Contesting Mexico’s Necropolitics: Necrogovernance and Subversive Necropower in Two Cases

Abstract

Mexico’s contentious necropolitics see different stakeholders involved in political struggles for control over the dead. The families of victims of state and corporate violence protest state necrogovernance and corporate necropower, the power to dictate the circumstances of citizens’ and workers’ lives and deaths. Two case studies show how the state and corporations deploy the criminal technique of disappearing bodies as a means of social control and rendering workers expendable and sometimes killable. Social movements counter this with a determined struggle to restore a sense of worth to the victims of violence through public mourning. Their repertoire of collective action has created a subversive necropower that challenges both necrogovernance and corporate necropower.

La contenciosa necropolítica de México involucra a distintos grupos de interés que participan en la contienda política por el control de los muertos. Las familias de las víctimas de la violencia de Estado y corporativa protestan contra la necrogobernanza estatal y la necropotencia corporativa, y du poder de dictaminar las circunstancias de vida y muerte de los ciudadanos y trabajadores. Dos estudios de caso muestran cómo el Estado y las corporaciones despliegan la técnica criminal de desaparecer los cuerpos como un medio de control social que hace a los trabajadores prescindibles y a veces matables. Los movimientos sociales responden con una lucha decidida por restaurar un sentido de valor para las víctimas de la violencia a través del duelo público. Su repertorio de acción colectiva ha creado una necropotencia subversiva que desafía tanto a la necrogobernanza como a la necropotencia corporativa.

Keywords

Mexico Necropolitics Necropower Disappearance Activism

“We’ve come to this ninth commemoration to honor our dead. They all belong to us, not to the companies or Grupo México or the government. They are all ours. We honor our dead,” Doña Margarita, the mother of a miner who died in an explosion in Pasta de Conchos, Coahuila, in 2006, proclaimed (speech, Mexico City, February 19, 2015). A member of the Organización Familia Pasta de Conchos (the Organization for the Pasta de Conchos Families—OFPC), which is fighting for the right to bury members’ lost loved ones, she was speaking before a small crowd of mourners performing an annual protest and remembrance ceremony. Among them were members of the Padres y Madres de Ayotzinapa (Fathers and Mothers of Ayotzinapa), the parents of the civilians killed or disappeared by municipal police in Guerrero in September 2014, one of whom also addressed the gathering: “You have a right to have their remains taken out so you can give them a good grave” (Bernabé Abraján, speech, Mexico City, February 19, 2015). Remembrance ceremonies like this one are common in Mexico nowadays, part of the ongoing protest against corporate, state, and criminal violence. These annual events, often including marches through the city, are a way of paying tribute to victims who have never been buried and still await justice. Many Mexican families of such victims—often from campesino and working-class backgrounds—engage in nationwide civil disobedience campaigns. These protests are examples of the subversive activist strategies of Mexico’s ongoing necropolitics—struggles for control over the dead and, in these cases, for truth and justice in the aftermath of atrocities (Robben and Ferrándiz, 2016).

Mexico is living in the era of the “narcos.” Two intense decades of drug-trade-related violence have seen the death toll skyrocket, especially since the government launched the war on drug cartels in 2006. The country has long had a high homicide rate, but this war—in combination with the impact of criminal groups fighting for dominance and control over cocaine- and opium-smuggling routes to the United States—has resulted in a staggering toll of at least 37,435 disappeared and more than 200,000 dead (INEGI, 2017; Instituto Belisario Domínguez, 2018: 1; RNPED, 2018). State institutions have tended to ignore the crisis, turning a blind eye to disappearances and violent deaths. Only the rare case ever results in punishment for the perpetrators (Human Rights Watch, 2013). Indeed, the police and the armed forces have been criticized for their involvement in the drug trade and serious human rights violations (GIEI, 2015; Marcial, 2015; Noble, 2015; Pereyra, 2012). This is what the relatives of Mexico’s many victims cannot accept.

Researchers and journalists have shed light on the way Mexico’s drug-related violence has created a “situation of social and political decomposition brought about by a new cycle of capitalist expansion and accumulation” (Zagato, 2018: 55), and on the fact that state and criminal warfare has opened up new markets for extortion, smuggling, and killing (Gibler, 2016). In the aftermath of the Ayotzinapa tragedy, more attention than before has been given to the emergence of brave collectives of surviving families resisting this nexus of economic and violent repression. In what follows I describe two cases—the OFPC’s struggle to exhume and rebury its dead miners and the protests for Ayotzinapa’s disappeared—to illustrate how the surviving families use a subversive form of necropower (reclaiming their dead or disappeared) in Mexico’s ongoing necropolitics. This necropower is part of a repertoire of collective protest (Tilly, 1995) that Mexican activists are drawing from and expanding through their protest performances—carrying signs through the streets, engaging in civil disobedience, and mourning in public as an argument against contemporary power regimes (Tilly, 2006).

Mexico’s violence and capital accumulation are intertwined with regimes of state necrogovernance and corporate necropower that often prevent justice for citizens in the interest of the drug trade, corrupt state agents, or the mining industry (Concha, 2015; Gibler, 2016; Gledhill, 2017; Zagato, 2018). My argument contains three hypotheses: (1) that necrogovernance in Mexico is based partly on violence and the criminal technique of disappearing bodies; (2) that the Mexican state’s necropower is challenged by both cartel and corporate necropower and the social movements that are fighting back; and (3) that these protests represent a sort of subversive necropower that seeks to reclaim ownership over dead or missing bodies and restore dignity to the victims. The first section below defines the concepts I use and is followed by a few paragraphs on methodology. The ensuing two main sections describe the Mexican state’s necrogovernance in the case of Ayotzinapa’s missing and then the corporate necropower in play in the Pasta de Conchos tragedy. I aim to demonstrate how activists seek to counter regimes of authoritarian necrogovernance with their own repertoires of subversive necropower.

Necrogovernance and Subversive Necropower

Between the conflicting interests of state institutions, corporations, and the families of victims, multiple different forms of necropower, necrogovernance, and activist counterstrategies compete for the power to decide who dies and who lives, how death should be handled, and who is deemed worthy of being mourned or having a proper burial (Robben and Ferrándiz, 2016). The terms “necropolitics” and “necropower” are often used interchangeably to refer to forms of state repression and terror (Mbembe, 2008; Robben, 2016). I shall instead use the term “state necrogovernance” to refer to the state’s capacity to take lives through police or military violence—its power to decide who may live or die (Mbembe, 2008: 11)—and to state control over forensic processes and police investigations as in the Ayotzinapa case (Concha, 2015; GIEI, 2015; Marcial, 2015). I shall use the term “corporate necropower” to refer to the power of corporations to dictate the circumstances of their workers’ lives and deaths. Finally, I shall use “subversive necropower” to refer to the strategies activists use to reclaim ownership of their dead or disappeared. I label these strategies “necropower” both to compare them to corporate, criminal, and state necropower and to shed light on the way Mexico’s contemporary repertoires of collective action seem to build on a regional history of social movements that memorialized victims in public spaces (Noble, 2015; Rivera Hernández, 2017; Robben, 2007; Sanjurjo, 2017; Tilly, 1995; 2006).

Achilles Mbembe, who coined the term “necropolitics,” uses it to develop Foucault’s concept of biopower, which he sees as insufficient to “account for contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death” (2008: 39–40). Necropolitics, he makes clear, operates through desubjectivization. Likewise, Robben (2016) uses the lens of necropower to describe how Argentina’s military junta killed and tortured dissidents in what he understands as a territorialization of state terror in public space. In my view, necropower can also be subversive in undermining the dehumanization processes that Mbembe and Robben describe. Necropolitics should be viewed as a contested field of social action and discourse in which subversive necropower may instead render victims visible and thus mournable. The benefit of this perspective is that it links the activist repertoires used by Latin American collectives of relatives of victims (Auyero, 2006; Rivera Hernández, 2017; Robben, 2007; Sanjurjo, 2017) to regimes of necrogovernance (Mbembe, 2008; Robben, 2016; Rojas-Perez, 2017). We might even speak of a discourse of “necromorality” that declares that the dead have rights and that the nation’s victims must have truth and justice and be remembered. This discourse could shame state institutions or corporations through “an essential Foucauldian path, in that it seeks to institute new norms by publicly identifying immoral . . . behavior as an object lesson of what societies ought not to be” (Courpasson and Vallas, 2016: 21). Mexico’s contentious necropolitics sees different stakeholders (e.g., state institutions, federal prosecutors, international forensic experts, drug cartels, corporations, social movements) involved in political struggles for control over the narratives surrounding the dead (GIEI, 2015; Robben and Ferrándiz, 2016).

Participant Observation in Activist Movements

The research for this piece was conducted through participatory fieldwork on Mexican activism for 16 months between 2014 and 2015. During this time, I befriended and accompanied the Fathers and Mothers of Ayotzinapa and met with members of the OFPC when they came to Mexico City to carry out protests. I also participated in the weekly meetings at the House of Solidarity in Benito Juárez, Mexico City, of the Plataforma de Solidaridad con Ayotzinapa (Solidarity Platform for Ayotzinapa), an activist forum consisting of social movements, unions, human rights groups, students, and survivors of the attack on the students from Ayotzinapa that planned and helped to coordinate the Ayotzinapa families’ protests in Mexico City.

The material for this article consists mainly of interviews with the Ayotzinapa families and the OFPC and transcribed recordings of their speeches. The Fathers and Mothers of Ayotzinapa and the OFPC used a touring model, with caravans traveling across the nation to stage protests. Accompanying these protests, in which relatives of victims staged acts of public mourning, made me reflect on the essence of this activist strategy (Rivera Hernández, 2017), and this reflection is at the heart of my argument here.

Participant observation methods are especially useful when adopting a bottom-up approach rooted in the perspectives of informants, and in this case they shed light on the way these families learned their trade and made use of a rich protest repertoire over time. By conducting fieldwork within these two political movements, I hope to specify how activists both draw from and create a repertoire of subversive collective necropower as they “learn to . . . stage public marches, petition, hold formal meetings, organize special-interest associations” (Tilly, 1995: 26), and band together to make their demands heard.

The families of the OFPC travel thousands of miles south from Coahuila to congregate outside the gates of Grupo México’s headquarters in the posh neighborhood of Polanco, Mexico City, to shame the company for its indifference toward their dead. By analyzing how they have ritualized protest and used a discourse of necromorality to reclaim their dead from the control of corporate necropower, I will illustrate the class dimension of necrogovernance. The Fathers and Mothers of Ayotzinapa have led large protest marches for justice and truth in the Zócalo, Mexico City’s main square. Of Mexico’s many movements of relatives of victims, the Ayotzinapa movment is the clearest illustration of state necrogovernance and its failure when surviving relatives deploy a wide repertoire of protests and join forces with international forensic experts.

State Necrogovernance: La Noche De Iguala

On the agenda of a crisis meeting held at the House of Solidarity in central Mexico City in late September 2014 was a police attack on students in Iguala, Guerrero, on the evening of the 26th and the early morning of the 27th. Six civilians had been shot dead and 43 students (normalistas) from the Raúl Isidro Burgos de Ayotzinapa Rural Normal School, an all-male teachers’ college, had been attacked and later taken away by municipal police. Omar García, a survivor of the massacre that would soon become infamous as the noche de Iguala (the Iguala night), had come to give us his testimony and organize protests for his disappeared comrades (testimony, Mexico City, September 30, 2014):

We went to Iguala to raise money and commandeer buses [a common practice among normal-school students in Mexico, although unpopular with the bus companies they “borrowed” from]. But when we were leaving the police stopped us and began shooting at us. I was with an injured friend who had been shot in his face. We were running for our lives through the streets of Iguala, knocking on doors in search of a hospital. It was dark, and all you could see was the gunfire.

García would, in the aftermath of this tragedy, take on a leading role alongside the fathers and mothers of the disappeared students in the nationwide protest movement that was about to sweep the country. What exactly had happened to the still-missing students has been the topic of controversy ever since. The Fathers and Mothers of Ayotzinapa held weekly marches in the capital to demand that their sons be handed back to them alive. Bernabé Abraján, a campesino from Guerrero like most of the parents, expressed his bewilderment when I talked to him during one of their protests in Mexico City in early November:

The last call [my son] made was to a nephew in the school, telling him: “The police are attacking us.” We wonder why this has happened to us, because we are not involved with cartels or the government. We are poor farmers who want to live a quiet life, that’s all. What happened has changed our lives. We are looking for our sons from sunup to sundown.

In the months that followed, several mass graves with a total of 28 bodies were discovered in the mountains outside of Iguala and were at first thought to be the missing students. This was later disproved by the Argentine forensic anthropology team that helped in the investigation as an independent group that, in contrast to those working for the Attorney General’s Office (led by Jesús Murillo Karam), had the trust of the Fathers and Mothers of Ayotzinapa. The movement began to suspect that the federal government was covering up what had really happened to the disappeared students and called for the resignation of President Enrique Peña Nieto (2012–2018). José Luis Abarca, the mayor of Iguala, was on the run with his wife, suspected of having ordered the attack and of belonging to the local drug cartel Guerreros Unidos. Soon the attorney general held a press conference to present what he called “the historical truth” about the tragedy. According to him the students had been handed over to members of Guerreros Unidos, who took them to a dump outside of the city of Cocula, executed them, burned their bodies in a big bonfire, and put their remains in plastic bags and threw them into the nearby San Juan River. Iguala’s municipal police were said to have mistaken the students for a rival cartel, Los Rojos (Jesús Murillo Karam, press conference, Mexico City, November 7, 2014). However, the Argentine forensic team criticized these claims and could not match DNA from the remains found in the river to any of the students.

Now a case of true forensic necropolitics ensued, with rival truth claims competing for control of the narrative. What had truly happened to the students? Were they dead, and had they been killed in the way that the Attorney General’s Office claimed? Or was this a smokescreen? The Fathers and Mothers of Ayotzinapa suspected that the investigation was an attempt to divert blame by attributing the disappearances to organized crime and the left-wing mayor. The investigative journalist Anabel Hernández (2016: 23, 51, 58–60, 161–175) revealed that federal police had taken part in the attack that night and said that she had evidence that the last registered GPS locations of two of the phones belonging to the disappeared students came from the military base of the 27th Infantry Battalion in Iguala. The fact that no one was allowed to search the base or ask the soldiers any questions only roused suspicion that they might have been involved in the massacre. Hernández (2016: 7) also reported that the intelligence-gathering centers known as C4 centers were operating that night, which implicated the army, the federal police, and the state government of Guerrero, since the system had had the students under surveillance three hours before they were attacked. In this light, the Iguala massacre appeared an act of intentional political repression of predominantly indigenous, left-leaning, and rebellious students.

Without any consensus about their fate that night, the Ayotzinapa families held onto the hope that their missing sons were still alive and continued their protest call: “¡Vivos se los llevaron, vivos los queremos!” (They took them alive, we want them back alive!). This echoed the cries of the relatives of Argentina’s many disappeared, such as the Madres de Plaza de Mayo (Mothers of Plaza de Mayo), whose family members were disappeared under the military junta in the 1970s and 1980s (Robben, 2007). Not knowing whether their sons might be found, they were caught between hope and despair. As Bernabé put it (Mexico City, November 12, 2014),

The police put them on trucks and took them away alive. My son’s name is Adán Abraján. He was kidnapped and remains disappeared. The government blames it all on criminals. It is painful for me, not finding my son, above all because he had two children, one seven and one two years old. He is supposed to get married December 20. That is why he is alive. He should farm. He is a person who resists, and he will come home to see his family.

The body material found in the San Juan River was sent to Innsbruck for further testing, and one student, Alexander Mora, was later identified from the burned remains, apparently confirming the attorney general’s “historical truth.” The parents seemed to be denying their sons’ probable death. Part of the psychological torture of a disappearance is that it fosters wishful thinking (Suárez-Orozco, 1987: 384).

The criminal technique of disappearing bodies can be an effective way to keep families quiet, since close relatives may choose not to speak up in fear of causing their abducted loved one’s death, and it makes criminal charges “impossible without any corpora delicti” (Robben, 2000: 83). Its necrogovernance works through invisible violence. Relatives, however, often refuse to stay at home haunted by nightmares and instead respond with activism. When they speak out against the terror, they break the reign of silence and fear that the disappearing of bodies is employed to maintain. Doña Adrianita, one of the indigenous mothers among the Ayotzinapa families, illustrated this well at one of their many protest rallies at the Monument of the Revolution in early December, holding a large sign with her missing son’s name and photo and declaring (speech, Mexico City, December 6, 2014): “We raise our voices and do not stay at home. We take to the streets. This is the moment to raise our voices and change this country, change the government that tricks us—to demand that every one of us will govern and not the government with its weapons.”

Latin American relatives of victims of state violence often defy regimes of necrogovernance by recalling violent memories in public spaces in this way (Rivera Hernández, 2017; Robben, 2007; Taussig, 1992). By doing so, they form a “shared strategy of political action” and participate in “the production of shared meanings” (Sanjurjo, 2017: 113). These protest repertoires draw their strength from a strategic deployment of a “politics of visibility” (Rivera Hernández, 2017: 108) that makes full use of the “moral and magical power of the unquiet dead” (Taussig, 1992: 48). They use testimonies and photos of victims to call on society to join them in their struggle.

In January 2015, the Fathers and Mothers of Ayotzinapa tried to storm the 27th Infantry Battalion’s base in Iguala but were met with rubber bullets that held them back and injured several. Gradually they turned to targeted civil disobedience. The midterm elections that year were to renew the 500 seats of the lower house of the Mexican Congress, 9 of 31 governorships, and hundreds of local mayorships. “We want our children to be found first, and then there can be elections,” the families proclaimed. They took over polling places and election offices and collected ballots later burned in the streets. They managed to prevent voting in 4.4 percent of the voting booths in Oaxaca and Guerrero (Lorenzen and Orozco, 2016: 185).

After almost 12 months of civil disobedience and constant protesting, the Grupo Interdisciplinario de Expertos Independientes (Group of Independent Interdisciplinary Experts—GIEI), working on behalf of the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights, released a report about the Iguala case that refuted the official explanation as “scientifically impossible” in that there was no evidence of a large bonfire at the dump outside Cocula where the attorney general claimed that the students had been killed and their bodies burned (GIEI, 2015: 340–342). The Fathers and Mothers of Ayotzinapa came to suspect that fake crime scenes had been staged at the San Juan River and the dump. The GIEI’s conclusions challenged the attorney general’s “historical truth” (GIEI, 2015) and, more broadly, posed a challenge to Mexican state institutions’ control over the forensic process and evidence as a basis for truth claims. The Attorney General’s Office refused to accept the GIEI’s report and continued to repeat its original narrative. Now necropolitics was being played out on the level of forensic technicalities as well as on the streets. The suspicion that the federal prosecutors had actively sought to conceal the truth and the degree of state involvement in the disappearance of the 43 students enraged the masses enough to return to the streets for the first annual protest event that marked the anniversary of the Iguala massacre. As one protester stated (Felipe de la Cruz Sandoval, speech, September 26, 2015):

We are on strike! We are enraged because they have played with our feelings. With all of our voices, we denounce the government of Enrique Peña Nieto and its complicity in the killings in Iguala. A crime like that cannot be kept hidden, because keeping quiet will condemn us to relive it, and this nightmare should not be allowed to be repeated ever again.

The GIEI’s report also suggested that the investigation look into a missing fifth bus that was never mentioned in the official report on the massacre. It advanced the hypothesis that this bus might have had a cargo of heroin meant for the United States, which would connect the Iguala massacre and the coordinated police attack on the students with the drug trade and the criminal economy (GIEI, 2015: 191–194). The unarmed students might have had the bad luck of commandeering the wrong bus. The GIEI also reported that soldiers were present at several of the crime scenes that night and recommended a search of the army base in Iguala (GIEI, 2015: 191–195).

The breakdown of the Mexican state’s necrogovernance and its control of the forensic narratives of the Ayotzinapa case was to reveal even more serious things than this. One of the students confirmed to have been murdered that night in Iguala, Julio César Mondragón Fonte, was found on the streets in the early hours of the following morning with signs of macabre torture: his eyes had been carved out and the skin of his face had been ripped off. The forensic doctors working for the Guerrero state prosecutor attributed this to “wild fauna.” A collective of independent forensic experts and activist academics created the Colectivo El Rostro de Julio (Julio’s Face Collective) to demand a second autopsy of his corpse to determine the cause of the damage to his face. Release of the documents from the original autopsy, which the group demanded to see, was delayed for months, and in the end some of the documents were said to have “disappeared.” Julio’s brother Lenin Mondragón spoke about the case at the Colegio de México as the first anniversary of the attack approached (roundtable, Mexico City, September 9, 2015):

They ripped off his face, his eyes, when he was still alive, and then they come up with this: that it was wild fauna that skinned him. And why the face? Why the face, and not a hand, a foot? It will soon be a year without justice or explanations of what happened. How is it possible that this injustice was done to him? They wanted to stain the memory of my brother. I hope that this won’t be repeated and that other families never have to suffer what we are suffering in this moment.

On the day of Julio’s exhumation for the second autopsy, a ceremony was held to symbolically reconstruct his face in Mexico City with colored sawdust from his family’s village. This was but one of many ceremonies held to restore the dignity of his memory. While this type of violence seeks to dehumanize the victim, Julio’s family reconstructed his image—and in a sense rehumanized him—to make him worthy of grief and value once more. These actions were part of a repertoire of subversive necropower that countered macabre violence and state necrogovernance with public mourning.

The second autopsy indeed proved the “wild fauna” hypothesis wrong and provided evidence that Julio had been subjected to torture and that this torture was the cause of his death (Colectivo El Rostro de Julio, 2017). Afterward his corpse was held in the morgue in Mexico City, denying his family a reburial, for three months and released only after the collective publicly criticized the state for revictimizing the victim and demanded that his corpse be returned to his family.

Julio’s face became a powerful symbol. Instead of scaring people away from the streets, it caused many Mexicans to engage in activism in solidarity with his surviving family. The case of the 43 disappeared students, however, remains unsolved to this day. The new left-wing National Regeneration Movement administration of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO, [2019–]), who had managed to break the Institutional Revolutionary and National Action Parties’ long monopoly on the presidency, set up a now-ongoing truth commission in 2019 that may yet bring truth, forensic consensus, justice, and closure to the families and resolve the case.

Awaiting the results of the truth commission, the Pandora’s box of Mexico’s necropolitics remains wide open. The criminal necropower on display in the Iguala massacre manifested itself through acts of spectacular violence, disappearance of bodies, and improper management of forensic investigations. The illicit drug business and authoritarian regimes often seek social control through fear. Criminal agents territorialize disputed narco plazas (smuggling routes and trade zones) in undeclared drug wars, marking them with morbid violence and dismembered bodies in a politics of fear meant to help them maintain their monopoly on violence and profits (Berlanga, 2015; Pereyra, 2012). The Mexican state’s war on drug cartels and alleged cooperation with some of them also partake of this geography of terror by exercising control through acts of state violence (Berlanga, 2015; Pereyra, 2012). But Ayotzinapa is also the story of the breakdown of macabre regimes of necrogovernance (Berlanga, 2015; Robben, 2016; Rojas-Perez, 2017) when the determined struggle for truth and justice of a collective of campesinos challenged what Adrianita called “the government with its weapons and its tricks.”

Corporate Necropower: Pasta De Conchos

Political protests can become commemorative ceremonies that live on for decades in their determined calls for justice. The surviving families of the miners who died in the explosion in Pasta de Conchas in 2006 still congregate outside Grupo México’s head office every year on February 19, the anniversary of the accident. What distinguished the mineshaft collapse at Pasta de Conchos was that only 2 of the 65 dead miners’ bodies were recovered. The rest have remained in the moist earth of the collapsed mineshaft ever since Grupo México called off the mission to recover them on April 4, 2007, and the OFPC continues to demand that they be exhumed: “¡Rescate Ya!” (Excavate Now!).

Grupo México’s search for the trapped miners was first paused on February 24, 2006, when only two bodies had been recovered, because of the high levels of gas inside the mine. The following day the company claimed in a press conference that there could be no survivors from the methane gas explosions that had occurred in two of the tunnels. Mineworkers had complained about high levels of gas and poor safety conditions in the months before the explosion. The Pasta de Conchos mine was already infamous for its poor working conditions, and the level of gas in the shafts when the rescue mission was paused was in fact similar to what the miners had to work in daily.

The annual protest that surviving relatives carry out at the company’s gates often involves the participation of other collectives such as the Ayotzinapa families and the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity, a group of relatives of victims of the drug war. Padre Gustavo, who belongs to the latter group, prepared for communion during the annual ceremony in February 2015 in the protective shadow of a small tent at a table covered with a white tablecloth. The tent and our gathering occupied most of the sidewalk and made it inconvenient for the office workers at Grupo México’s headquarters to enter and leave their workplace. A mariachi played corridos, and we stood together in a circle, holding each other’s hands, and said the names of the 63 unrecovered mineworkers, adding “Presente” (present), a call for the souls of the dead workers to join us. After all the names had been called out, we cried “¡Justicia!” and other slogans: “¡No más no honrar las víctimas!” (No more not honoring the victims!), “¡Ya basta la injusticia!, ¡Ya basta un México sin memoria!” (Enough injustice! Enough of a Mexico without memory!), “¡Murió por culpa de la empresa Grupo México!” (He died because of the Grupo México company!).

This ninth annual commemoration of the Pasta de Conchos tragedy was yet another chance for the surviving families to display their grief in the capital and demand the return of their lost loved ones’ bodies. Representatives of the Ayotzinapa families were also there on the sidewalk protesting the disgraceful handling of the tragedy. The widows and other relatives read statements at this combination religious commemoration ceremony and political protest—remembrance as activism. Silvia, one of the Pasta de Conchos widows, said, “The tragedies of the coal mines are not accidents, not spontaneous events. They happen because of the company’s negligence—by omission, complacency, and corruption among the majority of the mining companies ” (public testimony, Mexico City, February 19, 2015). Margarita followed:

Three presidents, three administrations of two different parties, the PRI [Institutional Revolutionary Party] and the PAN [National Action Party], and yet the case is not closed. We represent over 600 concerned relatives. We do not want more people to be killed in the coal mines or more safety violations. We come from the poorest region of the state. All of the riches from the coal extraction have stayed in the hands of the owners of the mines and the Coahuila state government—everyone but the families of the miners and our communities. . . . They will not change. It doesn’t matter what party they belong to or what company might be in charge. They all act the same. . . . Grupo México polluted the Sonora River, and after a century of industrial mining we have been left in an ecological disaster that we, the families, must live in. In the name of our dead, in the name of the miners of Pasta de Conchos that we shall rescue, and in the name of the thousands of people who live in our communities, we demand a rescue mission for Pasta de Conchos! We also have the right to a decent life, to health, to a level of life that grants dignity. . . . We’ve come to this ninth commemoration to honor our dead. . . . Life, our lives, are worth more than coal. The Pasta de Conchos case is not closed. We will recover our relatives.

The fact that Margarita had to reclaim the dead rhetorically in this way points to the fact that it is the company and state institutions such as the sympathetic court system that dictate the rights of the dead bodies here. Under conventional circumstances, the “honoring of the dead” is done through burial, but in this case the company’s refusal to pay for a prolonged rescue mission to recover the corpses and Mexico’s justice system’s refusal to force them to do so prevents it. It is the fact that the corpses remain beneath the earth in the mineshafts that continues to outrage the OFPC today and makes members congregate in these political commemorative events. As we have seen, Bernabé Abraján of the Ayotzinapa families addressed the widows of Pasta de Conchos that day, expressing profound solidarity with them: “We fight for the remains of your family members. . . . Have them, give them flowers. It really is very painful what we are going through” (Mexico City, February 19, 2015). The unburied dead lack ritual closure; their souls cannot find peace, and their relatives are trapped in emotional limbo and never-ending grief. The surviving relatives’ grief and anger, in turn, are now driving the nation with repeated public displays of mourning that shame state institutions and corporations alike in a stubborn pursuit of justice for the victims. On the streets of Polanco they deploy not only a politics of visibility but also a strategic evocation of shared and shareable emotions such as grief, anger, pain, and hope (Noble, 2015; Rivera Hernández, 2017; Sanjurjo, 2017) as they claim their right to have their dead husbands brought back for a final farewell.

Pasta de Conchos left 64 widows and 160 orphans. After 13 years of court proceedings, Grupo México has not yet been forced to recover the bodies, and the concerned relatives persist with their protest commemorations and their shaming of the mining company for its flagrant indifference to the workers and their families. The OFPC keeps on reclaiming its moral ownership of its dead as its members strive to uphold their relatives’ rights to “a good grave.” In March of 2018, the case was admitted before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which concluded that the company had not complied with safety norms and recognized the Mexican government’s failure to respect the dead miners’ rights to life, personal safety, access to justice, and economic, social, and cultural rights as protected in Articles 4, 5, 8, 25, and 26 of the Convention on Human Rights (CIDH, 2018). Mexico’s new government has now promised to recover the miners’ bodies, but until that day comes the Pasta de Conchos case remains a reminder of serious corporate negligence in which profits from mineral extraction took precedence over decency.

Corporate necropower in Mexico must, of course, be seen in the light of the nation’s generalized state of impunity, which allows conventional corporations such as Grupo México—Mexico’s largest mining firm and the world’s third-largest copper producer, run by Germán Larrea, one of Mexico’s richest men—to exploit workers in this shocking way. In a situation “dominated by the parallel power of organized crime, paramilitary violence, and impunity” and the “neo-extractivist economy” (Gledhill, 2014: 507; 2017), the boundaries between violent and conventional entrepreneurships dissolve. David Harvey (2004) reflected on something similar with his term “accumulation by dispossession.” However, what makes contemporary Mexico stand out is its withholding of bodies as an instrument both in the illicit drug markets and in the neo-extractivist economy. Grupo México’s corporate necropower continues Latin America’s long history of commodification and exploitation of workers’ bodies, a history that reaches all the way back to the extractive regimes and exploitation of indigenous people of colonial times (Gibler, 2016; Nash, 1979; Taussig, 1984). Similar regimes of necropower now live on in drug wars, kidnappings, forced labor, and human trafficking across the nation (Gibler, 2016; Reveles, 2015).

Grupo Mexico’s continuing use of corporate necropower to control the fate of the dead workers’ remains creates contention both in the courtroom and on the streets. It is far from a given that it will continue to dictate the terms, but what will be left to recover, grieve, and rebury if its grip persists? Corporate necropower comes with a more sophisticated method of silencing than the macabre violence of the drug cartels and corrupt state agents seen in the Ayotzinapa case. It aims to erase the memory of corporate abuse and secure profits, but it perpetuates lasting grief and family trauma in ways just as unsettling as the legacies of war or violence. The annual ceremonies of the OFPC are important because they refuse to forget or cede ownership of what is theirs. The ritualized annual protest event has—at least since the start of the commemorative march every October 2 in memory of the Tlatelolco Massacre in 1968 and the movement of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires in the 1980s—been part of the standard repertoire of Latin American collectives of relatives of victims. Their public displays of grief are simultaneously acts of defiance that reclaim public space and social acts of mourning for those that governments and corporations consider expendable.

Conclusion

Mexico’s contemporary necropolitics involves various stakeholders—state institutions, drug cartels, corporations, international forensic experts, and social collectives—competing for the power to decide who is worthy of a proper burial and which families can receive closure after a death. Necropolitics should not merely be viewed through a state-centered lens, and necropower should not be seen simply as the top-down implementation of terror (Mbembe, 2008; Robben, 2016). Instead, it may be examined to draw out how two of its features—state necrogovernance and corporate necropower—are met by a subversive protest repertoire that makes full use of the “moral . . . power of the unquiet dead” (Taussig, 1992: 48). Two Mexican cases demonstrate how state necrogovernance (in the case of Ayotzinapa’s missing 43 students) and corporate necropower (in the case of the still-unburied mineworkers from Pasta de Conchos) made the most of the impunity offered by the disappearance of bodies to prevent justice and utilize fear as a means of social control. Necrogovernance renders some citizens and corporate necropower renders workers expendable in the interests of capital accumulation. Narco-state control over criminal investigations can be used to hide state involvement in massacres and potential links to the drug trade. In both cases it appears that the regimes of state necrogovernance and corporate necropower are on the verge of breaking down because of the victims’ relatives collective struggles for justice. These organizations use a wide repertoire of collective actions that may be understood as a strategic deployment of a subversive necropower. Through their politics of emotions and visibility, they “cry out for the recognition of the lives of their dead . . . who should also be worthy of defense, courage, mourning, and memory” and seek to make their victims “seen, heard, and felt by others.” They fight to reclaim their dead, their disappeared, and public spaces (Noble, 2015; Rivera Hernández, 2017; Sanjurjo, 2017: 126).

This repertoire is clearly different from those of indigenous movements against capitalism and in favor of autonomy (Gledhill, 2017; Guerra Manzo, 2015; Stephen, 2002), instead drawing upon nonviolent protest aimed at achieving truth and justice for the victims and accountability from the state. The OFPC and the Fathers and Mothers of Ayotzinapa reclaim public space through “everyday passive revolution” (Morton, 2018: 118) when they take back the streets and important monuments, congregate in public squares or outside corporate headquarters, and dispel the politics of fear that serves only exploitation.

Photos of the victims appear on banners and T-shirts, testimonies are given, and the public narrative declares that “they have names, they had dreams, they are not numbers.” Reclaiming the dead and disappeared is acted out in annual commemorative events that recall violent memories. They seek to make the victims mournable once more and restore a sense of human decency while mobilizing for truth and justice. This action should be understood as a subversive necropower that serves as a repertoire of collective action under contemporary regimes of necrogovernance.

Footnotes

Olof Ohlson holds a Ph.D. in social anthropology from Edinburgh University. His dissertation, “The Political Afterlives of Mexico’s Dead and Disappeared” (2020), explores how relatives of victims of violence sustain their political afterlives to fight state-sponsored necrogovernance and criminal violence.

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