and actors outside of the official political system—relations that must be rigorously examined if we are to explain seemingly random upsurges of violence—both past and present. What do all these cases have in common? They all portray the activation of clandestine connections among political actors, some of them within the polity, others outside of it, that are encapsulated in the opening vignettes of this chapter. These illicit links are what define the gray zone of politics, and these are the links that we will further explore in the following three vignettes from contemporary political life in Argentina as a means of demonstrating the paradoxical ways in which the gray zone operates.

An Equine Paradox When state prosecutor Mónica Cuñarro investigated the shantytown fire in Villa Cartón, she discovered a unique paradox. Horses and carts—some of the “most important working tools of the local population,” a group known for scavenging the streets of Buenos Aires as a means of making ends meet—were, surprisingly, absent when the


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fire engulfed the shantytown. If the fire had been an accident, would not many of the horses and carts have been caught in the inferno? Indeed, the prosecutor noted that the horses’ absence was one of the many elements that proved the preplanned character of the fire along with the fact that the residents of the shantytown “avoided [other] vital losses . . . [including] goods such as appliances, chairs, desks, etc.” She concluded that the “neighborhood leaders planned the fire, and informed most of the local residents who, at around 5 A.M., removed appliances, clothing, and mattresses from their houses and moved the horses [to safety] . . . “ in a nearby field, owned by a relative of a political activist from a political faction opposing the then acting mayor. The report also notes that much of the damage from the fire could have been prevented had anyone from the shantytown called the fire department. Even though there were cell phones available to make such a call, no one bothered to call. Contrary to what was initially reported by the media, the report states that a further element of proof is that . . . luckily, there were no fatal victims, no one was burned, no one suffocated, no one was hospitalized . . . [showing] that the residents were mere spectators of the fire. There were no victims or material losses because, since they knew what was going to happen beforehand, they were able to protect themselves and safeguard their valuables.

In the weeks and months following the arson and Cuñarro’s report, a torrent of public finger-pointing, and counter fingerpointing ensued; opposing political factions openly accused each other of engaging in a “dirty political campaign,” while the minister of human and social rights accused one official linked to the federal government of masterminding the arson. Then, in August 2007, six months after the incident, the state prosecutor asked a judge to indict a grassroots activist, who was a member of one of the political parties then campaigning against the mayor, for starting the fire. Although the judge refused the prosecutor’s request (citing lack of solid evidence), the report produced by Mónica Cuñarro is nonetheless revealing in that it points unambiguously to the links between those who were directly responsible for starting the fire and the maneuverings of well-established political actors:6 “We cannot ignore the fact that the episodes were planned for a time that was close to the elections in the city, and that they were planned by neighborhood leaders who wanted to use a massive disaster in order to put pressure on local authorities to either obtain housing


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or subsidies.” Furthermore, the report points to the (potential) connection between the events in Villa Cartón and other episodes of collective violence in the city such as the organized invasion of an unfinished housing project in Bajo Flores that took place less than two months after the episodes in Cartón. Specifically, the report finds that in the months preceding the local elections there had been a dramatic increase throughout the city of these episodes of (seemingly planned) collective violence (a fact that was also corroborated by several newspapers). What was the cause of this increase in (planned) collective violence? According to informal conversations and interviews with former state officials and the prosecutor from the Villa Cartón case, party activists, such as those who were implicated in the shantytown arson and the invasion of the unfinished housing project in Bajo Flores, typically hoard access to the subsidies, housing, and food packages distributed by state agencies. They do so through their control of the government’s registries of beneficiaries—that is through their accounting of who receives government subsidies, housing, or food packages. It is these local leaders who decide who “makes it” onto the registry and who does not. In an interview, one former local official described how the process works: “When we were trying to register shantytown dwellers for Ciudadanía Porteña [a welfare plan], we would open an office in each shantytown and, in many a case, nobody showed up. Only after clearing things up with the local leaders, would people begin to register. These local leaders told us, ‘Just open the office, and they will come.’ Obviously, they are the ones who keep control of the final list.” In other words, local leaders (and not state officials) are the ones who tell the local population when and where to register for a welfare plan—and when not to heed the announcements of public officials who, as the local population suspects, might use a register to collect data that will later be used to evict them or to deprive them of other benefits. The state prosecutor explained it this way: Whoever controls the [welfare] register, controls who gets the housing, [and] under what conditions. Whoever controls the census, controls the state subsidies. These state subsidies are arbitrarily distributed, nobody checks them, they are not centralized. . . . Those who have the neighborhood register and the subsidies obtain the control over that particular territory, they are the ones who decide who comes into the shantytown and who has to leave, who gets the bricks and other materials [for building] and who doesn’t.


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After the recently appointed mayor (formerly the vice-mayor, who had taken office after the mayor was impeached) announced that he would run for reelection, one of his first projects was aimed at creating some order in what to many was the chaotic city welfare administration. His decision to “rationalize” or, in less euphemistic terms, to recover control over local welfare registries triggered a series of events (building occupations, fires, etc.), like those in Villa Cartón and the invasion of the housing project in Bajo Flores, leading up to the election. Generating episodes of collective violence was the way local leaders expressed in no uncertain terms that they were not going to give up control over state resources for their territories, just as they were not going to give up the attendant power that came with that control. In the words of the state prosecutor’s report, the arson’s objective was to “completely destroy the place as a way of exerting pressure on local authorities [the mayor and the municipal officials in charge of housing policies].” What were the arsonists trying to accomplish? In her report and in subsequent phone and e-mail interviews with her, the state prosecutor made it quite clear what the arsonists were up to: they were “trying to . . . acquire housing.” By burning down the shantytown, they would force municipal officials to move the (now homeless) population to the top of the list of those waiting for public housing. To put it differently, they were doing politics by other (obscure, clandestine) means. If these arsonists in Villa Cartón were doing politics by other obscure, clandestine means, then they were certainly not alone. But who were they and how did they became involved with work inside the gray zone of politics? Beyond the fact that they were probably grassroots activists, we can only speculate, but in the following account, we see up close and in striking detail how one man made a virtue out of the dirty work of politics, before his web of (in)visible connections caught up to him.

Making a Virtue out of the Necessity of Political Dirty Work “If you want to understand politics in Cutral-co you should talk with El Chofa. . . . Do you know who he is? He is quite a character. . . . You should talk with him.” That was what the former mayor of Cutral-co, an oil town in the Argentine Patagonia, said when the first author, during fieldwork in 2000 and 2001, asked him about the local political dynamics behind the recent episodes of protest. At that time, clandestine political practices and the invisible ties that sustain them were


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not the object of our attention and the importance of El Chofa’s story went unnoticed. But when we analytically revisited those field notes as a way to unearth the practices and connections from the gray zone of politics, the story of El Chofa immediately stood out. What follows, then, is a reconstruction of a string of events in the life of Justo Angel (a.k.a. El Chofa) Guzman, events that brought Chofa into the spotlight of media scrutiny and revealed his previously (largely) hidden connections with official politicos. As we will show, these (in) visible ties came to define who Chofa was, and it was because of these same ties that the mayor suggested that someone interested in knowing about politics in Cutral-co should talk to Chofa. On August 14, 1996, police raided the ranch of El Chofa in Plaza Huincul (a small town neighboring Cutral-co) after they got word that Piturro Aranda—a convicted murderer who had escaped from the local prison—was hiding there. According to the police, Piturro was a member of a gang—a superbanda headed by El Chofa—that smuggled drugs and weapons from Bolivia to Argentina. According to the attorney general who was the leading investigator in this case, El Chofa was, “the Czar of drugs and prostitution. . . . he was the number one criminal.” While the police found machine guns and other assorted weapons on the ranch, along with half a kilogram of cocaine, they did not find either Chofa or Piturro. The two had absconded minutes before the police arrived—thanks to a tip they received from members of the same police force that was trying to arrest them. A few days later, the local newspaper, La Mañana del Sur, in an article entitled, “Nobody wanted to capture El Chofa,” reported that, “El Chofa . . . may have been able to escape because some individuals in charge of arresting him dragged their feet.” Citing judicial sources, the newspaper reported that police agents “had more than one link with or knowledge about El Chofa.” The attorney general confirmed that this was the case, “Guzmán had contacts with low-level police agents.” Chofa’s contacts, however, did not stop at the lower ranks of the local police department. Along with the weapons and drugs found on his ranch, the police also found a cell phone that belonged to the local municipality where, the public would soon learn, El Chofa had been an employee for the past five years. This “top criminal” had been “the chauffeur, the bodyguard and even the confidant” of many a local politician and/or authority. In the words of journalists, state officials, and judicial personnel who were interviewed during that initial period of fieldwork, local officials and politicians relied on Chofa as an enforcer who could do their “dirty work”—work


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ranging from intimidating opponents, often through the use of physical attacks, to providing physical protection for allies and distributing drugs and alcohol to youth in exchange for their attendance at political rallies. “Chofa was well connected to men in power,” the former mayor of Cutral-co reported. “He was the chauffeur of Carlos Rosso [who later became the minister of government for the province], and he had a metallurgic shop that did jobs for the municipality. The kids that worked for him, some of them were public employees, and petty criminals who, during electoral campaigns, formed groups to paint walls and put up posters for the candidates.” When the first author initially interviewed him back in January 2001, the former mayor had already retired from politics, and without much at stake, he told, almost as a confession, the story of how he and “El Chofa” had met. The following exchange reveals in luminous form the intricacies of the gray zone and the pernicious ways in which clandestine connections are created and oftentimes, despite the best, or perhaps worst, intentions of public officials, maintained. Mayor: One of my closest collaborators was a good friend of Chofa, and he brought him to some of our meetings during the electoral campaign. I met him in one of those meetings, and since the very beginning, we got along quite well. He might have been an outcast [a marginal], but he was a good person. One day, close to the election, we were alone at my place—he used to stop by to drink mate—and he told me, ‘I will protect you, because you are going to win the election, and these sons of bitches (referring to the mayor’s opponents and Chofa’s former employers) will make your life hell. They really want to screw up you and your family. You have no idea of what they are capable of doing to you. But if they know I’m with you, they won’t bother you. I’m going to ask you only one thing: when you become the new Mayor, don’t let me out [no me dejés afuera]. If they see my car parked in front of your house, they won’t bother you, stay calm [quedate tranquilo].’ We won, and we gave him work (the municipality contracted with his shop). . . . Javier: Did you know who he was, what he was involved with, before you got in touch with him? Mayor: Yes, of course, but I’d rather have had him as a friend.

To put it simply, politicians such as the former mayor are, for better or worse, often in the position of making a virtue out of the necessity of gray zone connections; to them, it makes sense to have friends like Chofa.


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While Chofa was still a fugitive on the lam, his father was interviewed by reporters from a local paper, La Mañana del Sur (August 23, 1993, 12–13), and confirmed the rumors linking Chofa with prominent local politicians. Initially, Don Justo Guzmán was less than specific about the nature of Chofa’s political connections. He explained how he and his grandson had to care for Chofa’s ranch, which had turned into a state of disarray, now that Chofa was no longer around to tend to things there: “Many animals are dead, but we can’t find the receipts to be reimbursed for the works he did for Copelco (the local public services company) and for the municipality of Cutral-co, and to obtain the wages that the municipality of Plaza Huincul owes him.” Later in the interview, Don Justo became more explicit about Chofa’s political ties, “All his problems began when he got into politics, especially when he became a bodyguard. Chofa started when he was 16 or 17. All he did afterward was because of that environment.” Then, in quite unambiguous terms, he added, “Politicians always used him, now they will have to fix this mess.” “Chofa’s history,” his father concluded, “began with the MPN [the Movimiento Popular Neuquino, the governing party in the province] . . . [and] until recently he would go to barbecues with local politicians . . . estaban en la joda con los políticos. . . . He has been so involved in politics that someone [referring to a politician] should [eventually] solve this problem.” But politicians did not “solve this problem”—in part, because the mayor for whom Chofa had been working most recently had been impeached and his opponents (and Chofa’s) had assumed power. In fact, rumors had it that his former boss now wanted Chofa in jail, which is to say punished for having turned against him. On March 9, 1997, after an eight-month-long chase, Justo “el Chofa” Guzmán was apprehended by the local police after a chase, worthy of a major motion picture, through the Patagonian fields. During that chase, Chofa had tried to escape on his motorcycle but fell and badly injured his head. When the police found him, he had a gun and a rifle, and— according to the attorney general—“he told the cop who got him, ‘Please, brother, kill me.’ ” Notwithstanding the “sort of commotion” his arrest produced “in the local political environment” and the rumors that erupted thereafter suggesting that, “a big fish will go down now too” (La Mañana 1997: 16–17), no local politicians or officials were ever indicted for their (in)visble ties to El Chofa. The position Chofa held in the gray zone of Cultral-co’s politics was one riven with ambiguity. On the one hand, and as this tale has shown, he was incredibly well connected to the powers that be, but on the other


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hand, no officials would help Chofa in his current predicament, for to help him, would be to disclose their (in)visible connections to him. To underscore this ambiguity it is worth noting the irony in one final fact; the minister of government, Carlos Rosso, who was in charge of the local police who captured Chofa, is the same Carlos Rosso who was Chofa’s first political boss and for whom Chofa was chauffer. This time, the “most wanted man” in the state of Neuquén could not escape, but neither did any of the “very compromising secrets” that presumably would have implicated those in power (La Mañana 1997: 29). That Chofa had unknown connections to local political officials was an open secret in Neuquén; the purpose of those connections and the actions that were laundered through them were the subject of much public speculation but little was ever confirmed. The only ones who knew were those on the inside of politics—that is to say, inside the gray zone with Chofa. For many residents who were interviewed in 2000 and 2001 in Cutral-co and Plaza Huincul, El Chofa was a veritable Robin Hood (“When there was hunger, he would kill one of his cows and distribute beef for free”), a bandido who helped the poor but at the same time (and as many a bandido before him7), enjoyed well-oiled links with the powerful. Many people, including many former political officials, doubted that Chofa had ever been the drug lord depicted by the media—in fact, the former mayor still thinks that the drug charges were all a part of a conspiracy to penalize Chofa for the betrayal of his former boss. When one of us interviewed Chofa at his shop in March 2001, he had just been released from jail on probation. He and his employees were still manufacturing metal lampposts for the local municipal government, and he was understandably reluctant to talk. He denied any involvement in the drug trade but he did confirm—without going into any details and without naming who he had worked for—his father’s earlier statements about his role as someone who “took care of things [in local politics] when told [to do] so.” A detailed description of exactly what “things” he had “taken care of” was beyond the scope of the interview, but when the first author described what others had said (privately or publicly) about his actions (that he was a political enforcer; that he, at the direction of political elites, recruited youths for political protests and paid them for their participation with wine or marihuana), he smiled and said, “That’s possible, that sounds plausible.” How typical is this story? How locally representative is it? Any political analyst who looks closely at state actions (for example, examining how house evictions are carried out) and party activity (for


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example, empirically scrutinizing electoral campaigns in action) in Argentina will soon realize that the story of El Chofa is far from anomalous. For all its uniqueness, it is a story that brings into relief the obscure and obscured connections that operate in routine politics writ large.

From Clandestine Ties to Larger Episodes of Collective Violence The story of Chofa shows how (in)visible ties to official politicos and a willingness to carry out the dirty, (in)visible work of politics made one rather unofficial political actor indispensable to those politicos. Our third and last account of the gray zone demonstrates how these hidden links can play a significant role in activating a larger set of events—in this case, the episodes of collective violence that shook the country of Argentina for one week in December of 2001. Together with heightened elite factionalism, those events—the wave of food riots, road and bridge blockades, and demonstrations by thousands of protestors banging pots and pans together in one great cacophony of noise in the main plaza in Buenos Aires—led to the ousting of two presidents in less than a month.8 In the wave of collective violence in the week of December 14 to December 21—close to 300 stores were attacked or looted in 11 provinces. Twenty people died, all of them under the age of 35, with all of them either killed by police or by the storeowners themselves. Hundreds of others were seriously injured and thousands more were arrested. It was in the provinces of Entre Rios and Mendoza where the crowds of people first congregated to blockade roads or gathered in front of supermarkets or convenience stores, clamoring for food. And if they were rejected, the crowds would then enter the stores en masse, with force, looting them, and taking away whatever food and merchandise they could carry. Soon, the wave of road blockades and food riots extended to Santa Fe, Corrientes, Córdoba, Neuquén, Tucumán, Santiago del Estero, Chubut, Rio Negro, and Buenos Aires. But these episodes were far from spontaneous events that erupted by shear dint of hunger or moral frustration at poor material conditions brought on by large-scale structural adjustments, as they were often portrayed in the media. Here, as in the other accounts in this chapter, there were (largely) (in)visible connections at work that shaped this period of large-scale collective violence. To begin to understand what (in)visible connections were at work in these


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episodes, it is helpful to look more closely at the food riots that week. What types of stores were looted? Who was present at the lootings? Were police present? Based on a catalog of 289 food lootings culled from newspapers accounts: ●

●

●

●

●

●

Large chain supermarkets received ample police protection—protection that was generally successful in deterring looting. In areas where there were small, local markets, police rarely showed up. These markets suffered the bulk of the looting. Peronist party activists were likely to be present at small market lootings where there were few or no police. When big, chain supermarkets were looted, and activists were not present, the chances of police presence were statistically high. When small, local markets were looted and activists were present, the chances of police presence were very low. When the site of the looting was a small, local market, there was much greater activist activity and a much lower likelihood of police presence. (Auyero and Moran, 1341–67)

This apparent relationship between store type, police presence (or lack thereof) and activist participation was hardly a statistical anomaly—it was a product of the underlying (in)visible connections at work in these episodes—between Peronist activists, members of the local communities, and police. But just how did these connections work? One informant, Susana, a Peronist activist, sketches out the basic process: “We [the members of the party] knew about the lootings beforehand. Around 1 A.M. [the lootings began by noon] we knew that there was going to be a looting. We were told about them by municipal authorities, and we passed the information along [among the members of the party].” Our research has shown, that although some Peronist activists might have promoted the looting by recruiting their own followers, their main action seems to have been spreading news of the upcoming (lootings) opportunities, as Susana did. Peronist activists did not take their followers to the stores, nor could they control their actions. Instead, they passed out fliers and relied on the most (in)visible of networks—word of mouth in the local communities—to spread rumors about where the lootings would be. For example, Peronist activists distributed fliers throughout poor neighborhoods in Moreno, a district located in the suburbs of Buenos Aires, that invited residents to join the crowds that would go on to loot several dozen supermarkets and grocery stores on December 18


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and 19, 2001. One such flier read, “We invite you to destroy the Kin supermarket this coming Wednesday at 11:30 A.M., the Valencia supermarket at 1:30 P.M., and the Chivo supermarket at 5 P.M.” A report published in the main Argentine newspaper a year after the events sheds further light on how local citizens in the neighborhoods of Moreno and elsewhere throughout the city were recruited to participate in the food lootings. On December 18, Josefa, who lived in a small shack located in one of those neighborhoods, received a flyer that invited her to “bust” a group of markets. The next day, she showed up on time in front of Kin, and soon 200 people were all gathered in front of this small market clamoring for food. She recalls seeing a police car leaving the scene and a man who worked at the local municipality talking on his cellular phone. Shortly thereafter, a truck loaded with “un grupo de pesados” (or group of thugs), known in the neighborhood as “Los Gurkas,” arrived at the scene. “They broke the doors and called us in,” Josefa remembers. “A few days later, I met one of them, and he told me that people from the Peronist Party paid 100 pesos for the job.” In another poor enclave in Buenos Aires, one of the residents of the barrio Baires (located in the municipality of Tigre) received similar news, although this time she learned of the impending lootings from her son: “When my son arrived home from school, he told me that a man from the local Unidad Básica (the grassroots office of the Peronist Party) came to inform the teachers about the sites of the lootings. The teacher told my son that she was going to go. And we went to see if we could get something.” 9 Other than these two specific neighborhoods—one in Moreno and the other in Tigre—just where else would there be opportunities to loot? Where else did Peronist activists direct looters? The lootings “came” to areas populated not by large, chain supermarkets, but by small retail stores. These, Peronist activists knew, were “safe places” to loot—police would not be present and, if they were present, they would not act. The basic model is this: before the lootings had broken out and then again, once they had, Peronist activists passed word on to local citizens about what stores would be targeted and whether or not there would be police at those targets, thus communicating to the local citizens the feasibility of engaging in these otherwise risky practices.10 The first author, in June 2005, had an extensive conversation with Luis D’Elia, leader of the Federación de Tierra y Vivienda grassroots organization, about these events from December 2001. D’Elia lives in La Matanza, one of the most populated and poorest districts in metropolitan Buenos Aires, which is close to the crossroads of Crovara


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and Cristianía (C&C), a commercial area that was devastated during the food lootings of December 2001. D’Elia is particularly well-versed in the ins and outs of how to instigate (or prevent) large episodes of collective violence as his organization coordinated some of the largest and longest road blockades in 2000 and 2001 to protest the De la Rua administration (1999–2001). In our interview, he confirms, in the matter-of-fact language of one who knows how things get done in the gray zone of politics, our basic model of how Peronist activists coordinated the food lootings. They . . . did two sorts of things: some of them directed the looting. For lootings to occur there has to be a liberated territory. So, they moved the police away. And then they recruited people saying that they were going to loot. They did this from the Unidades Básicas [grassroots offices of the Peronist Party]. The guys from the Unidades Básicas populated the area of Crovara and Cristianía with their own people, as if they had been recruited for such a day. They moved the police away; the police usually have their patrols stationed here. That day, the police disappeared. And, at a certain time, they hurled the people against the stores . . .

Democracy and the Gray Zone The often (in)visible connections between established political actors, grassroots activists, and perpetrators of violence and political dirty work inside the gray zone of politics are a central element of the more visible world of official politics that most political analysts pay attention to. The gray zone is not a remnant of the past, nor should it be seen as alien or primitive. On the contrary, these clandestine connections and actions are a constitutive part of democracy. One grassroots leader interviewed about the 2001 Argentinean lootings put it this way: When officials and politicians talk about governability . . . what do you think they are talking about? Do you think they refer to their ability to pass a law in Congress? To have one or two more party members in the House? No. No way. Listen carefully. They are talking about the capacity to generate a big mess (un gran quilombo) in the Conurbano [metropolitan area surrounding the city of Buenos Aires]. That’s what they mean when they say governability.

The threat of collective violence, or in this leader’s words, “the capacity to generate a big mess in the Conurbano,” is part and parcel of everyday politics in contemporary Argentina. The episodes described


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in this chapter are hardly part of some dim, underdeveloped, and undemocratic past; they are an integral part of politicians’ and other political officials’ ways of doing and thinking about politics in posttransition to democracy Argentina (the interest and vehemence with which public officials talked to one of us about the 2001 lootings or about the arson in Villa El Cartón is evidence of this). What local political actors and those who do “dirty work” for them are (secretly) capable of doing (and not doing) is clearly vivid in the minds of average Argentinean politicos—and is something that they must actively take into account as they go through their daily comings and goings. The grassroots leader quoted above is referring to the power of disruption held by those political actors who have the ability to tap into these clandestine connections. For those politicos who have the willingness and social capital to use gray connections as a political tool, violence or even the threat thereof can be a way in which to challenge or perpetuate the power structures of institutionalized political life. After all, generating a “big mess,” as in the case of the 2001 lootings, led to the resignation of a president, and burning down a shantytown was the most direct means with which to contest a mayor’s plan to take over the allocation of state subsidies. Although it is difficult to precisely quantify the amount of leverage and/or political power political actors can gain through what Cloward and Piven term the “threat of disruption” (35), the episodes we describe above suggest that the power is considerable. Whether or not politicos are (viewed as being) directly responsible for acts in the gray zone (burning down a shantytown, creating opportunities for looting, attacking an opponent, etc.), the very fact that such acts do happen can still attest to, solidify, or even increase their power. If politicos are able to directly affect such events, without serious repercussions, then clearly they have power. But even if such events (appear to) happen spontaneously, without any of their direct involvement, politicos can still benefit from the occurrence of such events, and sometimes all the more so. Thus, the larger analytical implication of this chapter is that students of politics should pay sustained empirical attention to clandestine connections in their analysis of routine and contentious politics. The kind of politics most analysts see and discuss, the easily visible, “respectable,” and “civilized” sort, that which takes place in congresses, parliaments, and statehouses and enjoys widespread media attention, is bound to that obscure(d) and less visible gray zone of politics by countless clandestine, illicit, relationships that help to conceal much of where the political action really is. If our tools of political inquiry are to match the on-the-ground reality of everyday


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political practice, clandestine connections between established political actors and perpetrators of violence should neither be excluded from serious theoretical consideration nor from rigorous, albeit often challenging, empirical scrutiny. Visible state-society relations are undoubtedly important to the quality of democracy in posttransition Latin America and elsewhere; but so too are the hidden and clandestine links between official and informal political actors that are used to keep backstage political productions, to borrow from Goffman, backstage. Empirical work needs to examine the reasons why actors choose to operate within the gray zone, the ways in which they learn about it, and the mechanisms and processes involved in its emergence and perpetuation. One may hypothesize that political actors may establish clandestine relations in order to pursue “goals not considered publicly acceptable,”11 in a fashion similar to how other informal institutions are created. But only intensive fieldwork can unearth the diversity of reasons (and the specific strategies and competences) behind the operation and activation of these clandestine relationships. Only observation in real time and space can lead to explanations of how actors learn about (most likely, through “trial and error”) the importance, and even as many informants have described it, the “need” to tap into these (in)visible connections (as the only available way to “get things done”—to evict illegal squatters, to put pressure on a state dependency, etc). Observation in real time and space will also help to reveal the factors that shape both the supply of and demand for gray acts and the actors to carry them out. However, understanding and explaining why actors engage in this specific mode of political behavior, how they experience it, and how they learn about it, is insufficient to explain the emergence and (continued) existence of the gray zone. We must also concentrate our attention on the mechanisms and processes (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly, 2001) that, above and beyond actors’ consciousness, give birth to and sustain the gray zone. Here the focus of our attention should be on the dynamic interactions between actors inside and outside the polity and between informal and formal institutions (the judicial system being prominent among the latter), and particularly on brokerage—understood as the “forging of social connections between previously unlinked persons or sites” (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly, 2008). Forming these connections between previously unlinked actors, from different regions of social space and different positions within the political field, is a crucial mechanism for explaining the origins and perpetuation of the gray zone. This is especially so, if,


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as our preliminary research seems to suggest, long-term, albeit often informal, links expand out of initial clandestine connections. Here issues of publicity (or lack thereof), accountability (or lack thereof), and (selective) law enforcement should become prominent objects of analysis. Finally, just as it is not enough for social scientists to simply focus on the visible and often (more) “civilized” forms of politics, so too is not enough for them to now simply incorporate this other more invisible and often “tawdry” side of politics into their analysis. Their analytical instruments must also be attuned to the ever-changing relationship between these different forms of politics; they must also focus on what we might call the division of labor between these different modes of political operation. Rather than moral exhortation or comparisons between more or less “developed” democracies, the object of analysis should be on the varying social conditions that shape the continual shift between more and less (in)visible forms of governmentality whereby power disguises itself in its various forms. Here again a focus on the mechanisms, processes, and conditions under which various forms of gray acts and gray connections are activated and how they are chosen over more “official” means is well deserved. Are they chosen simply because other means are politically harmful or are their other considerations at play?

Sober Political Analysis When faced with much, if not most, of the research on both routine and contentious politics, one is reminded of Abraham Kaplan’s story of the “drunkard searching under a street lamp for his house key, which he had dropped some distance away. Asked why he didn’t look where he had dropped it, he replied ‘It’s lighter here!’ ”12 For all too long, political science and political sociology have been shying away from the nitty-gritty details of politics, its implicit meanings, its dayto-day intricacies, and its informal practices.13 Relying on familiar methodological tools such as surveys, secondary data (usually culled from newspapers), formal modeling, and statistical approaches, they have been stuck looking “under the street lamp” for too long, and in so doing, they have missed an important dimension of how politics, to paraphrase the title of Ledeneva’s insightful book on post-Soviet Russia, “really works.” This chapter is hardly the place to carry out a “sociology of” the intellectual practices of political sociologists and political scientists, but let us simply speculate about two potential reasons that might


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explain this lack of attention to (and interest in) clandestine connections. First, across the spectrum of political research, there appears to be what Stathis Kalyvas calls an “epistemic preference” (480) for data that is easily codeable over data that is “messy.” For example, if one glances at the issues of the American Journal of Political Science and the American Political Science Review from 1996 to 2005, it is hard to arrive to at any other conclusion than there is a distinct epistemic preference for the “codeable” over the “messy.” Out of a total number of 569 and 369 articles, respectively, only one relied on ethnography as a data-production technique (Soss 1999). Second, and closely related to the first, is the general absence of an ethnographic tradition in political studies that might also account for this disregard. As McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly (2008) recently asserted in reference to the study of collective action, “compared to other techniques, scholars have made relatively little use of ethnographic methods to systematically interrogate the dynamics of contention, despite the fact that the strength of the method is its attentiveness to process.” One would expect that ethnography, a mode of inquiry based on the “close-up, on-the-ground observation of people and institutions in real time and space, in which the investigator embeds herself near (or within) the phenomenon so as to detect how and why agents on the scene act, think and feel the way they do” (Wacquant 2003), would be one of the preferred tools among those for whom the study of politics is their profession. After all, ethnography is uniquely equipped to look microscopically at the foundations of political institutions and their attendant sets of routines and rituals, just as it is ideally suited to explain why political actors behave the way the do and to identify the causes, mechanisms, processes, and outcomes that are part and parcel of everyday political life. But here, as with many other scholarly matters, common sense serves as a less than reliable guide. Disciplines, after all, discipline; sociologists and political scientists are, for the most part, trained to examine politics from a specific perspective, with varying substantive interests and (not so unstable) methodological strategies—strategies that tend to screen out as inconsequential or anecdotal events that occur or are made possible by connections outside the bounds of official politics, such as those described in this chapter. By and large, students of politics are not following the ageold advice given by Robert Park’s to then nascent Chicago school sociologists; they are not going out and getting the “the seat of their pants dirty” in the grassroots offices of political parties, and in the shantytowns and other informal settlements; nor are they hanging


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out with low-level party activists, cops, enforcers, and other key (but subordinated) actors in the political field. If there is one methodological lesson to be gleaned from this chapter, it is that in order to understand and explain the political makings of collective violence, we must pay closer attention to the often (in)visible relationships between state officials, party operatives, and perpetrators of violence. By their very nature, these relationships are obscure and political necessities often dictate their active obscurement so that it is incumbent on those of us who are students of politics to, in the words of the grassroots leader quoted above, learn how to “listen (and to look) carefully.” It is ethnographic research that is equipped to listen and look carefully, and it is ethnographic research that can excavate in vivo the political dynamics that both create and sustain the need for such (in)visible connections and (in)visible acts. But, as our reconstruction of these three moments from contemporary political life in Argentina should illustrate, political scientists and political sociologists cannot and should not dig alone. It is our firm belief that in identifying, describing, and explaining the specific set of practices and relationships that define the gray zone of politics, we should enlist the help of other observers and analysts outside the limited (and limiting) boundaries of academia. These should include most notably, at least based on our experiences, investigative reporters and state prosecutors who can oftentimes—thanks to their own set of often (in)visible connections—guide us into this still relatively unknown and understudied realm of politics, as long as we follow their path with the proper epistemological vigilance. Yes, this gray zone of politics is not as well lit as the other more official side politics is, but if we are to discover the root causes of collective violence and to arrive at a more comprehensive and superior analysis of politics in general, we have no choice but to move out from under the street lamp into the grayer areas beyond.

Notes 1 Funding for this research was provided by a grant from the National Science Foundation (PI: Javier Auyero, Award No. 0739217). 2. United Nations Human Settlements Programme, The Challenge of Slums: Global Report on Human Settlements (London and Sterling, VA: Earthscan, 2003). 3. The ethnographic component of this paper is based not on ethnographic revisits but on “analytic revisits”; that is, what Burawoy calls ethnographic reanalysis, “which involves the interrogation of an already existing ethnography without any further fieldwork” (646). In other


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4. 5.

6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

J av i e r Au y e r o a n d M at t h e w M a h l e r words, we did not go back to the different field sites; instead, we jointly revisited the data (field notes, interviews, and newspaper accounts) collected by the first author. See Michael Burawoy, “Revisits: An Outline of a Theory of Reflexive Ethnography,” American Sociological Review 68, no. 5 (2003): 646–79. See, for example, Das ed. (1990); and particularly the chapter by Farida Shaheed. For further evidence on the Colombian case, see also Braun’s (1980) study of the violence during the 1948 Bogotazo that followed the assassination of liberal leader Gaitán. A fact that was confirmed by virtually everyone the first author interviewed about this case. See, for example, Joseph (1990) and Blok (2001). President De la Rua governed from May 1999 until December 2001 when he resigned in the midst of the unprecedented politicoeconomic crisis and mass protests. A quick succession of three different presidents (all belonging to the Peronist Party) ended when Duhalde, a former governor of Buenos Aires, was elected by the Parliament to become interim president. Summarized from Gerardo Young, “La Trama Política de los Saqueos,” Clarín Digital, December 19, 1991. Signaling, a crucial mechanism in the generation of collective violence, was at work. See McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly (2001). Helmke and Levitsky, 730. Quoted in Bourdieu, Chamboredon, and Passeron (1991): 9. For recent exceptions see Ledeneva (2006), Baiocchi (2005), and Volkov (2002).

References Abu-Lughod, Janet L. Race, Space, and Riots in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. New York: Oxford U P, 2007. Print. Arias, Desmond. Drugs and Democracy in Rio de Janeiro. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2006. Print. Astorga, Luis. El Siglo de las Drogas. Mexico: Plaza & Janés, 2005. Print. Auyero, Javier, and Tim Moran. “The Dynamics of Collective Violence: Dissecting Food Riots in Contemporary Argentina.” Social Forces 85, no.3 (2007): 1341–67. Print. Baiocchi, Gianpaolo. Militants and Citizens: The Politics of Participatory Democracy in Porto Alegre. Stanford, CA: Stanford U P, 2005. Print. Blok, Anton. Honor and Violence. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. Print. Bourdieu, Pierre, Jean-Claude Chamboredon, and Jean-Claude Passeron, The Craft of Sociology: Epistemological Preliminaries. New York: DeGruyter, 1991. Print. Brass, Paul. Theft of an Idol. Princeton, NJ: Princeton U P, 1997. Print.


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Braun, Herbert. The Assassination of Gaitán: Public Life and Urban Violence in Colombia. Madison: U Wisconsin P, 1980. Print. Burawoy, Michael. “Revisits: An Outline of a Theory of Reflexive Ethnography.” American Sociological Review 68, no.5 (2003): 646–79. Print. Clarín. April 17, 2007. Print. Clarín. August 29, 2007. Print. Cloward, Richard A., and Fox Piven, Frances. Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail. New York: Random House, 1979. Print. Cuñarro, Monica. Informe Fiscalia Federal. Buenos Aires: August 20, 2007. Print. Das, Veena. ed. Mirrors of Violence: Communities, Riots, and Survivors in South Asia. Oxford: Oxford U P, 1990. Print. Goldstein, Donna. Laughter Out of Place: Race, Class, and Sexuality in a Rio Shantytown. Berkeley: U of California P, 2003. Print. Gunst, Laurie. Born Fi’Dead: A Journey through the Jamaican Posse Underworld. New York: Henry Holt & Co, 1995. Print. Helmke, Gretchen, and Stephen Levitsky. “Informal Institutions and Comparative Politics.” Perspectives in Politics 2 (2004): 725–40. Print. Hochstetler, Kathryn, and Elisabeth Jay Friedman. “Assessing the Third Transition in Latin American Democratization: Representational Regimes and Civil Society in Argentina and Brazil.” Comparative Politics 35, no. 1 (2002): 21–42. Print. Joseph, Gilbert M. “On the Trail of Latin American Bandits: A Reexamination of Peasant Resistance.” Latin American Research Review 25, no. 3 (1990): 7–53. Print. Kakar, Sudhir. The Colors of Violence: Cultural Identities, Religion, and Conflict. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996. Print. Kalyvas, Stathis N. “The Ontology of ‘Political Violence’: Action and Identity in Civil Wars.” Perspectives on Politics 1 (2003): 475–94. Print. “Nadie quiso capturar a El Chofa.” La Mañana del Sur. August 20, 1996: 16. Print. La Mañana del Sur. August 23, 1996: 12–13. Print. ———. March 10, 1997: 16–17. Print. ———. March 10, 1997: 29. Print. Ledeneva, Alena. How Russia Really Works. Ithaca, NY: Cornell U P, 2006. Mauss, Marcel. “A Category of the Human Mind: The Notion of a Person, the Notion of a Self” in The Category of the Person, ed. Michael Carrithers, Steven Collins, and Steven Lukes. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1985. Print. McAdam, Doug, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly. Dynamics of Contention. New York: Cambridge U P, 2001. Print. ———. “Methods for Measuring Mechanisms of Contention,” Qualitative Sociology 31 (2008): 307–31. Print.


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Patterson, Orlando. “The Roots of Conflict in Jamaica.” New York Times, January 23, 2001; May 1, 2008. Web Roldán, Mary. Blood and Fire: La Violencia in Antioquia, Colombia, 1946 – 1953. Durham, NC: Duke U P, 2002. Print. Shaheed, Farida. “The Pathan-Muhajir Conflicts, 1985–6: A National Perspective.” In Mirrors of Violence: Communities, Riots and Survivors in South Asia, ed. Veena Das. Oxford: Oxford U P 1990. 194–214. Print. Soss, Joe. “Lessons of Welfare: Policy Design, Political Learning, and Political Action.” American Political Science Review 93 (1999): 363–80. Print. Tilly. Charles. “Describing, Measuring, and Explaining Struggle,” Qualitative Sociology 31, no. 1 (2008): 1–13. Print United Nations Human Settlements Programme. The Challenge of Slums: Global Report on Human Settlements. London and Sterling, VA: Earthscan, 2003. Print. Volkov, Vadim. Violent Entrepreneurs: The Use of Force in the Making of Russian Capitalism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell U P, 2002. Print. Wacquant, Loic. “Ethnografeast: A Progress Report on the Practice and Promise of Ethnography.” Ethnography 4 (2003): 5–14. Print. Wilkinson, Steven. Votes and Violence: Electoral Competition and Ethnic Riots in India. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 2004. Print. Young, Gerardo. “La Trama Política de los Saqueos.” Clarín Digital, December 19, 1991. Web.


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F u e r t e A pac h e Cristian Alarcón

Introductory Note This text was originally published as two different chronicles in November 2008 in the magazine Revista C. On October 28 of that same year, the (gendarme) national guardsman Antonio Centeno was killed in the neighborhood Ejército de los Andes, better known as Fuerte Apache. This neighborhood is located in Ciudadela, a few blocks from General Paz, a highway that divides Greater Buenos Aires——the metropolitan area that consists of 30 municipal districts—from the capital city itself. Approximately 35,000 people live in the 3,777 apartments located in the Fuerte Apache. The National Guard (Gendarmería Nacional) has occupied this neighborhood since November 14, 2003, with the stated purpose of “improving security.” The National Guard is a security force of military origins that reports to the Argentinean Ministry of Justice, Security, and Human Rights. The occupation was originally to last 90 days but thousands of residents signed a petition asking President Néstor Kichner to allow los verdes or los tortugas ninja (ninja turtles), as the national guardsmen are commonly known, to remain in the neighborhood. In the first chronicle, Cristian Alarcón describes daily life in this land of urban relegation. At this time, the chronicler was unaware of the twist that the death of a national guardsman would have. In the second part of the story, originally published several days later, one of the possible plot lines behind the death of the guardsman is revealed. The urban chronicler offers the reader one of those rare opportunities to witness, almost in real time and space, the relational and honorific character of a seemingly meaningless act of violence. The meaning of violence, as the chronicle suggests, is usually hidden from view, deep inside a complex judicial web. Javier Auyero


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C r i s t i a n A l a r c ón

El Barrio Fuerte Entering the neighborhood is not scary. As usual in these cases, a woman accompanied the reporter and photographer all over the place, through the labyrinth-like corners, introducing them to other women, working parents and children, petty criminals, teachers, and the numerous children who live in the Ejército de los Andes neighborhood, or Padre Mujica, “badly named Fuerte Apache,” as everyone you talk to insists. Two days of observation and sweet mates.1 The complex mosaic of poverty and violence has a single background sound: thousands of children playing among the noisy buildings. As in any other area of Greater Buenos Aires, the southern suburbs of the capital, some pockets are well-lit and safe, while others are dark and deteriorated. While some people are boarding the buses at five in the morning to go to work, others are recruiting 14-year-old youth into gangs with an initial beating. Some of these kids are forming a reggae band, while others are stealing “for the pot” (“para parar la olla”), declaring, “We are not at war with the guardsmen. We hate them and we have guns (fierros) to take them down. But it is not in our best interest.” Beneath the prejudices that everything in Fuerte Apache is either chaos or hell, another reality arises in each conversation. Death is not what prevails but rather an increasingly complex regulation of violence. The salary distribution separates the poor, the very poor, and the indigent. Alongside a nice pair of sneakers are the feet of a girl whose toes come out of her own pair, which is at least one size too small. The same thing occurs with violence. When the guardsmen break into buildings 12 and 13, they do it precisely because supposedly this is where the more experienced and better-armed youths live. These kids live near the monoblocks where on October 28 the guardsman Antonio Centeno was killed. Even though several kids were arrested, no one knows who did it. The guards restrain themselves, pushing the youth against the wall and kicking them in their ankles, knowing that most of these youth work eight hours a day and hang out at night to play tennis and smoke a joint in La Isla. La Isla is what they call the vacant lot where the rubble still remains from the explosion of two ten-story buildings that took place exactly eight years ago. All of this in spite of the shock and anger of the 300 families who used to live there.

Violent from Before The violence in the neighborhood has its own history. The Ejército de los Andes originated with two dictatorships, those of Onganía


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and the Juntas.2 The first people arrived from the villas porteñas, the shantytowns of Buenos Aires; they were brought there by the authorities who wanted to erase these “unrepresentables” from la villa 31 from the map.3 Those older than 36 remember. They came in buses. “We arrived and they told us ‘take an apartment,’ ” says Madera, a well-known figure in the neighborhood. Madera won a trial granting him permission to enter the United States to visit his family and also appeared on the cover of Viva magazine. Everyone ran up the building tower, carrying their belongings on their heads. Madera and his family grabbed a three bedroom on the first floor. The residents of the towers came in waves, as little by little the buildings were completed. In 1973. In 1976. In 1983. Perón inaugurated those of 1973. A few of them still keep their photos with the General. “The worst came with buildings 11, 12, 13—the tallest ones, with 12 floors. This is where those who did the dirty work for the military took refuge when they could see that democracy was on its way,” says a puntero, who does not want his name to appear in this article.4 But not many of them stayed. Rumor has it that they went looking for more comfortable places when the democracy needed their services. A bad reputation—this neighborhood knows well—is a stain not easily removed. Perhaps José de Zer, a famous reporter for the old sensationalist Channel 9, did not count on this. De Zer arrived one evening to cover a shoot-out. The Chilenos, a small gang that grew stronger at the beginning of the 1990s, were resisting a raid by the Buenos Aires police (known as “la Bonarense”), which had begun gassing them. Impressed by the shooting, De Zer coined the baptismal stigma, Fuerte Apache (Fort Apache), the name by which the neighborhood would be forever known. The view of the deteriorating towers from the highway that leads to Ezeiza is enough to confirm it. The very idea of 30,000 people living in these stew-like conditions is disturbing, just like the favelas (shantytowns) located a few blocks from the beaches of Ipanema. But this is not an example of favelization, which is a term used in sociology and among violence researchers to imply absolute territorial control by a narco organization. The so-called Fuerte Apache returned to the front page of the newspapers when buildings 8 and 9 were demolished on November 2, 2000. That day the crowd was divided in two. On one side, a group of dyed-blond Peronist brokers applauded the thunderous explosion. On the other, a group of youths with faces wrapped in T-shirts launched themselves with stones against the police. After the collapse of their homes, these kids had relocated with their families to shantytown shacks in exchange for 22,000 pesos per family. Neighbors


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walked around what remained of their homes, observing the small details and mourning their loss. During the ensuing years violence skyrocketed with the rising poverty. Gangs fought battles that left daily victims. The Backstreet Boys reigned for a time, until most were killed in fights or imprisoned. In 2004, in the midst of one of the cyclical “waves of insecurity,” the government decided to replace the Bonarense, the local police that had been guarding the neighborhood, with the federal National Guard.

La Isla Around the entryway where guardsman Centeno was killed is La Isla. There is Madera, who introduces us to five young men and two young women who read and comment on the newspaper in the middle of the green grass field that they also cut and clean. Facundo, an impeccably groomed young man in cargo pants and a collared shirt who works in an auto shop, reads La Nación, where an article published a week ago asserts that this is the most dangerous place in the country.5 One might think this is the old strategy of reading the enemy. But these youth, who number ten, and soon become twenty, do not think that way. Actually, of the ten that have voted, almost all went for the PRO or for Lilita.6 Consistent with their situation, these youth ask for order. “Even though the guardsmen now beat us to a pulp for no reason, we prefer that they stay, because before they came, there were dead here every day. They take care of the older people,” says Juan, a vegetable seller in the Villa del Parque. “I was going to study, almost two weeks ago. We had been eating homemade bread,” says P., a 20-year-old, unemployed since they fired him from his job as food distributor. “At least five or six guardsmen came with batons to hit people with. They have helmets, and that armor which make them look like Ninja Turtles. They tell you, ‘Don’t look at me. Look down. Drop to the floor. Don’t look at me so and so idiot,’ and then they empty out everything you have in your pockets. If there is money, depending on the guardsman, he might keep it. If not, they take the drugs and give you back everything else.” P.’s story is told again and again in various forms among the group. Details common to all include the order not to look, the military boots cruelly kicking their ankles, and the verbal denigration—techniques all used methodically. This is not about fatal violence, like that inflicted by the death squadrons of the Bonarense police, which killed youths under false pretenses. It’s what the neighbors describe


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as “the ways of these dark brutes that come from the countryside and don’t know anything.” Mutual discrimination occurs as a defensive/offensive practice. The uniformed poor and civilians look at each other with suspicion, armed not only with metal rods, but also with prejudices that trigger an onslaught of insults. “Murderous thieves” (chorros asesinos), on one side. “Brute Indians” (indios brutos), on the other. In fact, the harassed youths are the sons of other migrants from the interior: from Corrientes, Santiago, Salta, Jujuy, Formosa, Chaco, Misiones, Tucumán. The youths from La Isla vindicated themselves as laborers. A few of them—the sharper-looking ones—slyly smile when the talk turns to petty theft. A trained eye recognizes them. Smartly and fast, they let their law-abiding friends talk. One must advance deep into the neighborhood to hear the voices of the young robbers. The bonds of friendship shared here among these youth are stronger than those portrayed in beer commercials. They get together every evening when they get off work to do something that is thought to be exclusive of the chetos:7 play tennis. Several carry their own rackets. They have problems with the courts. Crossing an unnamed street there is a puntero who charges them 25 pesos an hour to rent a court covered with dirt. Now they are in the shadow of a metal dumpster that was abandoned in a field as reminder of something that never was. The 500 sq.m. space where the CIC—Integral Community Center—was going to be built remains empty. “The federal government gave the money, but the municipal government spent it. When they had it again, the project had been canceled and they returned the money, but the dumpster stayed behind,” explains Miguel Ojeda, one of the social leaders of the neighborhood; this week he circulated a letter asking the media to stop stigmatizing them. Directors of ten schools representing the heart of the district signed the letter—two junior highs, three preschools, a complementary educational center, plus four elementary schools, the San Antonio parish, the small health clinic, and the neighborhood Recuperation Assembly.

Brutes or Corrupt Within these 25 acres the streets have no names. Finding the entrances from the outside is the easy part. At each entrance there is a security post. Within each post are between three and five uniformed men. The guards do not look like those who walk in the neighborhood;


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they wear military clothes and have heavy weapons. They say that after ten o’clock at night, the Special Forces—known as the “helmeted” (cascudos)—come out. But for now, at sunset, all is childhood and youth. Within the neighborhood there is a shantytown. To get there one has to walk between two of the three-story buildings or monoblocks, connected by ladders that also serve as bridges. Between two ladders, another group of youth hangs out. Hardly anyone works. “We go out to work,” one laughs. It is something very different. In plain language, after testing the chronicler with poignant questions, they confess that they live from robbery. “I know that I have to take care of myself,” says one youth, who out of respect does not drink wine when I am talking to him. He keeps another tetra out of sight.8 “From what?” “Here inside, nothing. When I go out to steal, I have to take care of myself . . . “ “I provide for the house. I buy stuff. I control myself with cash. I mean, I only steal when I need to, when one of my brothers needs shoes. With what is left, I get a bit high. I have a good time.” “Where do you go?” “Nowhere. I am not going to go spend 80 pesos on only two alcohol jugs. I prefer to buy something here inside and share it with my friends.” “Do you go out like that?” “No, I go out careta.9 I am not going to give myself away. If I shoot, it is because I want to, not because I’m high. I am 19. I began working at 14. I have been caught only twice.” Pedro stops the conversation to ask his own questions. He does so lucidly. “You must be used to being in places that are very different. You must have several personalities.” He leaves me speechless. I think and then respond, “Yes, last week I was on a work trip at a very expensive hotel. I did not dress the same to be there as I dress here. I am sure I did not speak the same way. Just like you, when you go out to steal.” Pedro smiles. A friend passes by in the shadows. You can scarcely hear him, “Be careful, the guardsmen are around.” This is how the local security systems work. A warning can prevent a beating. “Some guardsmen, the stupidest ones te verduguean [mistreat you]. I mess with them [los verdugueo] because I know a bit about


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human rights. And if you talk to them, they understand. They put me against the wall and pulled my arms behind my back until they almost broke them. I complained and one of their bosses came. They let me go.” “Up to what grade did you study?” “I would like to redo ninth grade. My teachers barely came because they hardly got paid.” “Do you think they killed the guardsman to avenge the mistreatment?” “Here, if we want to make war with the guardsmen, they would lose.” “Why?” “Because we have guns, but it’s not what we want. They take care of the elders. At least they do that. Before it was anyone and now they only hit us.” “Why?” “Because there is no community. Everyone looks out for oneself. No one agrees. Here, each one has to earn the respect of others.” Next to Pedro there is a cardboard collector and his son of about eight years old meticulously collecting and arranging their merchandise. One of the youth in the group agrees to talk about the other face of the security in the zone: the Bonaerense police. “The police also beat you?” “No, they want money. They grab you, put you in the police car, and say, ‘What have you got?’ They are all corrupt. The guardsmen are stupid, but not corrupt.” “How is that?” “To let you go, they ask you for money. The other day there were three of us. We explained to them, ‘We just went to work, we don’t have anything.’ We had to pool our money. We gather 120 pesos. With 120 you fix them. But what they care about the most are the guns. We gave them the cash and the guns and they asked us, ‘OK, where do you want us to drop you off?’ and they brought us all the way here.”

Mothers In an apartment a group of women—friends of the guide for this story—agree to have a long and detailed talk as long as I do not identify them. We sit in the living-dining area. I am supposed to sleep on the long sofa tonight if the husband lets me. For Mari everything is


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fine; she wants me to go out to walk the last round with her at midnight, visit some girlfriends, and then hit the sack at about 2 A.M. She wants me to see that nothing happens, that the stories of incessant shooting are a media myth, that the police chief lies when he says that 90 percent of the neighbors are robbers. The apartment walls are decorated with family pictures. The main area is furnished with a stereo and a case full of trophies. Mari works as a domestic worker in several homes around the city. She has two boys that became soccer players, hence the trophies. Her teenage daughter is studying to be a teacher but she had to switch schools when they found out she lived in the Fuerte Apache. “The address issue is hard. They discriminate against you a lot, but my daughter told me, ‘No mom, I don’t have any reason to lie and say that I live somewhere else like many others do. I am proud to be from here, I’d rather start from zero.’ ” It is hard for them to admit, at the beginning, that they have problems with their teenagers. They talk about a friend’s experience, a sister-in-law, a sister. Tati, from Tucumán, with ten kids, 50 years old and a body of a 40-year-old, says that the problem is when the younger ones think they must follow the example of the ones who dress better. She found her 15-year-old smoking a joint and spanked him. Afterward, she swore and gave a punch to the door so that he would understand that he would be next. “What! Why are you are so protective!” the kid told her. “Yes, I have to be, stupid, if not you’d kill yourself,” Tati bluntly replied. “They see us mothers like the bad ones,” Marta laments, with six children of her own.

As a solution, Tati decided to threaten him—if he kept consuming drugs, he would have to move in with his father, who lives in the neighborhood but abandoned his parental responsibilities a long time ago. It was an effective remedy. At least the boy never let himself get caught again. All the women agree that the guardsman’s death was a shame. All of them insist that what is important is that their youngsters study. All of them lament being singled out for where they live. But what are the main problems in this neighborhood? Why is it in the line of fire for politicians and the media alike? In a heartbeat, I hear, “It is a lie that there are 30 small gangs. The youth are not organized. The ones who are organized are the older ones, the adults. They are the ones recruiting kids, even very young ones, for their business. First


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they beat them up, as a form of initiation. I have seen how they beat a 14-year-old. They hit him with the boy’s own apparent consent, who after surviving the beating begins to climb up the gang ladder. It is not that the kids get involved in crime by themselves. It’s that they do it as employees of these adults. That is the hardest part.” A mother of a large family, silent to this point, adds what she thinks is the worst of the ills, “The punteros that were corrupted by the local council members. They brought the materials to make a plaza not to far from here. Where is the plaza? What happened with the materials? One of them kept them.” “In the Villa Matienzo (inside the neighborhood) the government sent everything: pipes, cement, everything to develop, to install sewers, to improve the mess that is the sanitary system. Everything was left halfway done,” says Mari. “There are council members who came out of these neighborhoods and are now wealthy. They own construction businesses and they make deals with those in charge of the municipal infrastructure,” says another one. “But you can’t say this; you might stop receiving the little they send us now.” There are all sorts of social programs in the neighborhood. According to the people, there is the Heads of Household program, now called the Family Plan, whose contributions vary from 150 to 180 pesos depending on the number of children. There is PEC (Community Employment Program). There is also the Plan Seguro, which includes some kind of educational activity, as well as several other unemployment programs, such as Plan Piquetero and Barrios Bonaerenses. Hints of clientelism abound. With the exception of the Assembly for the Recovery of the Neighborhood, no other collective project attempts have been made. “No. We greatly miss the Public Safety project that was cut when (the governor Daniel) Scioli took office,” says Tati. Traces remain throughout the neighborhood of that initiative implemented by the Ministry of Public Safety during the previous administration. It was called the Program of Citizenship and Inclusion Barrio Padre Mujica. On the ministry’s Web page there is still an initial report by a team of 15 social science experts. In it they recount their surprise when they first went in. None of the experts were attacked during the year and a half they spent working in the supposedly most dangerous territory in the country. Later they discovered that the neighborhood was one of the most integrated of the


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Greater Buenos Aires suburbs. They also discovered that a “majority” of those living there have various occupations, especially in the metallurgical industry, in sales, and in the service industry. Many of the distributors, salespeople, store helpers, maids, and cleaning staff for the city of Buenos Aires come from the Fuerte Apache. In the group of women that gathered around Mari’s table, only two do not have formal jobs. They work from home. They assemble plastic buckles. If they assemble a thousand a day, they make between 12 and 14 pesos. The neighborhood is lacking in many areas. Walking down her alleys and streets at midnight on the first day with Mari, what is most striking is the huge list of projects that were never completed. As if in the so-called war being waged here, the biggest holes are not being left by bullets but by the state itself.

The Grey Zone By the second evening in the neighborhood I am still without accommodations. A few neighbors would offer their homes, but they do not have enough room. Others, men and women, consult their partners, who refuse out of precaution. If the guardsmen are hated by the youth for their beatings, we journalists are detested by the whole population. This week a television crew came in to film, in coordination with a group of leaders, but they were thrown out when the story began with the classic, “We are in the most dangerous neighborhood of the conurbano.” The photographer looks for a terrace to shoot a panoramic photo. It seems impossible, until Nino Aguilera, a well-known shirt maker, approaches us. Not only does he want us to witness the sunset from a good spot, but he also wants us to go to his apartment. He bought it in 1996 and paid 10,000 pesos, that is to say, 10,000 dollars in one to one times (10,000 dollars back when the exchange rate was one dollar to one peso).10 Looking out on the city, the man talks about the past: “In the lootings of 2001, the neighborhood played a key role,” Javier Auyero explains it in his book Routine Politics and Violence in Argentina (2007).11 Violence was coordinated from December 19 onward, like it can only be done in a society strained between Bonaerense police and the Peronist Party members. They protected the (large supermarket) Coto with the mounted police.12 In contrast, the TV stations filmed for posterity’s sake, the looting of the grocery store owned by a Chinese migrant who lost almost all of his merchandise.


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Mario, a kid with a hat and hip-hop look, comes to the terrace. He and five of his friends have formed a reggae band, Fyah. A year and a half ago he bought himself an apartment on the tenth floor. He paid 23,000 pesos. He’s happy. It’s the best building in the complex; the only one that has a door with a lock and where the elevator works— with an elevator man. Each owner pays 20 pesos for expenses. He now works at the Zanella factory assembling motorcycles. And he rehearses. His bandmate, Ezequiel, who plays the keyboard, lost his job in the supermarket when they asked him to work Saturday evenings extra. He was unwilling to leave the band, his only passion. They know that with their music they are swimming against the massive cumbia current, the most popular music. That makes them brave. They have gone through worse times. That is why they defend the presence of the guardsmen. In the shootings of the old small gangs, Mario lost a friend, el Honguito Gonzáles, who was 17. The ambulance did not arrive. He had to carry his dead body in a cop car.

The Ninja Turtles The tension with the guardsmen can be felt in darkness of Friday night. Between the dirty walls of one of the monoblocks, the light of a flashlight moves as if someone is looking for something. It looks like one of those huge floodlights they turn on in jails when someone escapes. One can make out the silhouettes of the Ninja Turtles forming a troop of six; hidden between them go two television cameramen. The guardsmen advance with their mouths closed and long rifles in hand. Just like that, without saying a word, they signal to the young men they approach to get against the wall. They force them to put their hands up, open their legs and proceed to pat them down. Soon after, they continue their surveillance round; they go up the stairs of building 1, where Carlitos Tevez grew up.13 In between the buildings, the little kids play soccer. Maybe among them there is another Carlitos. Translated by Pamela Neumann and Gabriela Polit Dueñas

Notes 1. Mate is a very common beverage in Argentina. Sweet mate is commonly consumed among poor people because it prevents you from feeling hungry. 2. The author is referring to the dictatorships of General Juan Carlos Onganía (1966–70) and of the Military Juntas (1976–83).


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3. The Villa 31 is one of the oldest and most typical shantytowns in the city of Buenos Aires. 4. Puntero is a grassroots political broker, usually working for the Peronist Party. 5. La Nación is a newspaper traditionally identified with a center-right political orientation. 6. PRO is the name of the center-right wing party led by Mauricio Macri, current mayor of the city of Buenos Aires. Lilita is the nickname of Lila Carrió, leader of the centrist Coalición Cívica. 7. Editor’s note: Chetos refer to the privileged in the local slang. 8. Editor’s note: Tetra refers to the cheap wine that is sold in disposable containers branded Tetra Pack. 9. Literally, “careta” is “mask.” “Salir careta” means that the person dresses up. 10. “Uno a uno,” refers to President Menem’s convertibility plan during which one peso equaled one dollar. 11. Auyero, Javier. Routine Politics and Violence in Argentina. New York: Cambridge UP, 2007. 12. See chapter by Auyero and Mahler. 13. This is the name of the soccer star currently playing for Manchester City. He is also one of the stars of the Argentine national soccer team. Apache is his nickname.


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A f t e rwor d Mary Roldán

Violence is a difficult subject to analyze, all the more so when we

attempt to go beyond the conventional collection and analysis of empirical data to inquire about the less evident, more elusive, meanings of violence. In recent decades violence in contemporary Latin America has expanded to encompass a wide variety of actors, affect a broad spectrum of society (whether physically or by association and symbolically), and involve a bewildering if transient array of sometimes unlikely accomplices and interests, making it difficult to systematically analyze violence beyond noting common elements that appear to have contributed to its proliferation such as drug trafficking, the emergence and spread of private forms of justice, the breakdown of institutions in the wake of neoliberal economic policies, and a growing confusion and complicity between sectors of legitimate society, agents of the state, and a murky underworld of privately armed interest groups (paramilitaries, criminals, traffickers, etc.) In contemporary situations of violence, victims may become perpetrators, ideologically distinct, armed groups (say leftist guerrillas and right wing paramilitaries) may struggle over territory in one region and collaborate to protect illicit economic interests in another, agents of the state may be complicit in criminal activities one day then train their guns on civilians tainted by association with suspected criminal elements because they inhabit the same neighborhoods the next. Neighborhoods, communities, political movements, sectors of civil society, and specific ethnic and gender groups may also be singled out and stigmatized by stereotypes repeatedly reproduced in the media or official discourses that identify them as agents of violence, in ways that become self-fulfilling or themselves engender violence as a form of resistance or self defense. In contemporary Latin America where violence is no longer characterized by clearly marked antagonists divided by ideology or differential positions of power (as might have been true in the post–Cold War period before the advent of


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Neoliberalism), elucidating the outlines of violence, much less extracting meaning, poses a daunting challenge. Attempting to make sense of growing violence in the region, Gabriela Polit Dueñas and Maria Helena Rueda, the editors of Meanings of Violence in Contemporary Latin America have come to conclusions that echo those of social scientists frustrated with the limitations of the traditional analytical frameworks used to explain the persistence of violence in the increasingly pluralistic and formally democratic nations of Latin America. In essence, the editors of this volume argue, nuanced understandings of violence may require relinquishing long-held preconceptions and outdated or limited analytical paradigms. In the case of scholars analyzing the relationship between violence and politics in Latin America, this has meant accepting that “violence in Latin American society [is] not merely concentrated in the state or in ‘deviant’ groups and individuals who contravene otherwise accepted norms of comportment in a consensual democratic society,” but that violence is “critical to the foundation of Latin American democracies, the maintenance of democratic states, and the political behavior of democratic citizens” (Arias and Goldstein 5). In other words, conceptualizations that treat violence as an aberration or indication of an incomplete transition to democracy or that attribute the proliferation of violence to weaknesses associated with a “failed” state may have outlived their explanatory usefulness in societies where violence has been incorporated as a daily fact of life and where the persistence of violence may be due as much to the tacit complicity of the state or its agents in promoting it, as it is to the incapacity of the state to rein it in. To push beyond the limits of existing analytical frameworks and make sense of contemporary expressions of violence in Latin America, the authors and editors of this volume have embraced what Arias and Goldstein call the principle of “cross disciplinary dialogue” (5), that is, an approach that encourages conversations and collaborations across disciplinary boundaries, and that privileges the adoption of diverse methodologies and conceptual frameworks to achieve a deeper understanding of violence that defies easy categorization or analysis. In this vein, a source of inspiration for Meanings of Violence in Latin America is Susana Rotker’s pathbreaking 2001 edited anthology, Citizens of Fear, which employed crónicas,1 reportage, and testimonials as well as straightforward, empirically based analyses to track the rise of a sense of pervasive insecurity in Latin America especially among urban inhabitants. In Rotker’s formulation, Cold-War-inspired perceptions of violence as a predominantly rural phenomenon or one


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that pitted “the state and its hegemonic institutions on the one side, and armed actors that fought against it on the other” (2), are insufficient to encompass the proliferation of actors and motivations and the increasingly urban character of late twentieth and early twenty-first century Latin American violence. To convey their palpable sense of fear, several of the contributors to Rotker’s edited anthology filter the effects of urban violence through their own personal observations and emotions, an approach that sacrifices “objectivity” but invites the reader to come face to face with individuals’ subjective constructions of the meaning of violence. Although the authors of the various essays in Polit and Rueda’s edited collection take different approaches in their analyses of violence that range from understanding violence as intrinsic to or destructuring of an established social order, to considerations of the aesthetic and political implications of the way violence is represented, all of the authors are animated by a common commitment to recuperate, expose, and make legible the hidden workings (whether physical or symbolic) of violence in order to extract possible meanings. Marta Peixoto does this in her essay “Urban Violence and the Politics of Representation in Recent Brazilian Film,” by combining attention to historical patterns of social and economic exclusion based on empirically measurable indices, with close readings and illuminating deconstructions of the contradictory messages embedded in fictional and documentary films purporting to represent or critique the tension between the forces of “law and order” and criminality in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas (shantytowns). In “Facing Unseen Violence: Ex-Combatants Painting the War in Colombia,” Maria Helena Rueda, like Peixoto, also explores the contradictions and intentional erasures incorporated into culture products that represent perceptions or memories of violence. Carefully cataloguing what is left out and put in, and combining her own observation skills with insights gleaned through extended email exchanges with Juan Manuel Echavarría, the Colombian artist whose idea it was to distribute art supplies to ex-Combatants as a venue for giving anonymous expression to the traumatic experience of war, Rueda illuminates certain omissions in otherwise graphic depictions of violence. Although self-identified perpetrators represented gruesome acts of violence on canvas, they were reluctant to represent themselves as active participants in violence. Ex-combatants’ paintings provide an unprecedented window for making “visible” to urban observers and those removed from the direct experience of conflict largely waged in rural areas distant from Colombia’s urban centers,


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the stories of violence that are not covered in the daily media or in official representations of internal conflict. The paintings Rueda tackles in her essay narrate violence as Rigoberta Menchu’s testimonio did: selectively, revealing some things in meticulous detail, while reserving others from the prying eyes of the uninitiated. In a similar fashion to Rueda and Peixoto, ethnomusicologist Samuel Araújo grapples in his essay “The Sounds of Violence: Critical Perspectives from Contemporary Brazil,” with the ethical implications and methodological conundrums academic analysts must confront when partnering in participatory action projects with favela youths in Rio de Janeiro who live in situations where violence is manifested on a daily basis not only as social, political, and economic exclusion, but also as the violence of “sound,” the perpetual white noise of gunshots, domestic disputes, and social conflict that orchestrates the rhythm of daily urban slum life. In Araújo’s essay the “relevance of looking at society and culture as sites of disorder and conflict” that social scientists are increasingly applying in their analyses of contemporary Latin American violence are here made explicit in activist academics’ recognition of “favela residents [in] the role of knowledge subjects who would formulate from the start the basic research themes, issues and even methods” to be used in devising analytical frameworks for understanding situations of violence, and determining the meaning to be derived from their experiences. The common thread that binds all three of the essays that take the field of culture as their central locus of analysis, as well as Hermann Herlinghaus’ “Considerations on Violence, the Global South, and an Aesthetics of Sobreity,” is an explicit recognition of voices and points of view that might normally remain invisible or obscured or that tend to be subordinated or eclipsed by the circulation of dominant discourses and externally constructed representations of violence imposed from above. The questions of subjectivity and erasure also inform Arturo Arias’ essay “Txitzi’n for the Poxnai: Indigenous Women’s Discourses on Revolutionary Combat,” Victor Vich’s “Ricardo Wiesse’s Cantutas,” Maria Victoria Uribe’s “Against Violence and Oblivion: The Case of Colombia’s Disappeared,” and Maria Socorro Tabuenca’s “Ciudad Juárez, Femicide and the State.” The focus of “recovery” or “reinstatement” in these essays is of physically (not just symbolically) denied, mutilated, or disappeared bodies. We might even define the mission of these and other authors in this collection as a “forensic” one in which the focus is not on digging up physical human remains to identify victims and perpetrators, but rather on gathering up the


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fragmentary and evanescent vestiges violence leaves in its wake, traces that unless rescued, probed, and rearranged may represent a double violence in which physical or symbolic violence is compounded by the violence of erasure from memory and public consciousness through indifference, misperception, and silence. In this vein, Arias engages the absence from heated debates surrounding the trajectory and meanings of the Guatemalan civil war of the voices of indigenous female guerrilla ex-combatants. These subjects represent themselves as having suffered “deep pain” or the loss of a part of their soul as a result on the one hand, of repudiation by their communities of origin for having transgressed the acceptable boundaries of gender behavior, and on the other, having been denied recognition of their contribution to the revolutionary effort by nonindigenous male ex-guerrilla commanders. As Arias’ subjects make patently clear, the subjective experience of violence can be many-layered, and ethnic and gendered differences may fundamentally alter the subjective meaning of violence experienced by individuals superficially linked by shared participation on the same “side” in situations of violence. But as Arias also persuasively demonstrates, the only way for analysts to become aware of how distinct constructions of the self emerge from experiences of violence is to interrogate directly and on their own terms subjects who may otherwise not been taken into account or whose voices have been marginalized or ignored by conventional inquiries into the effects and meaning of violence. Like the indigenous ex-combatant women of Arias’ study, the victims of femicide that are the focus of Maria Socorro Tabuenca’s “Ciudad Juárez, Femicide and the State” also suffer repeated attempts at erasure, but unlike their Guatemalan counterparts, erasure in the case of the women of Juárez has been both physical and symbolic. With sharp, incisive strokes, Tabuenca takes the fragmentary traces left behind on mutilated, violated bodies (a lone sneaker, a half-torn T-shirt, ripped apart jeans), to contest the tergiversating discourse of Juárez’s media and officials who not content to leave in utter impunity the alarming accumulation of unresolved murders, repeatedly attempt to stigmatize the victims as licentious predators responsible for their own deaths. An attempt to “rescue” or “restore” to public consciousness that which has been erased or suppressed in official discourses or public memories of violence is also the subject of Victor Vich’s “An aesthetic event: Ricardo Wiesse’s Cantutas and Political Violence in Peru.” Vich explores how the suppression of acts of violence waged by the Fujimori government on the bodies of disappeared students in Peru


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were publicly contested and “restored” by artist Ricardo Wiesse’s intentionally ephemeral art installation on the site of the unmarked graves where the students’ bodies had been secretly buried. Vich unpacks how the combination of an evanescent “restoration” of the memory of the dead students accompanied by a photographic essay and posters commemorating both the installation and the political significance of the students’ deaths evolved into a circulating archive that effectively contested official attempts to erase or downplay the violent actions of the Peruvian State. Maria Victoria Uribe’s “Against Violence and Oblivion: The Case of Colombia’s Disappeared” echoes the importance of mediations that may not be able to bring back from the dead the victims of violence, but may save them from suffering a second death by indifference. Uribe explores how two communities where the decomposed bodies of the victims of violence wash ashore take diametrically different approaches to the proliferation of bodies and attribute different meanings to them. One community assumes the role of informal “caretakers” who “restore” a semblance of humanity by adopting corpses, naming them, burying them, and mourning them as if they were their own kin, while another repudiates any responsibility for the bodies that clog local waterways, dismissing them as so much detritus to be ignored, disposed of, or incorporated into daily life without ritual or remark. The starkly different attitudes to the visible evidence of ongoing violence in Colombia by otherwise similar communities (of course, further ethnographic analysis would have to be done to determine what if anything in these communities’ pasts might account for such different attitudes toward the bodies of the victims of violence) reinforces a theme present in various essays in this collection, that is, the very different meanings apparently similar individuals or collectivities may attribute to the experience of violence. Deciphering the meanings of violence in situations where the objective of violence is both to announce its terrifying presence even as it clouds or obscures its complex origins requires an iconoclastic approach that enables insight into the unsuspected logics of violence through an artful rearrangement and interpretation of the incomplete traces violence leaves in its wake. Sometimes those in the best position to accomplish this reassembling of the puzzle pieces of violence into narratives that illuminate what otherwise might remain hidden or latent are not academics, but journalists and chroniclers, as both the essays by Gabriela Polit, “Chronicles of Everyday Life in Culiacan” and Cristian Alarcón’s “Fuerte Apache” suggest. Polit


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follows the life and work of Javier Valdez, a Mexican chronicler and journalist who shifts back and forth between investigative journalism and weekly chronicles that capture with irony, brevity, suspense and discretion, the Kafkaesque reality of life in the Mexican northern state of Sinaloa where thousands of people find themselves trapped by pervasive drug violence, and the corruption and impunity that make ordinary survival a haphazard luck of the draw. As Polit astutely concludes, “the immediate effect of the Malayerba is that all the nonsensical everyday violence in Sinaloa shows its significance.” With a single swift stroke of the pen, in a quickly observed vignette rendered succinctly and humorously, the chronicler briefly exposes and illuminates the essence of apparently impenetrable webs of complicity, violence, and influence, jolting the readers out of their daily complacency, and forcing to the surface the latent meaning of situations of violence and silence so routine, they cease after awhile to even be noticeable. Chroniclers are magicians who conjure with an economy of words rendered in the everyday slang or diction that locals trust (because it sounds like them) vivid portraits of daily life that capture the essence of impossible situations where readers recognize aspects of themselves and almost everyone they know. Cristian Alárcon is such a wizard. He insinuates himself into communities the outside world regards with fear and distrust, and within minutes is conversing easily with part-time thugs about the minutiae of surviving on the wages provided by sporadic robbery on the edges of a Buenos Aires slum where the inhabitants may not have PhDs but nonetheless wield a sharp and accurate grasp of their society and its problems. They are able to cut through the layers of official graft and malfeasance whose physical traces are embedded in half-finished or abandoned community centers, deteriorated neighborhood streets, and the constant shakedown for pocket change to which the police subject them to arrive at a clearheaded vision of their possible future (they’re screwed). In a single captured snippet of dialogue or sharply observed detail a world of information and insight can be revealed by the chronicle without resort to a single statistic. The reader gets the picture: the hardworking cardboard collector and the dutiful eight-year-old son whose labor is already central to the support of his family; the adolescents who gather on street corners to smoke some weed or steal a sip of wine from cheap tetra-packs financed by intermittent jobs, opportunistic thefts, and occasional dirty work for the local political party; the age-old animosity between unruly teenagers and police that is mediated only by the grudging recognition that the latter “take care


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of the elders” in the neighborhood and may therefore serve some limited purpose. All the elements that can illuminate the reasons for the fundamental gulf that separates the inhabitants of Fuerte Apache from the media and official forces who constantly stigmatize them, are rendered in the brevity of a couple of pages. Alarcón’s chronicle reaffirms the importance of listening in our search for meaning, a conclusion shared by other authors in this volume such as ethnomusicologist Samuel Araújo and sociologists Javier Auyero and Matt Mahler. Auyero and Mahler are among the few representatives of the social sciences in a volume otherwise dominated by writers, literary critics, and the occasional anthropologist. But a receptive ear, sharp ethnographic sensibility, and willingness to transcend disciplinary barriers in the interests of illuminating what is “hidden in plain sight” is the common thread that puts all the essays in this volume in dialogue with each other though their specific object of study and the lens they choose to view it through may be quite different. In “(In)visible Connections and the Makings of Collective Violence,” for instance, Auyero and Mahler apply their “forensic” skills to peek behind the curtain of formal politics at the layers of influence peddling, graft, clientelism, and under-the-table political brokering they dub the “gray zone” of politics. It is in the “gray zone” where the dirty deals that oil the electoral wheels and secure the “pork” without which political patronage networks cannot function are cut; it is also where the authors discover with the assistance of public prosecutors and well-connected journalists who act as their guides through the labyrinthine corridors of political power, the licit and illicit meet to engineer food riots, arrange arson, and generally orchestrate from behind the scenes, the myriad acts of low-level violence that secure the domination of one political interest group over another in lower class urban Argentine neighborhoods. The “gray zone” is the “real world” of lived politics so often dismissed as folkloric and unimportant by top down analyses of “formal” politics in Latin America. And yet, it is hard to escape the conclusion—implicitly or explicitly articulated by several of the authors in this volume—that it is impossible for us as academic researchers to hope to excavate the multiple meanings of violence unless we recognize and prioritize the insights and perceptions of what Araújo calls local “knowledge-bearers,” whether these take the form of public prosecutors and journalists, urban youth, slum dwellers, local townspeople, the women’s auxiliary, parish priests, community organizers, or the corner beat cop.


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Note 1. Crónica is a genre of writing with an impressive pedigree in Latin America that enables observers to bridge the gap between “facts” and personal analysis to convey a richer more nuanced sense of the subjective experience of events. See Corona and Jorgensen (2002) and Egan (2001).

References Arias, Enrique Desmond, and Daniel M. Goldstein, eds. Violent Democracies in Latin America. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2010. Print. Corona, Ignacio, and Beth E. Jorgensen, eds. The Contemporary Mexican Chronicle: Theoretical Perspectives on a Liminal Genre. New York: SUNY P, 2002. Print. Egan, Linda. Carlos Monsiváis: Culture and Chronicle in Contemporary Mexico. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2001. Print. Rotker, Susana. Citizens of Fear: Urban Violence in Latin America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2002. Print.


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C on t r i bu t or s

Cristian Alarcón is the author of Cuando me muera quiero que me toquen cumbia (2004), Samuel Chavkin Award (NACLA). His latest book, Si me querés, quereme transa (2010), deals with the war among Peruvian drug dealers in Buenos Aires. He has published in TXT, Gatopardo, Rolling Stone, Soho, and Crítica de la Argentina. A former fellow of the Fundación Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano (FNPI), he is currently one of its academic directors for projects on “Narcotráfico, ciudad y violencia en América Latina.” Samuel Araújo is Associate Professor of ethnomusicology at the School of Music of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. He has authored several articles and edited three books, focusing on music, social difference and inequality, participative action-research, and politics. His current work on music and social participation involves collaboration with research teams formed by Rio de Janeiro favela residents. He is the cofounder and former president of the Brazilian Association for Ethnomusicology, and a current member of the Executive Board of the International Council for Traditional Music. Arturo Arias is Professor of Latin American Literature at the University of Texas at Austin. He has published Taking their Word: Literature and the Signs of Central America (2007), The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy (2000), The Identity of the Word: Guatemalan Literature in Light of the New Century (1998), and Ceremonial Gestures: Central American Fiction 1960–1990 (1998). He cowrote the film El Norte (1984), and has published six novels in Spanish. Twice winner of the Casa de las Americas Award, and of the Ana Seghers Award in Germany, he was given the Miguel Angel Asturias National Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature in 2008 in his native country, Guatemala. Javier Auyero is the Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long Professor of Latin American Sociology at the University of Texas-Austin. He is the author of Poor People’s Politics (2000), Contentious Lives (2003),


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and Routine Politics and Collective Violence in Argentina (2007) and, together with Débora Swistun, Flammable. Environmental Suffering in an Argentine Shantytown. (2009). His new book, Patients of the State will be published by Duke University Press in 2012. Hermann Herlinghaus is Professor of Latin American Literatures and Cultural Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. His most recent books are Violence Without Guilt: Ethical Narratives from the Global South (2009) and Renarración y descentramiento: Mapas alternativos de la imaginación en América Latina (2004). Herlinghaus is currently preparing a monograph entitled A Global Aesthetics of Sobriety. Matthew Mahler is a PhD candidate at State University of New York at Stony Brook. His primary research interests are in the areas of political and cultural sociology, classical and contemporary theory, and embodiment and passion. His dissertation, entitled Homo Politicus: On Politics and Passion, examines the cultural logic of political practice. Marta Peixoto is Associate Professor of Brazilian literature at New York University. She has worked primarily on twentieth century Brazilian literature. Author of Poesia com coisas, (1983) on the poet João Cabral de Melo Neto and Passionate Fictions: Narrative, Gender, and Violence in Clarice Lispector (1994), she has also published articles on women’s autobiographical writing and on Machado de Assis. Her current work centers on subjective inflections in recent Brazilian documentaries and on questions of urban crisis and artistic representation in literature and film. Gabriela Polit Dueñas is Assistant Professor of Latin American Literature at the University of Texas at Austin. She has published Cosas de hombres. Escritores y caudillos en la narrativa latinoamericana del siglo XX (2008) and Crítica literaria ecuatoriana. Hacia un nuevo siglo. (2001). She is currently working on her book, Fictions of Drugs. Stories from Culiacan and Medellin, which is a comparative analysis of the representation of the illegal drugs traffic. Mary Roldán is the Dorothy Epstein Professor of Latin American History at Hunter College, City University of New York (CUNY) and the CUNY Graduate Center. Her book Blood and Fire: La Violencia in Antioquia, Colombia, 1946–1953 (Duke, 2002, Bogotá, ICANH, 2003) won the Fundación Alejandro Angel Escobar prize in the Social Sciences and Humanities. She is currently writing a book tentatively titled, Broadcast Nation: Radio, Politics, and Culture in Colombia, 1930–1962 tracing the impact of radio, especially news


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radio, on public opinion, cultural debates, propaganda, and politics in Colombia from the Liberal Republic through the first Frente Nacional government. María Helena Rueda is Assistant Professor of Latin American literature and culture at Smith College. She is the author of several articles on the cultural implications of violence and its representation in Latin America, and particularly in Colombia. She has also published articles on film and visual culture in the region. Her book La violencia y sus huellas. Una mirada desde la narrativa colombiana is forthcoming in 2011. María Socorro Tabuenca Córdoba has been a researcher for El Colegio de la Frontera Norte since 1991, where she was the Dean of the Northern Border from 1999–2006. She is affiliated to The Center for Inter American and Border Studies at UTEP since 2008. Tabuenca is the author of Mujeres y fronteras, una perspective de género (1998), and the coauthor of Lo que el viento a Juárez. Testimonios de una ciudad que se obstina (with Ricardo Aguilar, 2000); and Border Women writings from la frontera (with Debra Castillo, 2002). Her book Tendiendo puentes: Estudios literarios mexicanos y chicanos is forthcoming in El Colegio de Chihuahua. María Victoria Uribe Alarcón is an anthropologist with a PhD in History from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. From 1994 to 2005 she was Director of the Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia in Bogotá. From 2005 to 2007, she was an Associate Professor at the Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales y Culturales Pensar at the Universidad Javeriana. Currently she works with the group Memoria Histórica de la Comisión Nacional de Reparación y Reconciliación (CNRR). She has written several books. Her recent publications include “Memory in Times of War” (Public Culture, 2009), Anthropologie de l’Inhumanité. Essai interprétatif sur la Terreur en Colombie (2004), and “Dismembering and expelling. Semantics of political terror in Colombia” (Public Culture, 2004). Víctor Vich is the author of El discurso de la calle: los cómicos ambulantes y las tensiones de la modernidad en el Perú (2001); El caníbal es el otro. Violencia y cultura en el Perú contemporáneo (2002); Oralidad y poder (Ed. with Virginia Zavala 2004) and, Contra el sueño de los justos: la literatura peruana ante la violencia política (ed. with Juan Carlos Ubilluz y Alexandra Hibbet, 2009). Currently he is the Director of MA program in Cultural Studies at the Pontificia Univesidad Católica del Perú and a research scholar at the Instituto de Estudios Peruanos (IEP).


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I n de x

Acabal, María Itzep, 26 ADIQ, See Association for the Integral Development of Quiché ADIQ-Kumool Women Ex-Combatants Collective (Guatemala), 13–14, 19, 25–9, 30n9 aesthetics, 2, 5, 6, 16, 70, 75–88, 102, 106, 169–80, 180n8, 237–9 of “de-intoxification,” 5 event, See Wiesse, Ricardo and memory, 54 politics of, 76 of sobriety, See sobriety “affective marginalization,” 80, 82, 86 aggression, 2, 3, 5, 7–8, 9n4, 58–60, 65–6, 70n3, 72n13, 78, 125, 129 and perpetrators, 58–60 Agrarian Platform (Red de Mujeres) (Guatemala), 13–14, 28–9, 30n10, 31n14 animero (soul-keeper), 42 ANUC, See Asociación Nacional de Usuarios Campesinos Argentina, 197–220, 223–33 See also Fuerte Apache; “gray zone” Arias, Arturo, 9, 11, 238 Arias, Desmond, 203 Asociación Nacional de Usuarios Campesinos (National

Association of Peasant Workers) (ANUC) (Colombia), 39 Association for the Advancement of the Social Sciences (AVANCSO), 13–14, 30n11, 31n14 Association for the Integral Development of Quiché (ADIQ) (Guatemala), 30n8 See also ADIQ-Kumool Women Ex-Combatants Collective Astorga, Luis, 141n19, 152, 165n7, 166n17, 203 AUC, See Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia) Auerbach, Erich, 80, 82–4 Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia) (AUC), 37, 50n2, 59 Auyero, Javier, 7, 8n3, 212, 223, 232, 242 AVANCSO, See Association for the Advancement of the Social Sciences Babilônia 2000 (documentary film) (Eduardo Coutinho), 92, 106–12 and daily life, 111–12 focus of, 106–7 and media, 108–9 Badiou, Alain, 173


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I n de x

Barrio Terrazas, Francisco, 123, 125, 126, 128, 130, 141n21 Batista, André, 93 Bauman, Janina, 49 Benjamin, Walter, 5, 75, 78, 80–2, 84, 87, 155, 158, 167n18 Berger, Susan A., 13 Black Orpheus (film) (Marcel Camus), 107, 111 Border Industrialization Program (BIP), 116, 140n7 borders, 15, 28, 37, 79, 85, 124–5, 127, 129, 131, 138, 241 U. S.-Mexico, 22, 72, 79, 85, 115–17, 127, 129, 131, 138, 140n7–9, 141 Bourdieu, Pierre, 109, 160, 184, 220n12 Bourgois, Philippe, 8n2, 109 Brass, Paul, 201 Brazil, 91–113, 183–97 Constitution of 1988, 100 film, See film military dictatorship in (1964–85), 92 sound project, See sound and violence Brazilian film, See film (Brazilian) Bus 174 (documentary film) (José Padilha and Felipe Lacerda), 6, 92, 106 Butler, Judith, 175–6 Cadena, Marisol de la, 28 Caldeira, Teresa, 8n3, 100–1 Calderón, Felipe, 149–50, 161, 165n4 Calles, Plutarco Elías, 122 cantutas, 5, 169–79, 180n6, 238–40 Carrillo, Andrea, 14, 30n14 Castro, María Clemencia, 68–9 Catholicism, 31n14, 63, 80–1, 84, 130 Cauca River, Colombia, 37, 39, 42–5, 50, 51n3

CEASM, See Center for the Study and Solidarity Actions of Maré Center for the Study and Solidarity Actions of Maré (CEASM), 189–90 Cerruti, Gabriela, 198 Chávez Cano, Esther, 119, 124, 132 Christianity, 80–2, 84, 130 chronicles, 7–8, 149–65, 223–33, 240–2 Cinema Novo movement (Brazil, 1960s), 92 City of God (film) (Fernando Meirelles, Kátia Lund), 92–4, 102, 106 Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, 6, 115–38 blaming victims of femicide, 121–7, 131–4, 136 and city council advertisements, 118, 125–8 crime in, 115, 139n4–5 and gender stereotypes, 117–18, 123–7, 139n5 and genocide, 138 and government, 122–9 and the Human Rights National Commission, 129 image of, 130–8, 142n35 interpretations of, 115–16 and Los Rebeldes gang, 128–9, 134 and NGOs, 129, 132, 134, 137–8 “prevention campaigns,” 118–29 serial killings of women, 115, 117, 119–22, 128–9, 133–7, 140n13, 140n15, 141n16, 141n18, 142n26, 142n30 See also femicide; maquiladoras, industry Ciudadanías del miedo (2000) (Citizens of Fear, 2002) (Susana Rotker), 2, 236–7 The Civilizing Process (1939) (Norbert Elias), 159


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i n de x Colombia, 4–5, 37–51, 53–73 and corpses, See corpses in rivers drug trafficking, See drug trafficking guerrilla groups, See Ejército de Liberación Nacional; Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia and paintings, See paintings of war paramilitary groups, See paramilitary groups “the coloniality of power” (Aníbal Quijano), 12 Commission to Prevent and Eradicate the Crimes against Women in Ciudad Juárez (Juárez Commission), 121, 140n11, 143n45 Communist Party, 39, 133 “communities of peoples in resistance” (CPR) (Guatemala), 21, 24–5, 30n11, 32n27 corpses, 7, 37–51, 58, 62, 91, 233, 238, 240 in mass graves, 67–8 as messages, 149–50, 158–9 See also corpses in rivers corpses in rivers (Colombia), 7, 37–51, 238, 240 and autopsies, 43, 45–6, 49 burying, 45–9 and dehumanization, 38–9, 42–5, 49 and dignity, 44–50 and paramilitaries, 37–40, 46, 50, 51n4 photographs of, 43 and symbolic rescue of souls, 39–42 See also Cauca River; Magdalena River; NN Coutinho, Eduardo, 92, 106–12 method of, 110–12 See also Babilônia 2000

251

CPR, See “communities of peoples in resistance” Culiacán Sinaloa, Mexico, 149–65 See also Valdez, Javier “culture of exception,” 86 Cuñarro, Mónica, 204 D’Elia, Luis, 213–14 Das, Veena, 171 dead bodies, See corpses DeCesare, Donna, 61, 72n14 dehumanization, 97, 160 of corpses, 38–9, 42–5 and cruelty, 49 democracy, 92, 100, 112, 122, 138, 171, 180n7, 199, 201, 225, 236 antagonism and violence within, 76–7, 83 and the gray zone, 214–17 normative, 79 dictatorships, 3, 70n5, 92, 167n23, 171, 174, 175, 180n7, 224, 233n2 post-dictatorship, 54, 100 displacement, 12, 49, 62–3, 72n15, 81, 86, 108, 118 See also migration; refugees drug trafficking, 3, 6–7, 83, 85, 235 Brazil, 92–110, 188–9, 203 Colombia, 37, 42–4, 63–6, 72n16–18 and journalism, 157–8 and marginalization, 6–7 Mexico, 141n19, 142n32, 150–2, 157–9, 161–5, 165n2, 166n8, 167n23 See also narcos, narcocorridos Echavarría, Juan Manuel, 4, 51n8, 54–6, 64, 70n1, 70n3, 72n13, 82n13, 73n25, 237 education, 73n23, 117, 186–7, 190–2, 227, 231 and poverty, 17, 27, 103, 109–10


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252

I n de x

EGP, See Guerrilla Army of the Poor Ejército de Liberación Nacional (National Liberation Army) (ELN), 37, 39, 50n2 Elias, Norbert, 159, 198 Elite Squad (film) (José Padilha), 6, 92–102, 104, 106, 108 audience, 101 and point of view, 93–4 squad insignia, 99–100 theme of, 94–5 and torture, 94–100 and “war,” 101–2 ELN, See Ejército de Liberación Nacional (National Liberation Army) Enlightenment, 12 Escobar, Arturo, 18, 27–8, 31n20 Estudio hemerográfico de mujeres asesinadas 1993–1998 (Chávez Cano), 119–20, 140n14 ethics, 15, 75–9, 87 and aesthetics, 5, 80, 86, 172, 174 alternative, 30n13 and biopolitics, 159 and factual or fictive violence, 92, 101 rational, 84 and violence, 2 ethnography, 4, 7, 8n3, 93, 101, 165n2, 186–7, 189, 194, 197, 200, 203, 218–19, 240, 242 ethnomusicology, 4, 7, 184, 186–90 ex-combatants, See indigenous women ex-combatants; paintings of war Fairclough, Norman, 119, 123, 140n12 FARC, See Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia fascism, 82, 99, 138 favelas (shantytowns) (Rio de Janeiro), 6, 92, 94, 98, 101–3, 105–9, 111–12, 203, 225, 237

fear, 68, 95, 108, 139n5, 155, 158, 164, 166n16, 236–7, 241 and aesthetics of sobriety, 78–80, 83, 85–7 in the cities, 2–3 and combat experience, 15, 18–19, 21, 24 culture of, 5, 79 and the media, 105, 112n3 among Mexican journalists, 150, 159–62 femicide, 115–38, 139n5, 140n13, 140n15, 141n16–18, 142n26, 142n32, 144n46, 144n50, 238–9 defined, 119–22 and democracy, 122 government strategies on, 118 See also Ciudad Juárez film (Brazilian), 6, 91–112, 237 and favelas, 92, 94, 98, 101–3, 105–9, 111–12 real/represented violence in, 91–3, 98–9, 105–6 and the “retomada” (1990s), 92 Rio as “at war” in, 101–5, 108–9, 112, 112n2 and witnesses of violence, 104–7 See also Babilônia 2000; City of God; Elite Squad; News from a Personal War; “The Trespasser” (O invasor) Foucault, Michel, 97, 140n12, 159, 167n20 Fourteenth Army Brigade, 39–40 Freire, Paulo, 187–8, 190–4 Fuerte Apache (Buenos Aires, Argentina), 7–8, 223–33, 241–2, 248–9 and corruption, 227–9 and grey zone, 232–3 history of violence in, 224–6 and La Isla, 226–7 and mothers, 229–32 neighborhood description, 224


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i n de x and ninja turtles (National Guard), 223–4, 233 and urban chroniclers, 223, 241 Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) (FARC), 37, 39, 50n2, 72n16 Fujimori, Alberto, 5, 169, 171, 179n1, 180n7, 239–40 Fundacion Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano, 151, 166n10 Fundación Puntos de Encuentro, 54, 56, 69 García Uribe, Víctor Javier, 134, 143n42, 143n45 genocide, 15–16, 37 Gente Como Uno (People Like You) Cemetery, 45–9 Global South, 5, 75–88 globalization, 5, 13, 29, 79–80, 82 Goldstein, Donna, 203, 236 González Rascón, Arturo, 130–4, 143n38, 143n40 “gray zone” (Argentina), 197–219, 232–3, 242 and clandestine connections, 199–203, 206, 208, 211–18 and collective violence, 199–203, 211–14 and democracy, 214–17 paradoxes of, 203–6 political analysis of, 217–19 scenes from, 197–200 Grisales, Fernando, 56 Guatemalan civil war (1960–96), 4, 11–29, 238–9 See also indigenous ex-combatants; Ladino; Maya Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG), 11, 13–14, 24–6, 30n2

253

Guatemaltecas: The Women’s Movement 1986–2003 (Susan Berger), 13 “A guerra do Rio” (Rio’s War), 102 Guerrero, Nahun, 43 Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP) (Guatemala), 13, 30n2, 31n15, 33n37 guerrillas, 4–5, 11, 15–19, 21, 23–6, 30n2, 31n15, 32n23, 33n37–38, 37, 39–40, 46, 53, 55–8, 66–7, 71n6, 72n16, 167n23, 235, 239 idealization of, 15–16 See also Ejército de Liberación Nacional; Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia; Guerrilla Army of the Poor Gunst, Laurie, 203 Guzmán, Justo Angel (“El Chofa”), 207–11 hegemony, 2–3, 6, 12, 27, 81, 83–4, 86, 117–18, 120, 122, 124, 128–9, 134, 137, 144n48, 173, 188, 190, 192, 194, 237 Helmke, Gretchen, 200 Hernández, Rosalinda, 14 Holocaust, 138 Holston, James, 100 Human Rights National Commission (Comisión Nacional de Derechos Humanos) (CNDH) (Mexico), 129 Hopenhayn, Martín, 113n6 indigenous women ex-combatants (Guatemalan civil war), 11–29, 238–9 childhoods, 17 demands of, 14–16, 20, 25, 27–8 and discourse, 27–8 and domestic chores, 17, 26 education of, 17, 27


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254

I n de x

indigenous women ex-combatants (Guatemalan)—Continued and freedom, 22, 26 identity, 15–18 ignoring of, 11–12, 25–7 and literacy, 21, 25, 27–8 and marriage, 24 and men combatants, 14, 15, 19–20, 23, 26, 27 and menstruation, 17–18, 23–4 and the peace process, 13–14 and rape, 18–19 and sexuality, 23–4 txitzi’n, 14–15, 17, 19, 22 as witnesses, 15–16, 19 See also ADIQ-Kumool Women Ex-Combatants Collective INMUJERES, See Instituto Nacional de las Mujeres (Women’s National Institute) Instituto Nacional de las Mujeres (Women’s National Institute) (INMUJERES), 134–5 Insurgent Citizenship (James Holston), 100 Ixil, 13–14, 18–21, 27, 30n8–10, 31n15 Jamaica, 203 John Paul II, 94 Jorge Ajanel, Tomasa, 26 journalists in Mexico, 149–65 and dead bodies, 149–50, 158–60 and fear, 158–62 and informers, 151 killing of, 149 threats to, 153–4 See also Culiacán Sinaloa; Valdez, Javier Juárez, Mexico, See Ciudad Juárez Kant, Immanuel, 76, 78 Kumool, 30n9 See also ADIQ-Kumool Women Ex-Combatants Collective

La Cantuta massacre (1992), 5, 169, 175 art in response to, See Wiesse, Ricardo “La guerra que no hemos visto” (The War We Have Not Seen) (exhibition), 53–70, 237–8 and art naïf, 53, 71 backgrounds of paintings, 62–3 details of, 53–5, 68–70 and drug trafficking, 63–6 and identity, 53–4, 56–8, 65–6, 68, 70n5 mass graves, 67–8, 72n19 and refugees, 62–3 and trauma, 61 and victim/victimizer continuum, 57–61, 72n19 violence of images, 53–4 and visual memory, 54, 57 and witnesses, 58, 60–3, 66–8, 70n3, 71n11, 71n13, 72n20 See also paintings of war La Matanza, Buenos Aires (Argentina), 198–9, 213 La Violencia, 42, 64, 72n16, 202 laCuerda (feminist weekly), 14 Ladino, 12, 14, 27–8, 30n10 Language in Power (Fairclough), 118 Lauretis, Teresa de, 78 Levitsky, Steven, 200 Ley de Justicia y Paz (Peace and Justice Law), 57, 67, 69, 71n6–8 Lins, Consuelo, 103, 106, 108, 110 Lins Ribeiro, Gustavo, 12, 30n3 López Molina, Ana, 14, 30n7 López Molinar, Jorge, 123–6, 141n22, 141n24 Los Tigres del Norte, 5, 85–8 Lotman, Yuri, 174 Lund, Kátia, 92, 102 See also City of God; News from a Personal War Luz, Hélio, 104–5


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i n de x Magdalena River, Colombia, 37–42, 49–50, 51n3, 51n8 Malayerba column/anthology (Valdez), 149, 151–2, 154–60, 162–5, 165n3, 241 and Benjamin, 155 description of, 154–5, 160–1 and drug trafficking, 157–8 effects of, 155, 158–9 examples of, 156–7 and habitus of violence, 159–61, 167n21 and Poe, 154 maquiladoras (Mexico), 116–34, 140n7, 142n35 industry, 116, 121, 134 workers, 116–17, 126, 134, 140n8, 142n35, 240–1 See also Ciudad Juárez marginalization/marginality, 3–8, 77, 80–3, 86, 124, 183, 188, 193–4, 208, 239 “affective,” 5, 80–3, 86 and drug trafficking, 6–7 and meaning, 8 Martín-Barbero, Jesús, 105, 112n3 Martínez García, Patricio, 130–4, 137, 144n47 Marxism, 12, 39, 184 Matom Velasco, Catarina, 26–7 Mauss, Marcel, 198 Maya, 11–15, 18, 23, 28–9, 30n8, 30n11, 30n13, 32n24, 32n27, 32n32, 33n34 memory, 2–5, 9n4, 15–18, 28, 38, 40, 54–7, 61, 68–70, 73n24–25, 138, 171–2, 179n1, 237, 239–40 and corpses, 37–51 and feminine voices, 4 historical, 4–5, 171–2, 179n1 of tradition, 186 and visualization, 54 Menchú, Rigoberta, 9n4, 17, 29n1, 238 Mesquita, Claudia, 103, 106

255

Mexico, 115–38, 149–65 and journalists, 149–65 and U.S. border, 79, 85, 115–38, 140n8 See also Ciudad Juárez; Culiacán Sinaloa; femicide; Valdez, Javier migration, 3, 49, 82, 86, 117, 142n25 migrants, 82, 189, 227, 232 Milgram experiments, 60 Mimesis (Erich Auerbach), 80, 82–4 modernity, 12, 14–15, 18, 28–9, 76–88, 119, 158, 174 Monárrez, Julia, 120–1, 129, 131, 140n13, 141n16–18, 142n27 Monsiváis, Carlos, 123, 129, 139n6, 151 Moreira Salles, João, 92, 102 See also News from a Personal War Mouffe, Chantal, 75–6 Municipality of Marsella, 42–5, 50, 50n1 Museum of Modern Art (Bogotá), 53–4 narcos, 149, 151–2, 155–6, 158, 161–2, 164–5, 166n8–9, 225 narcocorridos, 5, 79, 85–8, 161, 166n17, 167n23 narconarratives, 85–8, 166n17, 167n23 narcotics trade, 44, 83, 85, 152, 158, 161, 165n2 See also drug trafficking neoliberalism, 2, 27, 29, 75, 192, 235–6 News from a Personal War (documentary film) (Joãn Moreira Salles and Kátia Lund), 92, 102–6 and audience, 105–6 and cocaine, 102–3 and hopelessness, 105 and point of view, 103–5 style of, 103


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256

I n de x

NN, 37–51, 51n8, 70n3 and animero (soul- keeper), 42 description of, 40–1 photographs of, 41 non-governmental organizations (NGOs), 69, 186, 189–91 Ciudad Juárez, 6, 127, 129, 132, 134, 137–8, 140n11, 144n50 fictional, 94, 97–8 Nuestras utopías: Mujeres guatemaltecas del siglo XX (Our Utopias: Guatemalan Women of the 20th Century) (Norma Stoltz-Chinchilla), 12–13 Ochberg, Frank, 61 Operación Cóndor, 150, 165n7 ORPA, See Revolutionary Organization of People in Arms Padilha, José, 92, 98–9, 106 See also Elite Squad paintings of war (Colombia), 4–5, 53–73 See also “La guerra que no hemos visto” Palacios, Noel, 56 PAN, See Partido Acción Nacional paramilitary groups (Colombia), 37–40, 46, 50, 51n4, 53, 55–8, 66–8, 72n16 See also Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia Parra Molina, José, 124–5, 127, 130, 142n28 Partido Acción Nacional (PAN), 122–3, 129, 131–2, 135, 141n21, 143n36 Partido Nacional Revolucionario (PNR), 122 Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), 122–3, 129–38, 143n36, 144n47

Peace Treaty (Guatemala) (1996), 13–14, 24 Peláez, Ligia, 13–17, 23, 26–9, 30n5, 30n7, 30n11 Pérez, Amparo, 37, 51n3 Peru amnesty law (1995), 169–70, 175 See also Wiesse, Ricardo Peru constitutional crisis (1992), 169 Pimentel, Rodrigo, 93, 102, 104–5 PNR, See Partido Nacional Revolucionario Poe, Edgar Allan, 154 Political Theology (Carl Schmitt), 86 Ponce Prieto, Suly, 132–4 poverty, 17, 26, 40, 42–3, 48, 50, 78, 86, 100, 121, 198, 224–6 criminalization of, 3, 86, 101, 109 representations of, 6, 78, 92–3, 98, 100–5, 109–11 PRI, See Partido Revolucionario Institucional Puerto Berrío, 38–42, 49–50, 51n8 Quijano, Aníbal, 12 Radford, Dianna, 120 Rebel Armed Forces (FAR) (Guatemala), 30n2 Red de Mujeres (Women’s Network) (Uspantán), See Agrarian Platform refugees, 63, 189 “retomada” (Brazil, 1990s), 92 Revolutionary Organization of People in Arms (ORPA) (Guatemala), 30n2, 33n37 Richard, Nelly, 54 Rio de Janeiro, 91–112, 112n2, 188–95, 203, 225, 237 in film, 91–112 sound project, 188–95 “at war,” 101–5, 108–9, 112, 112n2 See also favelas (shantytowns)


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i n de x Riodoce (weekly newspaper), 7, 151, 152–4, 160, 165n3, 166n14, 166n16 grenade explosion at, 153, 160 Roldán, Mary, 8, 202–3 Rotker, Susana, 2, 236–7 Ruiz Durand, Jesús, 174 Russell, Jill, 120 Sanford, Victoria, 33n39 Santana, Juan de Dios, 37–8 Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, 8n2, 100–1, 109 Schmitt, Carl, 86 Schwarz, Herman, 5, 170, 172, 174, 176–7, 180n8 September 11, 2001, 78 Soares, Luiz Eduardo, 93 sobriety, aesthetics of, 5, 75–88, 238 and “affective marginalization,” 80–3, 86 and autonomy, 75, 77, 81–2, 88 defined, 80, 87 and ethics, 75–9 and fear, 78–80, 83, 85–7 and free choice, 78–9 globalization, 79–80, 82 and guilt, 80, 86–7 and intoxication, 80–4, 86–8 and narconarratives, 85–8 and religion, 80–2, 84 and victimization, 77 and vulnerability, 77–8, 80 See also narcos, narcocorridos sound and violence, 183–95, 238 case study, 188–94 conceptual premises, 184–6 conclusions, 194–5 ethnomusicology, 186–8 theory on, 183–4 Sousa Santos, Boaventura de, 35 Stoltz-Chinchilla, Norma, 12–13, 30n6 surrealism, 80–2, 84 Taussig, Michael, 28, 68, 75

257

testimony, 4, 9n4, 12, 16, 18, 28–9, 31n18, 38, 56, 68, 72n18, 72n20, 73n22, 138, 175, 179n1, 236, 238 testimonio (genre), 4, 9, 9n4, 16, 31n18 Tiscornia, Ana, 54, 57, 70n5 Torres, Jacqueline, 14 torture, 22–3, 25, 33n39, 53, 58, 59, 61, 65, 94–100, 120–1, 129, 133–4, 136, 143n45, 150 trauma, 2–5, 9n4, 19, 25, 56, 61–2, 67, 69, 70n3, 107, 150, 153, 172–3, 237 “The Trespasser” (O invasor) (film) (Beto Brand), 6, 92 txitzi’n, 14–15, 17, 19, 22 Tzoc Velásquez, Santa Anastasia, 26 Unión Patriótica Obrera (Patriotic Workers’ Union) (Colombia), 39 United Nations (UN), 13, 71n8, 135 urban violence, and film, See film Uribe, Alvaro, 51n4, 57 Uribe, María Victoria, 4, 70n1, 70n3, 71n9, 72n19, 238, 240 URNG, See Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity Valdez, Javier Arturo, 6, 149–65, 165n2–3, 166n11, 166n15–16 in 2006, 152–4 in 2007, 149–50, 161 in 2009, 161 dangers of being a journalist, 149 See also Malayerba; Riodoce Veja (Brazilian weekly), 98–9 victims, 6, 29, 40, 42, 49, 55, 59–60, 67, 70n3, 71n7, 77, 92, 96, 99, 104, 117, 118–38, 139n4, 141n18, 142n26, 142n31–32, 144n48, 144n50, 150, 152, 160, 166n8, 204, 226, 239, 240


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258

I n de x

victims—Continued victimization, 77 and victimizers, 2–3, 5, 58–61, 71n11, 72n19, 235, 238 Villa El Cartón, Buenos Aires (Argentina), 197–9, 203–6, 215 Villamizar, Darío, 58, 62 villas porteñas (shantytowns) (Buenos Aires), 224–5 Vinebaum, Lisa, 16 violence analysis of, 1–3, 184–6, 235–6 and art, See paintings of war; Wiesse, Ricardo chroniclers of, See chronicles; Fuerte Apache as continuum, 3–4, 109 and corpses, See corpses and femicide, See Ciudad Juárez; femicide and film, See film and journalists, See journalists in Mexico meanings of, 1–9, 235–6, 240–1 and paintings, See paintings of war as a “slippery concept,” 8n2 and sobriety, See sobriety, aesthetics of and social order, 1–2 and sound, See sound and violence and testimony, See testimony urban, in film, See film Violence in War and Peace (2004) (Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe I. Bourgois), 8n2, 109 Volpi, Jorge, 161

Votes and Violence (2004) (Wilkinson), 201–2 war on drugs Brazil, 101–2 Mexico, 149–50, 162, 165n7 U.S.-led, 65, 112n4 Weil, Simone, 91 Western thinking/culture, 12, 14–17, 77–8, 83–4, 86, 185 Wiesse, Ricardo, 5, 169–79 and cantutas, 170–9, 180n6, 238–40 and historical memory, 171–4 importance of, 177–8 photographs of cantutas, 170, 172, 176–7, 180n8 and politics, 172–9 poster, 175–6 Wilkinson, Steven, 201–2 Winter in the Morning (1986) (Janina Bauman), 49 witnesses/witnessing, 15–16, 19, 39, 49, 53, 58, 60–2, 67–8, 70n3, 71n11, 72n13, 72n20, 75, 92, 104–5, 107, 151, 160, 169, 174, 178, 198, 223, 232 women, 4, 11–34, 104, 115–44, 151, 239 and corpses, 38; See also corpses in rivers killing of, See Ciudad Juárez; femicide and war, See indigenous women ex-combatants Zizek, Slavoj, 76, 78–9, 109


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9780230113787_01_previii.indd viii

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