‘Noticias no son noticias,¿no?’: Mexican perspectives on violence in the media and the war on drugs

Introduction: ‘No Más Sangre (No More Blood)’

WARNING: Contains graphic images

Demonstrators numbering in the thousands carried signs reading, ‘No Más Sangre (No More Blood)’. While living in Mexico City and during subsequent return stays (2009–2016) as an African American woman researcher, I witnessed multiple mass protests against the War on Drugs. People in Mexico were showing their profound frustration, sadness, and dismay at the growing, aggravated death toll and numerous desaparecidos, or disappeared victims of the illicit drug trade. Mexican President Felipe Calderón’s 2006 policy change had resulted in a federal police force more militarized and confrontational with organized crime. Within 5 years, the drug war had grown to claim the lives of at least 34,612 women, men, and children across the country, and almost exclusively outside of Mexico City, the administrative and financial center of Mexico (Economist, 2012). Unsurprisingly, during this same period, U.S. demand for illicit narcotics continued to expand and diversify. Transnational criminal organizations and drug-trafficking organizations deepened their operations sourcing fentanyl, heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine, and marijuana to U.S.-based distributors and users (Drug Enforcement Administration [DEA], 2021; Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration [SAMHS], 2011).

On separate occasions in Mexico City, I observed well-armed police in black face masks and militarized camouflage openly touring the avenues in a bold intimidation effort. Assault rifles in hand, with guns mounted on armored vehicles, the regular and highly visible police presence there, in Acapulco, and other locales, had the chilling effect of reminding civilians of the state-sanctioned power of the police. Arguably, their stepped-up presence under President Calderón was intended to push back on the physical and psychological incursion of violent, drug-related deaths. However, in the years since, Mexico’s cumulative human loss in the drug war has continued climbing beyond 105,000 deaths (Hurtado, 2021). And today, the U.S. government names Mexican transnational criminal organizations as the most significant source of illicit narcotics in U.S. circulation, particularly synthetic opioids (DEA, 2021).

Not long after I arrived in Mexico, I also learned that the drug trade was well-entrenched in local media. In addition to regular, limited news reporting on the situation, there was a proliferation of music centered upon drug-trafficking. Such ballads, or narcocorridos like the song ‘Sanguinarios del M1’ (Bukanas de Culiacán, 2011), assist in narrativizing and historicizing the turbulent, bloodied conflict through popular lenses. In the words of narcos (agents of organized drug-trafficking), their severe tactics have the purpose of inflicting and broadcasting trauma, as in ‘Pa’ traumatizar’ [para traumatizar]. There were also a range of scripted dramas on local television such as Telemundo’s La Reina del Sur (The Queen of the South, 2011-), which had steady afternoon showings. With its sexy escapades and action sequences, the popular narcotelenovela appealed to what literary and cultural studies scholar Cabañas (2012: 75) refers to as a ‘global voyeur-audience’.

Nevertheless, in January 2010, a watershed moment occurred when President Calderón was asked for comment about a cartel-directed massacre that killed 15 young people in Ciudad Juárez (located near the border with El Paso, Texas) (Mexican News Daily, 2017). The president responded by characterizing the shooting victims as merely ‘pandilleros’ (gang members), a statement interpreted as both undervaluing the victims’ lives and blaming them for their fate (Cervantes Porrúa, 2017). The president’s statement greatly angered locals, and particularly Mrs. Luz María Dávila, the mother of two teenage boys slain in the violence. When Mr. Calderón later surfaced at a town hall event in an effort to make a public apology, Mrs. Dávila stood up and confronted him with a statement of her own. Her spontaneous public remarks in Ciudad Juárez are the subject of this paper, along with related discussions of the drug war made during a university seminar in Mexico City.

As a Black woman and scholar based in North America, I am keenly aware of how media portrayals of drug-trafficking, addiction and illicit drug use, and drug-related deaths overwhelmingly associate Black and Brown life with criminality (Brown et al., 2018). Such implicit and explicit bias is exacted in the strategic wording and imagery of news headlines, as well as that of popular music, film, television, and videogames, effectively skewing our views of the drug war (Mercille, 2014). Over time, right or wrong, these media discourses circulate in our public imaginary, contributing to our outlook on others. This is why discourses of the drug war, which I witnessed while in Mexico, make a particular and enduring impact on me.

With this in mind, the spoken discourses that form the subject of this paper derive from a larger ethnographic project on language, race, and popular culture in Mexico and the Global South (Thomas, in press). Through analysis of both spontaneous speech and speakers’ physical stances (by way of video stills), I show how participants in these two sites – both public and private – challenge mediatized normalization of graphic and casualized talk about violent, drug-related death in Mexico.

Background: Narco violence in popular and political discourse

In this new era of transnational organized crime, and particularly after President Calderón’s declaration of ‘war’ in 2006, escalating violence follows in the path of trafficked narcotics. However, both the U.S. and Mexico are responsible for the socioeconomic conditions, and racial and class biases, that perpetuate the conflict and place the greatest losses on working class Black and Brown people (Boullosa and Wallace, 2015). Beginning in the U.S. in 1914, more than a century of collusion in the prohibition of narcotics has helped to fuel a cross-border drug-trafficking industry. The Los Angeles Times (2012) widely reported that as ‘drugs continued to flow north and U.S. government weapons and cash laundered by major global banks flowed south’, resulting in ‘a catastrophic expansion of violence and a crime-solving rate of nearly zero’. Consequently, Mexican journalists continually face a security crisis of widespread and deadly intimidation, by way of very real threats of censorship, beating, kidnapping, and murder (Campbell, 2014; González Macías and Reyna García, 2019).

While in Mexico City, I observed how the visual intimidation projected by cadres of black-masked police was intended to protect the city from physical violence, inasmuch as it was also broadcasting a message of government confidence and control. And though the city largely felt safe, regular news reports of murders, assassinations, kidnappings, and dismemberments were reminders of the expanding violence in other parts of the country, as near as Cuernavaca on the city’s southern outskirts, and further south to Acapulco in the coastal state of Guerrero. The violence was also apparent hundreds of miles to the north, toward Culiacán in Sinaloa state, and Ciudad Juárez in Chihuahua state, at the border with El Paso, Texas. By contrast, the quiet affluence of life in central Mexico City, where close to a million of the city’s 9 million inhabitants lived, meant that most residents were physically removed from the immediate effects of drug-related homicide. Arguably, these circumstances perpetuated a desensitization to the human impact of the War on Drugs.

Told from the perspective of leaders in organized drug-trafficking, however, the imminent threat of violence is more than a powerful material and discursive tool of social control. It is also a way of life, a defining principle of guerilla warfare, masculine heroism, and the burgeoning trade in illicit narcotics (Grillo, 2014). Though demonized by the state, the way that narcos are alternatively upheld as heroes for their daring evasions of police custody and judicial regulation also indicates how complex and dynamic the concerns surrounding drug-trafficking truly are. It is a storyline that plays out over and over again across popular song, tabloid news, digital platforms, and television dramas, as drug cartels, media outlets, and the state leverage the sociopsychological aftereffects of mass fear and trauma.

One such cartel, Los Caballeros Templarios de Michoacán (Knights Templar of Michoacán), have pictured themselves with medieval helmets and assault rifles on social media. They are widely known to manage their trafficking of methamphetamine from within Michoacán state, using a group honor code that frames their activity as a subversive act in the utmost public interest (as quoted in Bunker and Sullivan, 2014):

Esta lucha es por tu gente, por mi gente; Por nosotros mismos y por nuestras futuras generaciones. (This fight is for your people, for my people; For ourselves and for our future generations).

Indeed, media representations of the War on Drugs themselves arguably constitute a narcoscape, a storied-world in which violence, death, and drug-funded prosperity are contested across various archetypal characterizations (after Appadurai, 1990, on mediascapes). Exemplars include the deviant, murderous narco that may, at times, choose to be a valiant hero; the corruptible politician or member of law enforcement charged with upholding both morality and capitalism; and the poor, disempowered civilian caught in the middle. The term narcoscape has been used by scholars to describe the composite physical geography, built landscape, political borders, climate conditions, and syndicates that grow, gather, and traffic the crops, chemicals, and people that feed illicit trade around the world (e.g. concerning Tanzania, see, for example, Millet, 2019; and on cross-Atlantic trafficking organizations linking Africa and Latin America, see, for example, Affinnih, 2002). Ballads like ‘Sanguinarios’ exemplify the currency of violent imagery within Mexican popular culture centered upon the War on Drugs. Though banned from radio play for its graphic content, this class of contemporary narcocorridos circulates through digital platforms and concert performances, easily reaching transnational audiences in both the U.S. and Mexico (e.g. Cabañas, 2014; Campbell, 2014).

In addition, the Spanish-language television show La Reina del Sur offers a further example of the mediatized narcoscape. By continually towing the line between tragedy and triumph, La Reina del Sur lionized its central character as a ‘queen’ of organized crime, and turned criminality, lawlessness, and romance into a seductive spectacle. The series has since become so successful that an English-language remake of the show, billed somewhat obviously as The Queen of the South, debuted in 2016 on U.S. television networks. This and other narcomedia crossover sensations, including Netflix’s Narcos (2015–2017) and companion series Narcos: Mexico (2018–2021), mirror the multiple cross-border investments and concerns in the War on Drugs. Many people, beyond drug-traffickers themselves, benefit from the narcoscape as it currently exists, and from circulating racialized, gendered, and classed portrayals of criminality, aggression, and tragic victimhood.

Within these ideological fields, news and entertainment media serve not to merely recount events, but as a conduit for the manipulated and constructed portrayal of the imagined worlds of drug-related crime (Iglesias Ortiz, 2013). These brands of entertainment and shock advertising are enabled by our increasingly commodified and class-mediated relationships to one another (Appadurai, 1990). Importantly, the consumer audiences of these mass media are simultaneously local, national, and transnational, particularly where the multinational War on Drugs is concerned, in addition to an increasingly visible militarization of state (e.g. police, army) and non-state actors (e.g. drug cartels, self-defense militias eradicating cartels).

The present study

Here, I illuminate the related impacts of drug-trafficking and violent death within Mexico’s media landscape by centering the voices of people with firsthand experience of these discourses in Mexico City and Ciudad Juárez. I present these extracts of their talk as a collection of ethnographic vignettes. These vignettes are contextualized through description of further relevant details of the Mexican media landscape, including my observations of the widespread, normative circulation of explicit images within print news media. My analysis engages methods in interactional sociolinguistics and critical discourse analysis to explore speakers’ insights with regard to their interactional stances and commentaries on local media and social power. Analysis of talk from the Ciudad Juárez town hall is supplemented by photographic stills (my screenshots) from publicly available video of the interaction. All talk participants in non-public arenas of discussion are attributed using pseudonyms.

Ethnographic Vignette 1: ‘The media is loco (crazy)’

With a view toward illustrating the media landscape of Mexico City, I take us now directly to a university seminar discussion on April 11, 2011. By that point, I had been a participant observer in courses common to this learning community for nearly 7 months. On that particular day, late in the semester, the African Studies graduate seminar was focused on the politics of media representation. As the series of extracts illustrate below, the seminar was conducted in Spanish by a Mexican professor, and consisted of five Master’s students. The entire classroom community was accustomed to my digital audio recorder, and also to my presence as a note-taker, observer, and occasionally active contributor to discussion when invited.

In Extract 1, the professor (Profe) and one of the students, Ximena, drew comparison between problematic representations of African countries and Mexico itself. Together, they began questioning whether the noticias (news) are simply news, or something more. The professor asks the students to consider the overrepresentation of chaos in news stories about African countries. Ximena (lines 5–8) observes that the kind of (in)visibility that Africa commands in media, especially with regard to chaos, is motivated by the news media’s overall fetishization of crisis events, such as matanza (massacre).

Extract 1 ¹ :

With his follow-up questions (lines 9, 11), the professor continues to critically question the default substance of news media, and provoke Ximena and the other students to more deeply consider their participation in the mediascape. The professor’s tag question ‘¿no?’ (right?) (line 9) marks his persuasive effort and bid to stimulate further discussion.

In the continuation of the discussion, the professor problematizes the entire media enterprise as ‘loco’ (crazy) (Extract 2, line 1). His point is initially missed by Natalia (line 2), but reiterated to greater effect by Jazmín (line 3), who clarifies that the crux of the issue is the overrepresentation of violence in Mexico’s news media.

Extract 2:

In Extract 2, no one in the class disputes that images of violent and injurious death are in wide circulation across multiple news outlets. In fact, as the Mexican context comes into greater focus, the prevalence of violence in the media becomes attributed to coverage of drug-trafficking and related criminality (line 3). As Natalia underscores, it is the media’s replay of narco activities that is billing drug-traffickers as underdog heroes, and contributing to overall increases in violent imagery across news outlets. According to Ana (lines 9–11), children are particularly vulnerable to this spectatorship, as explicit images of bodies decapitated, hanged, and/or burnt circulate freely across Mexico’s Internet, television, and print journalism. She partly blames the right to freedom of speech for these occurrences (line 5). While most everyone in the class agrees that the amount of violence in the media is staggering (lines 4, 7), there seems to be no true solution to this problem. Rather, the professor submits that the issue is very complex (line 6).

Observations of explicit, graphic content in Mexican print media

Apart from the university classroom, my experiences in Mexico City’s streets and subway plazas corroborated much of the mediatized violence that Ana, Jazmín, and Natalia described as commonplace. For example, explicit images of the deceased feature in Mexican print media in a manner that does not similarly surface in the U.S. without intentional blurring of aspects of the image or a textual warning. On one occasion, as I was walking to catch a train in the underground subway system near the city’s downtown area, I noticed a collection of four tabloid pages on display at an informal news kiosk, and used my smartphone to capture their in-situ context.

My photo (Figure 1) offers a view of the news vendor’s unique 2 × 2 arrangement of the four tabloid pages. I have blurred the vendor’s face in the photo to protect their anonymity, and placed a circle in the image to draw attention to the news pages. I believe my photo captures how typical it is in Mexico City to encounter images of explicitly and violently deceased persons within print news media, and how often these are juxtaposed with softcore pornography, in the form of sparsely clad, hypersexualized feminine bodies. The vendor’s foursquare arrangement, which displays two pages from each of two publications (which appear to be reporting on the same murder), constitutes a visual text that teases the contents of these news publications as a form of conspicuous entertainment. The manner in which it broadcasts this imagery underscores its normalization in public space, and also makes passersby into spectators. The visual composition is further hyperbolized by the sharp narrativizing of a series of briefly worded and eye-catching headlines:

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Figure 1.

Cellphone camera image taken in Mexico City subway plaza in July 2016, with headlines of newspapers El Gráfico, and Metro. The lead headline of tabloid El Gráfico reads, ‘ACUCHILLADO’ (KNIFED), and is superimposed over an explicit image of the deceased victim.

As their headlines illustrate, three of the four tabloid publications reported incidents of murder. Each featured explicit images of the deceased and bloodied victims, alongside action-oriented headlines emphasizing the violent acts that led to the person’s demise. At the same time, the overall normality of these images and headlines means that they are not extraordinarily sensational within this context, and fade quite easily into the regular everyday activity of the city. These tabloids are structured by what journalist and scholar Susan D. Moeller describes as compassion fatigue, by which media outlets repeatedly limit coverage to the most sensational and crisis-affirming subjects. The media’s reliance on a principal of ‘prior restraint’, as Moeller (1999: 125) puts it, to prevent waning audience interest, ensures that intense, attention-grabbing stories and discourse – particularly regarding colonizer interests in the Global South – are the ones that make the largest headlines.

Furthermore, in their study of the widespread circulation of explicit images of violent, drug-related deaths in Mexico, visual politics scholar Iglesias Ortiz (2013: 232) argues that, ‘with the permanent status of the drug trafficking conflict and the constant stream of news and visual content reporting on violence in Mexico, the conflict has become mediated entertainment’. The commodification of these visual elements amplifies the spectator and voyeur dimensions of the media landscape, further complicating and exploiting popular relationships with discursive violence.

Such explicit images proliferate, even though in 2011, some of the major Mexican media outlets, including Televisa and Televisión Azteca, and print media giants La Prensa and El Universal (which publishes El Gráfico newspaper as shown in Figure 1), among others, bowed to public pressure and signed a common agreement to self-regulate explicit and violent content, especially as related to drug-trafficking and organized crime. The agreement, called ‘Acuerdo para la Cobertura Informativa de la Violencia’ (Agreement for News Coverage of Violence), acknowledges a professional responsibility to stick to the facts, openly reject organized crime, and join against threats from criminal organizations, so as not to become involuntary mouthpieces for such organizations (as cited in Lozano Rendón, 2016: 18–21). Nonetheless, the media agreement has had limited success. This is because the pact does not carry robust enforcement capability or other accountability mechanisms, and was not publicly supported by the Calderón government (El País, 2011; Lozano Rendón, 2016). Consequently, although El Universal did limit its inclusion of explicit images in print and online editions due to the agreement, its sister publication, the lucrative daily tabloid El Gráfico, has continued to feature explicit material on its frontpage without ethical concern. These differences illustrate how ethical guidelines in journalism and attempts to assuage public disapproval, are compromised by financial interests in exploitative imagery – all under the umbrella of the same media conglomerate.

Ethnographic Vignette #2: ‘Very real, jets of blood come out’

Returning to the university, as the seminar discussion expands, it revisits the subject of the War on Drugs (Extract 3, lines 9–10). First, however, Ximena (lines 1–3) shares her observation of a recent visit to a neighborhood convenience store. She had been shocked to see that raw, graphic (non-redacted) images of a woman’s death by stinging were featured in the frontpages of news publications on display at the store. She has since decided not to visit this store again, in order to avoid encountering more of these explicit images (line 4). In response, the professor (line 6) connects Ximena’s desire to avoid such images to society’s broader attempts at ‘poco suavizar’ (smoothing over) certain aspects of violence while neglecting others.

There is a certain irony here, in that Ximena has only moments before in the same discussion, attested that the level of mediatized violence in Mexico was not ‘excesivo’ (excessive) (Extract 2, line 8). However, her latest comments in Extract 3 make sense as an indication that the element of choice is crucial to her; she wants to choose when and where to encounter mediatized violence. And this is a point the professor (line 11) returns to in his observations of a dichotomy between preoccupations with the ‘lucha contra el narco’, the fight to combat drug-trafficking, organized crime, and related violence, and the relatively low concern over everyday participation in violent entertainment (lines 16–18).

Extract 3:

Within this discussion, the term el narco (Extract 3, lines 10–11) takes on the collective meaning of drug cartels, rather than solely one drug-trafficker or criminal agent. On this point, Natalia articulates that the contemporary government campaign against the drug cartels has exacerbated violence, and tanked public opinion on further militarized, anti-drug efforts (lines 9–10). And while mass protests call attention to the overt loss of life in the War on Drugs, less attention is paid to violence in our everyday news and entertainment. This is the professor’s point, that while we protest this overt carnage, we tend to ignore what he refers to as our ‘inclinaciones corruptas (corrupt inclinations)’ (line 17), or tendencies toward accepting violence as commonplace in our daily lives.

In the continuation of the discussion (Extract 4), the professor argues that videogames are a prime example of our uncritical acceptance of violence in everyday entertainment. One can spend hours on Xbox, and other home gaming consoles and multiplayer media, fighting and instigating wars without consequence in imagined gaming worlds (lines 4–6), and particularly through videogames with ‘temáticas muy violentas’ (very violent themes) (line 8).

Extract 4:

In Extract 4, Natalia (line 9) expands upon the professor’s concerns about violent videogames with her own observation of the mimetic imagery of such games: ‘Muy reales, salen chorros de sangre’ (Very real, jets of blood come out). This leads Ximena (line 11) to share the specifics of Resident Evil 5, one such zombie apocalypse-themed game, particularly as it is fictionally set in an African location, and therefore of potential interest to her peers in the African Studies seminar. But, do the students really actually play these videogames? The professor (line 12) wants to know, but also wants to emphasize his point that violent videogames are of little constructive societal value.

Ximena is the first to admit the ‘awful’ truth (line 13), and receives tacit disapproval from the professor in the form of a short laugh (line 14) that overlaps with her talk. Then, as Luna comes to Ximena’s defense with a complimentary observation about the quality of some such videogames (lines 15–16), the input of the two students is undermined by the professor (line 17) interrupting and talking over them with another observation of his own. As the authority figure in the room, the professor succeeds in regaining the dominant position in the talk and completing his diatribe (lines 17–19). His statement attempts to counter Luna and Ximena’s assertion that there are some very good videogames. Even if these games are entertaining, he says, they are inducing players to enjoy killing people (lines 17–19).

Arriving at this moment in the classroom discussion, we can see how the talk shifted from a broader critique of Africa’s largely chaos-filled media representation, to Mexico and its problem with overrepresentation of narco violence in its media (itself driven by a kind of prior-restraint compassion fatigue in Mexican media). This called attention to public outcry over ongoing failures of the War on Drugs, and the lesser-acknowledged mediatized violence that dominates everyday entertainment, chiefly tabloid news and zombie videogames. Perhaps this begs the question of which context is truly more violent, but what is clear is that the spectator dimensions these media demand add to the cumulative political and cultural power of violence of a discursive tool. Across these avenues of mass media, and as these seminar participants have themselves theorized in their own words, global circulation of imagery centering upon the body – both dead and undead – has become a site for manipulative and recursive schemes of structural violence.

The rationalization of individual choice in personal exposure to violence, as Ximena invokes in descriptions of her dislike of explicit print images, as opposed to her embrace of violent videogame content, is also critical. Social theorist Achille Mbembe has interrogated the structural biopower of the right to kill and to expose to death in his concept of necropolitics. With attention to the legacies of European colonialism in Africa and elsewhere, Mbembe (2003: 14) envisions the body at the center of a tug-of-war in the exercise of public and private, human and animal, life and death, savage and civilized, and integral to institutionalized justifications of acts of killing and cruelty:

Imagining politics as a form of war, we must ask: What place is given to life, death, and the human body (in particular the wounded or slain body)? How are they inscribed in the order of power?

With regards to global flows in the relationship between humans and those portrayed as non-humans, and their interplay with structural violence, the Mexico City university professor and his graduate students remind us that we have no further to look than the enduring allure of videogames and print news media to encounter the Other. In fact, the modern myth of the zombie, and its deployment across entertainment genres, exposes how certain embodiments are viewed as appropriate collateral damage, because they are ‘inherently’ dangerous to order, power, and the status quo. For example, the opening salvo of Brooks’ (2006) novel World War Z (also a major motion picture) probes the all too common impulse to portray an enemy as deserving of subjugation and death.

Returning to the War on Drugs, when it comes to cross-border violence in this conflict, and the numerous decapitated and dismembered corpses of women found in and around Ciudad Juárez, critical geographer Wright (2011) has highlighted how this femicide subjugates communities, and particularly women, through a politics where death reshapes the very notion of life. Were her article to have been published any later, Wright might have surely included mention of Ciudad Juárez mother, Mrs. Luz María Dávila, whose public testimony on the Villas de Salvárcar massacre underscored the human consequences of the drug war, and the complexities of dismissing certain lives as acceptable carnage in the conflict.

Ethnographic Vignette #3: ‘You said they were gangsters, [that’s] a lie’

Mrs. Dávila’s impromptu remarks on February 11, 2010 at the public town hall meeting in Ciudad Juárez was reported in several news media outlets, including a 2010 editorial by the leftist review Revista Rebeldía. Her speech has since continued to be discussed in news media, including 2012 and 2014 digital editions of the newspaper Sin Embargo, and also in studies of violence in the War on Drugs (e.g. de Lachica Huerta, 2021). In addition, Sin Embargo published to YouTube audiovisual footage of Mrs. Dávila’s testimony, which they titled ‘El discurso de un madre: Luz María Dávila confronta a Felipe Calderón’ (A mother’s speech: Luz María Dávila confronts Felipe Calderón). My original transcription of her comments, and screenshots of the interaction, emanate from this video of Mrs. Dávila’s unedited speech (SinEmbargo, 2012; YouTube account uploaded in 2012).

When the video begins, Mrs. Luz María Dávila (LMD) has already come to the front of the room and begun to speak in a direct address to President Calderón, who is seated next to his wife, and an array of fellow politicians. As the security staffer approaches Mrs. Dávila (Figure 2), she turns to the audience to further her appeal, with left hand extended. In this moment, Mr. Calderón can also be seen gesturing toward the security staffer with his right hand, in a motion to discourage the staffer’s action. I call attention to each of these hand gestures in Figure 2, with the addition of superimposed circles. As Mrs. Dávila continues, her words make it clear that she has not come forward to praise the President (Extract 5, lines 2–3). Rather, her goal is to voice her dissatisfaction with what she perceives as the government’s failure to redress the number of ongoing murders in her hometown. In this, she does not ask for justice, but demands it (line 5).

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Figure 2.

Screenshot: President Calderón stops security guard from removing Mrs. Dávila, 0:02 minutes.

Extract 5:

In the continuation of her remarks in Extract 6, Mrs. Dávila voices an additional source of grievance – that President Calderón earlier publicly responded to the Villas de Salvárcar Massacre by framing the victims as ‘pandilleros’ (gangsters) (line 7) rather than the ‘estudiantes’ (students) they actually were. More specifically, she demands (line 6) that President Calderón retract his previous statement, which she characterizes (line 8) as an outright lie. As her entreaty expands, Mrs. Dávila continues to directly address Mr. Calderón by facing him, and eventually places her right hand over her chest and heart area in a gesture of deep emotion (Figure 3). Her remarks center around the violent loss of her two sons, and the political cynicism that has branded her everyday life in Ciudad Juárez. By drawing direct comparison to her own disempowered situation, and Mr. Calderón’s power and status (lines 13–15), Mrs. Dávila issues a further indictment of the ineffectual stance of the lawmakers and politicians in attendance, naming them in turn (line 16).

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Figure 3.

Screenshot: Mrs. Dávila places her right hand on her chest, 2:07 minutes.

It is Mrs. Dávila’s repeated mention of the two boys killed as ‘mis dos niños’ (my two children) (Extract 6, line 1), and ‘mis hijos’ (my sons) (lines 8, 19, 22), that sustains a narrative centered on rescuing their representation and humanity. While her phrasing emphasizes the deeply personal dimensions of the massacre, it also capitalizes on the public’s spectator-voyeur relationship with the tragedy. By personalizing the impacts of the War on Drugs, she succeeds in making it nearly impossible for onlookers to distance themselves from the human consequences of narco violence and the state’s inadequate response. Even as Mr. Calderón’s eye contact with Mrs. Dávila is stoic and unwavering, and his hands clasped in a sign of emotional control (Figure 3), his wife breaks eye contact, indicating her own discomfort with Mrs. Dávila’s plea for justice.

Extract 6:

In the next moments, as her speech enters its second minute and Mrs. Dávila remains uninterrupted, she turns her gaze away from President Calderón to face the audience (Figure 4). As she now addresses the audience in an indication of solidarity (Extract 7), she extends her appeal to the town hall attendees, while using her right hand to signal toward the dais in disapproval and dissatisfaction (Figure 4). Mrs. Dávila’s gesture toward the lawmakers and politicians at the front of the room assists in accentuating their symbolic status as an empowered few in a room of many local Ciudad Juárez residents. Moreover, she uses the moment as an opportunity to assail her peers in the room (Extract 7, line 2) for having applauded the President’s visit without fully examining the problematics of the encounter. She asks that they each put themselves in her place, so they can feel the extent of her anger, frustration, and grief (line 3).

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Figure 4.

Screenshot: Ms. Dávila faces the audience, and gestures in disapproval to the politicians, 2:17 minutes.

Extract 7

As her remarks conclude in Extract 7, Mrs. Dávila reiterates (lines 4–5) that she has made these statements not solely for herself, but for the children of Ciudad Juárez, and for the hope that her community can return to what it once was before the violence took hold. After these last statements, she pauses, and applause begins to immediately fill the hall (Figure 5). The continuing applause ushers in the conclusion of her speech, and she turns to walk across the front of the room to exit. As she walks out, the camera view pans to capture the largess of the seated crowd (Figure 6) and continued applause from all those on the dais. Although this is where the video ends, broader discussion on the matter of the drug-related violence in Mexico will continue.

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Figure 5.

Screenshot: Mrs. Dávila begins to receive applause, 2:36 minutes.

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Figure 6.

Screenshot: Applause continues as Mrs. Dávila exits, 2:39 minutes.

After her impromptu speech, Mrs. Dávila was hailed as a spokesperson of frontline suffering in the War on Drugs. A 2010 online editorial penned by Revista Rebeldía quoted directly from her speech at the public town hall meeting, and mocked President Calderón:

El rostro de Felipe Calderón era el de alguien que tiene miedo, parecía que quería refugiarse en el regazo de su mujer.

The face of Felipe Calderón was that of someone afraid, appearing to desire refuge in his wife’s lap.

However, more importantly, the editorial also explicitly connected local protests in Ciudad Juárez with the Zapatista movement and other efforts across the country to resist state-sanctioned policies that further exacerbate violence, organized crime, and socioeconomic inequality. As the editors explained, it is a matter of life and death for Mexico’s disempowered:

El modelo neoliberal exige a los gobiernos dejar de invertir en obras sociales. . .

La gente se organiza y desafía al poder, a pesar de los soldados y las policías. La gente está cansada, está harta de los politicos de todos los colores que están arriba. No se trate de defender a ninguno de ellos. Por el contrario, de lo que se trate es de defender al pueblo, del mal gobierno. De defender la vida, frente a la muerte.

The neoliberal model requires governments to stop investing in social projects. . . The people are organizing and challenging power, despite soldiers and police. The people are tired, are fed up with politicians of all colors who are at the top. It’s not about defending any one of them. On the contrary, it’s about defending the people, from bad government. Defending life, in the face of death.

This editorial perspective (Revista Rebeldía, 2010) on the urgency of voices like Mrs. Dávila’s helps to explain why her improvised speech has come to be interpreted as an embodied protest action. Her speech also harbors a critique of the way that government messaging and mass media collide and conspire, in both the sensationalization of narco violence and the rationalization of violent deaths of particular groups of people. In this, I find that her remarks can be understood as a call for the audience to disrupt their own passive acceptance of a landscape of violence, though in an arena that goes beyond the closed doors of the university seminar discussion, and mounts a public appeal.

Conclusion

Across both a university seminar in Mexico City, and a presidential town hall in Ciudad Juárez, I have witnessed deliberate attention to language as an important dimension of the necropolitical spectacle of violent death in Mexico. Spanish-speakers interacting in these discursive sites have separately problematized the serial and connected emergence of casualized violence across multiple genres of media targeted to Mexican audiences. Their commentary points to the cumulative sociopolitical and cultural impact of violent death as it is portrayed across tabloid news, videogames, and widely disseminated presidential opinion.

As these speakers theorize in their own words, the circulation of imagery of violent death, inclusive of visual and textual discourse, manipulates and exploits the spectator-voyeur. Consequently, the public has become desensitized to the loss of life that illicit, cross-border trade in narcotics is incentivizing, and that is increasingly casualized through mass media. At the same time, the striking emotional weight of Mrs. Luz María Dávila’s eyewitness testimony poses as much of a challenge to President Felipe Calderón’s hegemonic discourse and presence, as it does to all of us. And though she might appear to be speaking from a powerless subjectivity, her speech’s strength comes through in how it uses disruption to demand disruption of the preeminence of violence in Mexico’s popular culture and media narcoscape.

Where the Mexican narcoscape forces the corpse into a subjugated media afterlife, it calls into question the necropolitical dimension of the role of media in circulating discourses that further distance consumers from the personal and human consequences of an ongoing war. Across the discursive sites of this research study, an African Studies professor and a self-politicized mother each demand that others take up the cause of critical introspection and attention to their participation in systems tacitly upheld by investments in violence. For, as the professor reminds us (Extract 1, line 9), ‘News are not simply news, right?’