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Nonfiction

The Politics of Mourning

By Rafael Lemus
Translated from Spanish by Daniel Hahn

“Acapulco, September 18 [2010]. Two unidentified men, decapitated in the town of Coyuca de Catalán. Heads thrown into a soft-drink bottling plant from two moving vehicles. One has its eyes masked with gray industrial adhesive tape. The bodies have not been identified.” “Juárez, Chihuahua, December 27 [2010]. On Jarudo and Sierra Candelaria streets, in the community of Jarudo, two young students were riddled with holes and charred by Molotov cocktails in the red Silverado pickup in which they were travelling. The first, aged 18, was a student at the Colegio de Bachilleres, and the second a student on the Physical Education course at Chihuahua University; their names as yet unknown.” “Aguascalientes, Aguascalientes.  February 19 [2011]. A man was found dead, his throat slit, on the state’s Highway 77 East.” “Acapulco, Guerrero, March 7 [2011]. Police discover three heads in plastic bags in the tunnel connecting the port with the outskirts of the city. A message was found bearing the announcement that the acts had been perpetrated in reprisal for a murder carried out during an attempted kidnapping.” “Chihuahua, April 26 [2011]. Two young women were shot dead in the Barrio Azul community.  The victims’ names have not been released.”[1]

1.

To begin like that, by laying out a few crimes, recalling a few deaths, might be seen as suspect: an overly sensationalist start, an early bit of emotional blackmail. But this is precisely our subject, men and women murdered in Mexico from December 2006 to date, and what is to be done about it: there’s just no way we can talk about this subject and simultaneously dodge the eschatological and affective aspects that go along with it.  How many deaths are we talking about, exactly? According to official figures released by President Felipe Calderón on January 12, 2011 it’s 34,612—that is, 34,612 homicides related to illegal drug trafficking and the federal government’s fight against organized crime. By today, at the start of June 2011, this figure has already been exceeded and must have surpassed forty thousand homicides—and counting. What do we know about these crimes? What we do know, or at least have known for five months, thanks to the extraordinary investigation carried out by Fernando Escalante Gonzalbo (in his report “Homicides 2008–2009: Death Is Granted Permission,” Nexos, January 2011), is that violence in Mexico has increased dramatically over the last three and a half years. What we do know is that after two decades of a systematic downward trend, the national homicide rate shot up by fifty percent in 2008 and a further fifty percent in 2009. What we do know is that in 2008 there were 5,207 executions, another 6,587 in 2009, and that in the last year alone there were 15,237 homicides recorded that were linked to organized crime. It is also quite clear that violence rose in every state in the republic (excepting only one: Yucatán), and that the greatest increases took place precisely in those zones where the famous “military operations” were implemented. The most brutal example of all this is, of course, Ciudad Juárez: in 2007—the year that saw the start of the military operation in the area—there was a rate of 14.4 homicides per hundred thousand inhabitants; three years later this had already reached 108.5 homicides per hundred thousand inhabitants, the highest rate of any city in the world. What do we know about those killed? Considerably less, and not all of it reliable. According to the Secretariat of Public Security, 2,076 municipal, federal, and state police were assassinated in Mexico between December 2006 and August of last year[2]. According to the National Commission on Human Rights, between January 2006 and March 2011, 8,898 unidentified bodies were buried in the country and 5,397 people were reported missing[3]. According to one news report, which has by now been superseded, during the Calderón administration 647 dead bodies were discovered in 156 secret graves[4]. According to other figures, sprinkled here and there in newspapers and on Web sites, something like fifty percent of people who are riddled by hails of gunfire, in face-to-face confrontations and settlings of scores, are never identified, and at least twelve thousand bodies that were never identified have been buried in mass graves up and down the country over a period of four and a half years. Though to call them bodies suggests there’s more to them than there often is; rather: heads, trunks, arms, legs, feet, decomposed or charred, bullet-ridden or mutilated, from which is hung a little tag with the initials NN—no name. No name. This is the most visible product of these four and a half years of fighting against organized crime: a vast, shapeless heap of dead bodies in which the corpses of drug barons and soldiers and hit men and policemen lie side by side, all jumbled up together, with mayors and kidnappees and kidnappers and dealers and migrants and coyotes (smugglers of migrants) and peasants and workers and journalists and civilians, thousands of them nameless and buried in mass graves, without any ceremony or any mourning. This is the image that for some time has been occupying and saturating public debate in Mexico: an undefined, unspeakable heap of corpses, so large and heavy that it distorts space and pulls every conversation toward it. It’s at this point that the eyes and the voices of countless public figures have ended up coming together: with all the reasons that provided support to the federal campaign against drug-trafficking now left behind, a growing number of writers and academics and journalists and bloggers and tweeters have ended up focusing their attention on the effects of that campaign—that is, on the dead. How many are there? Who are they? How can they be explained? It is, indeed, no exaggeration to say that today, at the heart of Mexico’s public arena, there’s a heated dispute underway: a dispute over these dead—whether to deny them or to name them, to stigmatize or martyr them, to silence them or give them meaning. The dead are there, in their thousands, mute and powerless, relatively anonymous, and there is no shortage of social actors who are fighting to appropriate them and to integrate them somehow or other into their different ideological discourses.

2.

It is often said that the federal government does not have a strategy—a clear, robust, sustainable strategy—for fighting organized crime. Only very occasionally does anyone add that they do make use of a handful of very obvious communications tactics in order to try and minimize the consequences of this fight. At first, when the facts about the increase in violence had not yet managed to sneak their way into public opinion, the maneuver consisted simply in denying the increase, attributing it to an alleged media illusion. Calderón himself, along with the heads of the different government ministries and those in charge of the security services, insisted that the number of crimes had not increased, that the only thing that had increased was the amount of attention the media were paying them, and they even reprimanded the press and television for publicizing crimes that were not more regular but merely more spectacular than they had previously been. Later on, when evidence had begun to demonstrate that homicides were indeed increasing, and even now, when we have confirmation that they have skyrocketed, the government insisted, and insists, on localizing the problem: they accept that violence has flared up, but—they add—only in certain places. For example, Alejandro Poiré, the sinister technical secretary of the Council of National Security, stated: “70 percent of homicides took place in 85 of the country’s municipalities.”[5] He gives itemized detail: 36 percent of them occurred in only four municipalities—figures with which he wants to demonstrate that “the violence that embodies this conflict is not widespread across the whole country,” and that it would appear to be a little local issue: something to do with local councils and municipal representatives and unions. Since it’s also not all that easy to hide violence, the government chooses less and less to deny it or localize it, and more and more to ascribe it almost exclusively to the drug cartels. In the official rhetoric, violence does exist: it’s a violence perpetrated by gangs of drug traffickers on other gangs of drug traffickers. A cause exists, too: the realigning of power between these gangs. The confrontations and executions have multiplied, so the argument goes, because the government campaign has been effective, and that with the capture or elimination of certain drug barons, power vacuums have been created within the cartels which the hit men are using bullets to fill. That is to say, the increase in crime is a demonstration that the government is winning the war against criminal gangs. That is not the only absurdity: logic is also twisted to indicate the culpability of drug traffickers without any recognition of the culpability of the State itself. Or to put it another way: they hide the fact that the number of homicides—which are doubtless committed, unjustifiably and inexcusably, by the criminal gangs—only soared when the State undertook a disorganized, improvised crusade against them, and most of all in those places where it was most in operation. At this point it hardly even matters any more whether or not the crusade was necessary. Four and a half years after the start of this campaign it’s obvious that the government is directly responsible for the escalation in violence, and that it is also their responsibility to put a stop to it and return things to the way they used to be. The federal government’s policy concerning the approximately forty thousand dead is no less irresponsible. They state, almost mechanically: the victims are not victims but murderers, the dead were members of criminal gangs and they have been executed by other criminal gangs. The National Security Council specifies: eighty-nine of every hundred deaths were linked to drug trafficking. Only very occasionally do they specify what sort of drug traffickers they were: whether they were drug barons and hit men or peasants growing marijuana or migrants who were “picked up” and forced to carry a package from one place to another. Only very occasionally do they offer proof to demonstrate the murder victim’s links to drug trafficking: apparently the mere fact of the crime having taken place within an “execution context” is proof enough that the victim “was a member of organized crime” (the sinister Poiré, again). There are thousands of occasions when the dead are not altogether convincingly identified—sometimes because the bodies are so decomposed and dismembered that there is no way to identify them, sometimes because it’s easier to brand as a narco a dead man who doesn’t have so much as a name with which to defend himself.  One by one, the government’s strategies have been losing credibility and effectiveness.  The theory of media illusion? Nowadays there’s a lot of information to hand that demonstrates that the increase in homicides is no fiction, it’s no sham. The argument that violence is contained within a small number of places? It’s unsustainable, now that the conflict has spilled beyond the north of the country and infected zones which had previously been so peaceful, such as Colima and cities that, in spite of everything, had managed to retain something of the standing of a holiday oasis—Cuernavaca and Acapulco. The idea that practically all the violence is a product of the rivalry between criminal gangs?  Though this is partly correct, it is inadequate to explain the complexity of violence in Mexico (there is more than just narco-violence—social violence, economic violence, racial violence, gender violence), nor to understand the brutal collective massacres carried out against civilians. May 2010, Taxco, Guerrero: 55 bodies in the ventilation shaft of a mine. August 2010, San Fernando, Tamaulipas: 72 corpses in a hidden burial pit, all of them Latin American migrants, all of them executed with “kill shots.” November 2010, Acapulco, Guerrero: 20 tourists from Michoacán state, previously reported missing, all of them with signs of having been tortured. March 2011, San Fernando, Tamaulipas: another hidden burial pit, 183 bodies, almost all of them badly beaten, passengers on commercial buses kidnapped on their way from one city to another. April 2011, Durango, Durango: dozens of hidden burial pits, bodies found almost daily, 228 bodies to date. How is it possible to explain this, all this, by means of the propositions that the government is offering? These crimes and many others, perhaps less grotesque but nonetheless perpetrated against men and women on the very fringes of the drugs trade, have ended up delegitimizing the final official argument: that almost ninety percent of the victims were members of criminal gangs.

One case in particular, which was decisive in public debate, put a dent in this argument forever: the episode in which Calderón hurried to classify as pandilleros—gang members—fifteen adolescents murdered on January 31, 2010, in Villas de Salvárcar, Juárez. When it was discovered that the young people were students and had absolutely no connection to any gang, it became clear that the category of pandillero—just like those ideas of narco, complicity, execution and settling of scores are just that: categories that the federal government assigns to actions and bodies, sometimes rigorously and sometimes irresponsibly. In other words, it showed that government practice consists less of identifying the dead than attributing a certain category to them, and that this attribution is, it can be, doubtful or simply erroneous. Which brings us, then, back to the beginning: to this shapeless, muddled heap of forty thousand barely identified dead bodies.

3.

It’s quite clear that the federal government could have acted differently. Rather than turning their noses up at the dead, and stigmatizing them, they could have appropriated thousands of them and taken advantage of them for use in their campaign against the drug trade. Appropriating and taking advantage are not happy phrases to apply to the dead, it’s true, but what they describe are in fact fairly common practice and outside the country. Governments often use the dead, turning them into martyrs for a cause, laying the blame for them on the enemy, employing them as a “free pass” and a banner for certain policies. In this case, the Calderón administration could have made an effort to identify the innocent victims of the conflict and recognize them as martyrs of the campaign against the narcos. But in order to do this, to integrate the victims into a story, they first need to have a story and the federal government has no such thing. Four and a half years after it started up, the crusade against the drug cartels is still not attached to a convincing narrative; forty thousand deaths later, the authorities still haven’t completely dispelled the suspicion that they launched the campaign without any prior planning, anxious about economic expectations and the shadow of illegitimacy hovering over them, without having supplied themselves in advance with any screenplay, without anticipating the motivations for the action, the roles played by each of the characters, the unfolding of the whole enterprise. Not that long ago, Calderón was still pondering whether the military offensive he had ordered was or was not a war: he said it wasn’t, and the following day a number of journalists pointed out to him that he himself had said that it was. It’s a question of the federal government not only having refused to recognize and keep vigil for the victims: they have also obstructed the mourning of others. Rather like the character of Creon whose edict to the city enjoins “that none shall entomb him or mourn, but leave unwept, unsepulchred,” Calderón has pledged to dispel any possibility for collective mourning. It isn’t only that he has not (as has happened so often elsewhere) declared a day of national mourning; it’s that for some time now—as evidenced by his first reaction to the marches that followed the killing of Juan Francisco Sicilia—he takes any public displays of mourning to be a betrayal of the State, as proof of a moral complicity with the drug trade.  In order to discourage such practices, to obstruct the marking of a public mourning, the government operates as has been described: they disqualify the dead a priori. At the same time it gives an account of these dead mechanically, in technical, heavily bureaucratic language, as though by doing so they might neutralize the political and affective charge of these dead bodies and discourage their citizens’ feelings of empathy toward them. What could be a better example of this than the ill-fated “Database of homicides presumed to be linked to organized crime,” which the federal government launched in January 2011 and which a month later had its name changed to “Database of deaths resulting from presumed criminal rivalries.” There, in that cybernetic mass grave, the dead are not registered by name, nor even with a tag to suggest that they were once human beings; the dead are lodged in one of three categories: “violent executions,” “confrontations,” or “acts of aggression against authority.”

According to Judith Butler, “What follows […] from prohibitions on avowing grief in public is an effective mandate in favor of a generalized melancholia”[6]. It is fair to suppose that Freud—or at least the Freud of Mourning and Melancholia—would have agreed with her. In this paper of 1915 Freud found that both states, mourning and melancholia, have a common origin, the loss of someone or something loved, and that in principle they share the same symptoms: a “loss of interest in the outside world, […] loss of capacity to adopt any new object of love […], turning away from any activity that is not connected with thoughts of [the deceased].” The difference, he pointed out, is that the person in a state of mourning knows what he has lost, whereas someone experiencing melancholia “cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost” and suffers “an impoverishment of his ego on a grand scale.” In melancholia the suffering is diffuse, pathological, and only undermines the subject’s self-esteem; in mourning, in contrast, what is suffered is a concrete loss and the suffering fulfills a function: “each single of the memories and expectations in which the libido is bound to the object [the love object—the person who has died] is brought up and hypercathected, and detachment of the libido is accomplished in respect of it.” That is, “when the work of mourning is completed, the ego becomes free and uninhibited again.”[7]

And yet: is it possible to talk about the Mexican case as a state of generalized melancholia? Is it possible to say that this huge, imprecise heap of dead bodies and the lack of public mourning has ended up plunging the country’s citizenry into a state of melancholic rumination? Is it possible to back up this argument with the repeated op-eds that refer to the pessimism of Mexican society, and with those statistical studies that detect—or think they detect—high rates of depression and listlessness among Mexicans? I don’t know whether it’s possible to speak in these terms (“citizenry,” “Mexicans”) and I’m afraid that using this sort of psychological category, melancholia, ends up rarefying a problem that is eminently social and political. On the other hand I am quite sure that it is possible and reasonable to speak of trauma. It is possible to follow Roland Barthes in pointing out that “trauma is a suspension of language, a blocking of meaning”: a shock-image-experience “about which there is nothing to say”[8]. It is easy to discern the role of trauma in the suffering of Mexican civil society since the end of 2006: as a traumatic experience, as a fact that stuns into a state of astonishment and strikes dumb, which evades the usual narratives of signification, resistant both to the official victorious discourse and to the victimist accounts of its citizens. It’s relatively easy to see this feeling of stunned astonishment here and there, on blogs and in the papers, in the repeated jeremiads of the one or the desperate metaphors used by the other to try to understand the scale of what has occurred. That if all the dead bodies were lined up end to end the chain would stretch from Zócalo Square in Mexico City to the city of Toluca. That if a minute’s silence were to be held for each of the dead it would be necessary to keep quiet for twenty-seven days. That if the bodies were piled up by the Angel de la Independencia victory column, that if forty thousand letters were sent to the presidential residence at Los Pinos, that if, etc. Such a feeling of alarm, the same disturbance that follows trauma, was visible until recently in the Mexican intellectual arena. To begin with, the escalation in violence did not come accompanied by an escalation in public debate. Rather the contrary: as the conflict intensified and the numbers of the dead began to accumulate, cultural production surrounding the drug trade seemed to maintain the same old inertia—little novels on the drug trade, reportage on the drug barons, more or less precise criticism of this or that detail of the government offensive. Even now, four and a half years on, there is no essay that tries to explain the conflict altogether, there is no novel that seeks to represent “the violence,” no speech that risks assimilating those disparate forty thousand unclassifiable corpses to its heart. And that’s fine: stories, great stories, tend to appease—and it isn’t a matter of that here. It’s a matter of overcoming the trauma without concealing the wound. It’s a matter of passing from melancholia over to mourning, not in order to allow the people to get through it, to throw earth over the dead, but to abandon that state of stunned astonishment and retrieve the agency that has been lost: to leave the state of shock, to adopt a critical posture. This impossible mourning that Derrida wrote about, which helps us to carry the dead within ourselves while at the same time being reminded that the dead person was always someone else, is always someone else. This lucid, tense mourning experienced and described, again, by Barthes: “Mourning: not a crushing oppression, a blockage (which would suppose a ‘filling’), but a painful availability: I am vigilant, expectant, awaiting the onset of a ‘sense of life’.”[9]

“And then”—writes Judith Butler—“there is something else that one cannot ‘get over’, one cannot ‘work through’, which is the deliberate act of violence against a collectivity, humans who have been rendered anonymous for violence and whose death recapitulates an anonymity for memory. Such violence cannot be ‘thought’, constitutes an assault on thinking, negates thinking in the mode of recollection and recovery. But what then emerges in the place of thought? Or what new thought emerges? It is not as if thinking ceases, but after such an internal break, it continues, and that continuation is founded and structured by that break, carries the break with it as the signature of its history. We might say, in Benjaminian fashion, that thought emerges from the ruins, as the ruins, of this decimation. It does not constitute its reversal or recuperation, its animated afterlife. [. . .] What results is a melancholic agency who cannot know its history as the past, cannot capture its history through chronology, and does not know who it is except as the survival, the persistence of a certain unavowability that haunts the present.”[10]

4.

It might be possible to track, in more or less detail, the growing cracks in this state of astonishment, the progressive overcoming of this trauma in the Mexican literary arena. In order to do this, it would be necessary to go, sooner or later, beyond conventional media—books, newspapers, magazines—and deal with the growing critical activity carried out by writers on blogs, Twitter and social networking sites, support mechanisms that (unlike the others) make it possible to follow events in real time and establish immediate positions, without the mediation of a publisher or the burden of “literary” production. It would be necessary, too, to go beyond the obvious intellectual groups and find emerging writers from both within and outside Mexico (Lolita Bosch and Jorge Harmodio, for example) who have been promoting initiatives that have tended to dispel the astonishment of the literary arena. Consider at least three projects set up on the Internet, all three of them launched or carried out during 2010, all three supported by writers and journalists. The first, which in some respects was the catalyst for the other two, is the group blog Our Apparent Surrender—a platform created and animated by the Catalan-Mexican writer Lolita Bosch, where a number of literary texts on violence (essays, poems, stories, articles) are reproduced that have been published in various other places, an archive in a permanent state of construction which, as it creates a critical corpus, generates debate within it and launches new texts.

The second is the Web site 72 Migrants—a “virtual altar” to the 72 Latin American migrants murdered in Tamaulipas in August 2010—devised by the Mexican journalist Alma Guillermoprieto and made up of funerary texts by 72 writers, one for each of those killed. The third is the collective blog Fewer Days Here—a daily inventory of the victims of violence in Mexico, an archive which from the time of its establishment, on September 12, 2010, to date, contains more than ten thousand entries like this: “The charred remains of a man were reported found shortly after ten in the morning this past Monday, when a scavenger stumbled across them in the Moctezuma community of the Xalapa Territorial Reservation.” It’s clear that these projects—and the last two especially—are implementing a strategy that is precisely the opposite of the government’s. Faced with an imprecise heap of dead bodies: clarifying, recognizing, naming. Faced with victims: mourning. Nowadays it’s no longer necessary to gather evidence to demonstrate that the trauma is beginning to dissipate. Nowadays the sense of stunned astonishment has been definitively overcome in the Mexican literary arena.

Just one event, the killing of Juan Francisco Sicilia, the son of poet Javier Sicilia, and of six others on March 28, 2011, in Cuernavaca, Morelos, managed to shake up the literary world and put right in its center, once and for all, the subject of the war against the drug trade. The death of young Sicilia was followed by statements signed by a number of writers, all of them more or less questioning the state campaign against the drug trade, and the most intense debates within the Mexican intellectual arena since the 2006 presidential elections, whether on the legalization of drug use, or on the effectiveness of the marches, among those who still support the official strategy and those who demand a rethinking or even a complete cessation of the offensive. One way or another, the dilemma that for two or three years silenced the large part of Mexican intelligentsia—is it Calderón or is it the traffickers?—has been dismantled and what seems to have been established in its place is another formulation, which is obviously more suited to critical debate: it is the fault of the traffickers, it is the responsibility of the government. More important still: the death of Juan Francisco Sicilia inspired the most numerous displays of public mourning since the conflict began. On Wednesday, April 6 more than thirty-five thousand people marched in Cuernavaca, with Javier Sicilia at their head, and tens of thousands of others were protesting simultaneously in thirty-eight cities around the country and a few abroad. The Cuernavaca march, half funeral procession, half political protest, which involved both people with candles and people with placards, set out from a place that is more or less neutral, the Monument of the Dove of Peace, and paused at two obviously political sites—a military zone and the Legislative Congress—before ending up at the city’s central square, opposite the Government Palace. At each of the three stops, Sicilia—a devout Catholic and self-confessed leftist, a combination that makes each group as uncomfortable as the other—read different texts, all three of them quite singular hybrids of a funeral oration and a political pamphlet. It all culminated that same night, and in a decidedly combative fashion, when Sicilia issued the  governor an ultimatum—either solve his son’s murder  before April 13, or resign—and announced that he and others would camp out in the main square of Cuernavaca until one or the other had happened. It might seem imprecise to use the word mourning to describe such a public, political demonstration as this was, or as that which took place in early May, a march from Cuernavaca to Mexico City and a massive rally in the capital’s Zócalo Square. That is the view of those who, prior to April 6, demanded that the marches should not be politicized and who, from that day on, lamented the fact that mourning—which for them was a private and religious matter—should have degenerated into politics. But mourning does not degenerate into politics: mourning is politics. How to recall the dead? Which dead? Who is to recall them? In what space is this to happen? When? Finding answers to any of these questions implies the adoption of a polemical position, most especially in times of war or generalized violence. Institutions, bureaucracies, hierarchies, laws, codes: all these are set in motion when someone mourns for a person who has died. The mere fact of recalling is already a political act: the person recalling resists the passing of the past, reconstructing in a biased way what has happened and bringing into a present a ghost that is ready to be given meaning. The idea that it is impossible to mourn and simultaneously be politically active is therefore just a trap: another invitation to melancholia.

Maybe it is because the origin of these demonstrations was the killing of seven people, or perhaps because at their head marched a father who had just lost his son, but only very few people have ventured openly to censure the movement, and many others have been obliged to hide their reservations, or their outright hostility, behind a couple of feeble moral criticisms. First, that the movement does not adequately condemn drug trafficking, and instead of railing against the cartels, it pins responsibility on the government. Second, that in lamenting the deaths of forty thousand people the movement is ignoring the fact that in doing so it is crying not only for the victims but also for the thousands of murderers  who have been executed. The first criticism scarcely needs to be refuted: do you really want the demonstrators to choose as their interlocutors the cartels rather than the elected authorities? Do you really think citizens should be demanding public safety from criminals rather than from those who govern them? As far as I’m aware Calderón is president of the country, and it’s up to his government to ensure a peaceful, secure civil life. As long as this remains the case, and violence continues to devastate the land, there is nothing more sensible and democratic than going out onto the streets to shout and criticize and jeer and condemn and make demands of Calderón’s government.

It is true, on the other hand, that nowadays it isn’t possible to mourn for all the victims of violence in Mexico, identified and unidentified without, in the process, ending up sitting vigil for thousands of murderers. Yes, in an ideal situation it would be best to know the identities and stories of those who have died, to distinguish between victims and murderers and then proceed accordingly. But this, evidently, is not an ideal situation, and here the victims and the murderers lie side by side in the same graves. In this situation a citizen, unable to retrieve the bodies and identify them for himself, ultimately has two options: either he does nothing and allows the trauma to become normalized, or he performs a general, collective mourning of the dead, accepting that in the process he will be including thousands of criminals. At one extreme, there is that sense of astonishment: waiting and watching as they pile up the dead—how many of them? And on the other,  the decision to act—an action that is polemical but is after all an action, at least: running the risk of including murderers in his mourning on condition that he can recover his power of agency and go out into the streets and voice his complaints to the government and bewail the destiny of thousands of beings who have been tortured, disappeared, murdered. Isn’t it evident that one option leads to melancholia and that the other, while morally disputable, fires up whoever chooses it and contributes toward activating a civic life that is being depressed, almost destroyed, by the climate of violence?

Ultimately it’s this that is the most beneficial about the movement led by Javier Sicilia: and a movement is exactly what it is. At this precise moment, as I write, a column of hundreds of people, with Sicilia at their head, the Convoy for Peace, is making its way along a Durango highway, heading toward Saltillo, having just left Cuernavaca and stopped at five of the country’s cities. We should hope that on its way the convoy will grow and receive the support of different groups—then it will be possible to criticize them, its contradictory makeup, the Pancho Villas, the perredistas, too (these are the militants from Mexico’s Party of the Democratic Revolution). There is no doubt that, as the days go by and the procession approaches its final destination, Ciudad Juárez, the movement will fire off new statements, new texts—then there will be things to say about them: about the poetic tone, as well as the ambiguity of the imagery, as well as Sicilia’s Messianism. It’s fine like that: we must pay attention to whatever happens along the way, and criticize it, if we want; rather this than to go on pretending that this movement is a purely spiritual one, and therefore scarcely possible to criticize, and that it does not damage interests or create new ones or contribute toward reconfiguring public debate. In any case, what is most important is not what happens along the journey, but the journey itself: the fact that right now hundreds of people are making their way along a Durango highway and that just by doing this they are widening the horizons of public life and breaking the oppressive dichotomy of our times (either it’s Calderón or it’s the traffickers) to introduce new social actors onto the scene—next of kin, poets, the fathers of the disappeared, citizens prepared to give the dead some meaning.

A march might not seem much, and some people must be fed up with them by now. But what is undoubtedly true is that the marches called by Sicilia have brought something new, a breath of oxygen, into the country’s political life, and have had major consequences. Three or four months ago, nobody was marching to question the official campaign against the drug trade and these highways were things to be rushed across, fearfully. Three or four months ago, Mexican intellectuals—with a few isolated exceptions—sat petrified in their cubicles and their libraries, and now a poet is marching at the head of a multitude—does poetry embody something now? Three or four months ago, a feeling of generalized unease and disturbance was depressing almost all of civil society, and now this same feeling is propelling tens of thousands of people out onto the streets and organizing groups of citizens. This isn’t all that much? Of course, containing the violence requires more than just a march, and no demonstration will be able, alone, to provoke what this country most needs: profound structural changes, a radical redistribution of resources. But it’s important to be candid: there is something important happening right now—and it’s thanks to a father who refuses to allow his son to be dragged into nothingness.

—April 2011

An earlier version of this text was read (in Spanish) on April 29, 2011, at a symposium held at the Graduate Center of the  City University of New York.


[1] All these have been taken from the website: menosdiasaqui.blogspot.com

[2] “Five presumed members of ‘La Linea’ held” – El Economista, 13th August 2010.

[3] “Missing, more than 5000 people since 2006: CNDH” – El Economista, 2nd April, 2011.

[4] “156 Graves Found in Five Years” – Reforma, 19th April, 2011.

[5] “Homicides and the violence of organized crime,” Nexos, February 2011.

[6] Precarious life: the powers of mourning and violence, London and New York, Verso, 2004, p. 37.

[7] Sigmund Freud, from vol. XIV of the Standard Edition, The Hogarth Press, tr. James Strachey, 1957.

[8] Roland Barthes, “The Photographic Message,” tr. Stephen Heath – in Image-Music-Text, Fontana, 1977.

[9] Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary; tr. Richard Howard; Notting Hill Editions, 2011, p.80.

[10] “Afterword: After loss, what then?,” in Loss: the politics of mourning, eds. David L. Eng and David Kazanjian, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2003, p. 468.

English Spanish (Original)

“Acapulco, September 18 [2010]. Two unidentified men, decapitated in the town of Coyuca de Catalán. Heads thrown into a soft-drink bottling plant from two moving vehicles. One has its eyes masked with gray industrial adhesive tape. The bodies have not been identified.” “Juárez, Chihuahua, December 27 [2010]. On Jarudo and Sierra Candelaria streets, in the community of Jarudo, two young students were riddled with holes and charred by Molotov cocktails in the red Silverado pickup in which they were travelling. The first, aged 18, was a student at the Colegio de Bachilleres, and the second a student on the Physical Education course at Chihuahua University; their names as yet unknown.” “Aguascalientes, Aguascalientes.  February 19 [2011]. A man was found dead, his throat slit, on the state’s Highway 77 East.” “Acapulco, Guerrero, March 7 [2011]. Police discover three heads in plastic bags in the tunnel connecting the port with the outskirts of the city. A message was found bearing the announcement that the acts had been perpetrated in reprisal for a murder carried out during an attempted kidnapping.” “Chihuahua, April 26 [2011]. Two young women were shot dead in the Barrio Azul community.  The victims’ names have not been released.”[1]

1.

To begin like that, by laying out a few crimes, recalling a few deaths, might be seen as suspect: an overly sensationalist start, an early bit of emotional blackmail. But this is precisely our subject, men and women murdered in Mexico from December 2006 to date, and what is to be done about it: there’s just no way we can talk about this subject and simultaneously dodge the eschatological and affective aspects that go along with it.  How many deaths are we talking about, exactly? According to official figures released by President Felipe Calderón on January 12, 2011 it’s 34,612—that is, 34,612 homicides related to illegal drug trafficking and the federal government’s fight against organized crime. By today, at the start of June 2011, this figure has already been exceeded and must have surpassed forty thousand homicides—and counting. What do we know about these crimes? What we do know, or at least have known for five months, thanks to the extraordinary investigation carried out by Fernando Escalante Gonzalbo (in his report “Homicides 2008–2009: Death Is Granted Permission,” Nexos, January 2011), is that violence in Mexico has increased dramatically over the last three and a half years. What we do know is that after two decades of a systematic downward trend, the national homicide rate shot up by fifty percent in 2008 and a further fifty percent in 2009. What we do know is that in 2008 there were 5,207 executions, another 6,587 in 2009, and that in the last year alone there were 15,237 homicides recorded that were linked to organized crime. It is also quite clear that violence rose in every state in the republic (excepting only one: Yucatán), and that the greatest increases took place precisely in those zones where the famous “military operations” were implemented. The most brutal example of all this is, of course, Ciudad Juárez: in 2007—the year that saw the start of the military operation in the area—there was a rate of 14.4 homicides per hundred thousand inhabitants; three years later this had already reached 108.5 homicides per hundred thousand inhabitants, the highest rate of any city in the world. What do we know about those killed? Considerably less, and not all of it reliable. According to the Secretariat of Public Security, 2,076 municipal, federal, and state police were assassinated in Mexico between December 2006 and August of last year[2]. According to the National Commission on Human Rights, between January 2006 and March 2011, 8,898 unidentified bodies were buried in the country and 5,397 people were reported missing[3]. According to one news report, which has by now been superseded, during the Calderón administration 647 dead bodies were discovered in 156 secret graves[4]. According to other figures, sprinkled here and there in newspapers and on Web sites, something like fifty percent of people who are riddled by hails of gunfire, in face-to-face confrontations and settlings of scores, are never identified, and at least twelve thousand bodies that were never identified have been buried in mass graves up and down the country over a period of four and a half years. Though to call them bodies suggests there’s more to them than there often is; rather: heads, trunks, arms, legs, feet, decomposed or charred, bullet-ridden or mutilated, from which is hung a little tag with the initials NN—no name. No name. This is the most visible product of these four and a half years of fighting against organized crime: a vast, shapeless heap of dead bodies in which the corpses of drug barons and soldiers and hit men and policemen lie side by side, all jumbled up together, with mayors and kidnappees and kidnappers and dealers and migrants and coyotes (smugglers of migrants) and peasants and workers and journalists and civilians, thousands of them nameless and buried in mass graves, without any ceremony or any mourning. This is the image that for some time has been occupying and saturating public debate in Mexico: an undefined, unspeakable heap of corpses, so large and heavy that it distorts space and pulls every conversation toward it. It’s at this point that the eyes and the voices of countless public figures have ended up coming together: with all the reasons that provided support to the federal campaign against drug-trafficking now left behind, a growing number of writers and academics and journalists and bloggers and tweeters have ended up focusing their attention on the effects of that campaign—that is, on the dead. How many are there? Who are they? How can they be explained? It is, indeed, no exaggeration to say that today, at the heart of Mexico’s public arena, there’s a heated dispute underway: a dispute over these dead—whether to deny them or to name them, to stigmatize or martyr them, to silence them or give them meaning. The dead are there, in their thousands, mute and powerless, relatively anonymous, and there is no shortage of social actors who are fighting to appropriate them and to integrate them somehow or other into their different ideological discourses.

2.

It is often said that the federal government does not have a strategy—a clear, robust, sustainable strategy—for fighting organized crime. Only very occasionally does anyone add that they do make use of a handful of very obvious communications tactics in order to try and minimize the consequences of this fight. At first, when the facts about the increase in violence had not yet managed to sneak their way into public opinion, the maneuver consisted simply in denying the increase, attributing it to an alleged media illusion. Calderón himself, along with the heads of the different government ministries and those in charge of the security services, insisted that the number of crimes had not increased, that the only thing that had increased was the amount of attention the media were paying them, and they even reprimanded the press and television for publicizing crimes that were not more regular but merely more spectacular than they had previously been. Later on, when evidence had begun to demonstrate that homicides were indeed increasing, and even now, when we have confirmation that they have skyrocketed, the government insisted, and insists, on localizing the problem: they accept that violence has flared up, but—they add—only in certain places. For example, Alejandro Poiré, the sinister technical secretary of the Council of National Security, stated: “70 percent of homicides took place in 85 of the country’s municipalities.”[5] He gives itemized detail: 36 percent of them occurred in only four municipalities—figures with which he wants to demonstrate that “the violence that embodies this conflict is not widespread across the whole country,” and that it would appear to be a little local issue: something to do with local councils and municipal representatives and unions. Since it’s also not all that easy to hide violence, the government chooses less and less to deny it or localize it, and more and more to ascribe it almost exclusively to the drug cartels. In the official rhetoric, violence does exist: it’s a violence perpetrated by gangs of drug traffickers on other gangs of drug traffickers. A cause exists, too: the realigning of power between these gangs. The confrontations and executions have multiplied, so the argument goes, because the government campaign has been effective, and that with the capture or elimination of certain drug barons, power vacuums have been created within the cartels which the hit men are using bullets to fill. That is to say, the increase in crime is a demonstration that the government is winning the war against criminal gangs. That is not the only absurdity: logic is also twisted to indicate the culpability of drug traffickers without any recognition of the culpability of the State itself. Or to put it another way: they hide the fact that the number of homicides—which are doubtless committed, unjustifiably and inexcusably, by the criminal gangs—only soared when the State undertook a disorganized, improvised crusade against them, and most of all in those places where it was most in operation. At this point it hardly even matters any more whether or not the crusade was necessary. Four and a half years after the start of this campaign it’s obvious that the government is directly responsible for the escalation in violence, and that it is also their responsibility to put a stop to it and return things to the way they used to be. The federal government’s policy concerning the approximately forty thousand dead is no less irresponsible. They state, almost mechanically: the victims are not victims but murderers, the dead were members of criminal gangs and they have been executed by other criminal gangs. The National Security Council specifies: eighty-nine of every hundred deaths were linked to drug trafficking. Only very occasionally do they specify what sort of drug traffickers they were: whether they were drug barons and hit men or peasants growing marijuana or migrants who were “picked up” and forced to carry a package from one place to another. Only very occasionally do they offer proof to demonstrate the murder victim’s links to drug trafficking: apparently the mere fact of the crime having taken place within an “execution context” is proof enough that the victim “was a member of organized crime” (the sinister Poiré, again). There are thousands of occasions when the dead are not altogether convincingly identified—sometimes because the bodies are so decomposed and dismembered that there is no way to identify them, sometimes because it’s easier to brand as a narco a dead man who doesn’t have so much as a name with which to defend himself.  One by one, the government’s strategies have been losing credibility and effectiveness.  The theory of media illusion? Nowadays there’s a lot of information to hand that demonstrates that the increase in homicides is no fiction, it’s no sham. The argument that violence is contained within a small number of places? It’s unsustainable, now that the conflict has spilled beyond the north of the country and infected zones which had previously been so peaceful, such as Colima and cities that, in spite of everything, had managed to retain something of the standing of a holiday oasis—Cuernavaca and Acapulco. The idea that practically all the violence is a product of the rivalry between criminal gangs?  Though this is partly correct, it is inadequate to explain the complexity of violence in Mexico (there is more than just narco-violence—social violence, economic violence, racial violence, gender violence), nor to understand the brutal collective massacres carried out against civilians. May 2010, Taxco, Guerrero: 55 bodies in the ventilation shaft of a mine. August 2010, San Fernando, Tamaulipas: 72 corpses in a hidden burial pit, all of them Latin American migrants, all of them executed with “kill shots.” November 2010, Acapulco, Guerrero: 20 tourists from Michoacán state, previously reported missing, all of them with signs of having been tortured. March 2011, San Fernando, Tamaulipas: another hidden burial pit, 183 bodies, almost all of them badly beaten, passengers on commercial buses kidnapped on their way from one city to another. April 2011, Durango, Durango: dozens of hidden burial pits, bodies found almost daily, 228 bodies to date. How is it possible to explain this, all this, by means of the propositions that the government is offering? These crimes and many others, perhaps less grotesque but nonetheless perpetrated against men and women on the very fringes of the drugs trade, have ended up delegitimizing the final official argument: that almost ninety percent of the victims were members of criminal gangs.

One case in particular, which was decisive in public debate, put a dent in this argument forever: the episode in which Calderón hurried to classify as pandilleros—gang members—fifteen adolescents murdered on January 31, 2010, in Villas de Salvárcar, Juárez. When it was discovered that the young people were students and had absolutely no connection to any gang, it became clear that the category of pandillero—just like those ideas of narco, complicity, execution and settling of scores are just that: categories that the federal government assigns to actions and bodies, sometimes rigorously and sometimes irresponsibly. In other words, it showed that government practice consists less of identifying the dead than attributing a certain category to them, and that this attribution is, it can be, doubtful or simply erroneous. Which brings us, then, back to the beginning: to this shapeless, muddled heap of forty thousand barely identified dead bodies.

3.

It’s quite clear that the federal government could have acted differently. Rather than turning their noses up at the dead, and stigmatizing them, they could have appropriated thousands of them and taken advantage of them for use in their campaign against the drug trade. Appropriating and taking advantage are not happy phrases to apply to the dead, it’s true, but what they describe are in fact fairly common practice and outside the country. Governments often use the dead, turning them into martyrs for a cause, laying the blame for them on the enemy, employing them as a “free pass” and a banner for certain policies. In this case, the Calderón administration could have made an effort to identify the innocent victims of the conflict and recognize them as martyrs of the campaign against the narcos. But in order to do this, to integrate the victims into a story, they first need to have a story and the federal government has no such thing. Four and a half years after it started up, the crusade against the drug cartels is still not attached to a convincing narrative; forty thousand deaths later, the authorities still haven’t completely dispelled the suspicion that they launched the campaign without any prior planning, anxious about economic expectations and the shadow of illegitimacy hovering over them, without having supplied themselves in advance with any screenplay, without anticipating the motivations for the action, the roles played by each of the characters, the unfolding of the whole enterprise. Not that long ago, Calderón was still pondering whether the military offensive he had ordered was or was not a war: he said it wasn’t, and the following day a number of journalists pointed out to him that he himself had said that it was. It’s a question of the federal government not only having refused to recognize and keep vigil for the victims: they have also obstructed the mourning of others. Rather like the character of Creon whose edict to the city enjoins “that none shall entomb him or mourn, but leave unwept, unsepulchred,” Calderón has pledged to dispel any possibility for collective mourning. It isn’t only that he has not (as has happened so often elsewhere) declared a day of national mourning; it’s that for some time now—as evidenced by his first reaction to the marches that followed the killing of Juan Francisco Sicilia—he takes any public displays of mourning to be a betrayal of the State, as proof of a moral complicity with the drug trade.  In order to discourage such practices, to obstruct the marking of a public mourning, the government operates as has been described: they disqualify the dead a priori. At the same time it gives an account of these dead mechanically, in technical, heavily bureaucratic language, as though by doing so they might neutralize the political and affective charge of these dead bodies and discourage their citizens’ feelings of empathy toward them. What could be a better example of this than the ill-fated “Database of homicides presumed to be linked to organized crime,” which the federal government launched in January 2011 and which a month later had its name changed to “Database of deaths resulting from presumed criminal rivalries.” There, in that cybernetic mass grave, the dead are not registered by name, nor even with a tag to suggest that they were once human beings; the dead are lodged in one of three categories: “violent executions,” “confrontations,” or “acts of aggression against authority.”

According to Judith Butler, “What follows […] from prohibitions on avowing grief in public is an effective mandate in favor of a generalized melancholia”[6]. It is fair to suppose that Freud—or at least the Freud of Mourning and Melancholia—would have agreed with her. In this paper of 1915 Freud found that both states, mourning and melancholia, have a common origin, the loss of someone or something loved, and that in principle they share the same symptoms: a “loss of interest in the outside world, […] loss of capacity to adopt any new object of love […], turning away from any activity that is not connected with thoughts of [the deceased].” The difference, he pointed out, is that the person in a state of mourning knows what he has lost, whereas someone experiencing melancholia “cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost” and suffers “an impoverishment of his ego on a grand scale.” In melancholia the suffering is diffuse, pathological, and only undermines the subject’s self-esteem; in mourning, in contrast, what is suffered is a concrete loss and the suffering fulfills a function: “each single of the memories and expectations in which the libido is bound to the object [the love object—the person who has died] is brought up and hypercathected, and detachment of the libido is accomplished in respect of it.” That is, “when the work of mourning is completed, the ego becomes free and uninhibited again.”[7]

And yet: is it possible to talk about the Mexican case as a state of generalized melancholia? Is it possible to say that this huge, imprecise heap of dead bodies and the lack of public mourning has ended up plunging the country’s citizenry into a state of melancholic rumination? Is it possible to back up this argument with the repeated op-eds that refer to the pessimism of Mexican society, and with those statistical studies that detect—or think they detect—high rates of depression and listlessness among Mexicans? I don’t know whether it’s possible to speak in these terms (“citizenry,” “Mexicans”) and I’m afraid that using this sort of psychological category, melancholia, ends up rarefying a problem that is eminently social and political. On the other hand I am quite sure that it is possible and reasonable to speak of trauma. It is possible to follow Roland Barthes in pointing out that “trauma is a suspension of language, a blocking of meaning”: a shock-image-experience “about which there is nothing to say”[8]. It is easy to discern the role of trauma in the suffering of Mexican civil society since the end of 2006: as a traumatic experience, as a fact that stuns into a state of astonishment and strikes dumb, which evades the usual narratives of signification, resistant both to the official victorious discourse and to the victimist accounts of its citizens. It’s relatively easy to see this feeling of stunned astonishment here and there, on blogs and in the papers, in the repeated jeremiads of the one or the desperate metaphors used by the other to try to understand the scale of what has occurred. That if all the dead bodies were lined up end to end the chain would stretch from Zócalo Square in Mexico City to the city of Toluca. That if a minute’s silence were to be held for each of the dead it would be necessary to keep quiet for twenty-seven days. That if the bodies were piled up by the Angel de la Independencia victory column, that if forty thousand letters were sent to the presidential residence at Los Pinos, that if, etc. Such a feeling of alarm, the same disturbance that follows trauma, was visible until recently in the Mexican intellectual arena. To begin with, the escalation in violence did not come accompanied by an escalation in public debate. Rather the contrary: as the conflict intensified and the numbers of the dead began to accumulate, cultural production surrounding the drug trade seemed to maintain the same old inertia—little novels on the drug trade, reportage on the drug barons, more or less precise criticism of this or that detail of the government offensive. Even now, four and a half years on, there is no essay that tries to explain the conflict altogether, there is no novel that seeks to represent “the violence,” no speech that risks assimilating those disparate forty thousand unclassifiable corpses to its heart. And that’s fine: stories, great stories, tend to appease—and it isn’t a matter of that here. It’s a matter of overcoming the trauma without concealing the wound. It’s a matter of passing from melancholia over to mourning, not in order to allow the people to get through it, to throw earth over the dead, but to abandon that state of stunned astonishment and retrieve the agency that has been lost: to leave the state of shock, to adopt a critical posture. This impossible mourning that Derrida wrote about, which helps us to carry the dead within ourselves while at the same time being reminded that the dead person was always someone else, is always someone else. This lucid, tense mourning experienced and described, again, by Barthes: “Mourning: not a crushing oppression, a blockage (which would suppose a ‘filling’), but a painful availability: I am vigilant, expectant, awaiting the onset of a ‘sense of life’.”[9]

“And then”—writes Judith Butler—“there is something else that one cannot ‘get over’, one cannot ‘work through’, which is the deliberate act of violence against a collectivity, humans who have been rendered anonymous for violence and whose death recapitulates an anonymity for memory. Such violence cannot be ‘thought’, constitutes an assault on thinking, negates thinking in the mode of recollection and recovery. But what then emerges in the place of thought? Or what new thought emerges? It is not as if thinking ceases, but after such an internal break, it continues, and that continuation is founded and structured by that break, carries the break with it as the signature of its history. We might say, in Benjaminian fashion, that thought emerges from the ruins, as the ruins, of this decimation. It does not constitute its reversal or recuperation, its animated afterlife. [. . .] What results is a melancholic agency who cannot know its history as the past, cannot capture its history through chronology, and does not know who it is except as the survival, the persistence of a certain unavowability that haunts the present.”[10]

4.

It might be possible to track, in more or less detail, the growing cracks in this state of astonishment, the progressive overcoming of this trauma in the Mexican literary arena. In order to do this, it would be necessary to go, sooner or later, beyond conventional media—books, newspapers, magazines—and deal with the growing critical activity carried out by writers on blogs, Twitter and social networking sites, support mechanisms that (unlike the others) make it possible to follow events in real time and establish immediate positions, without the mediation of a publisher or the burden of “literary” production. It would be necessary, too, to go beyond the obvious intellectual groups and find emerging writers from both within and outside Mexico (Lolita Bosch and Jorge Harmodio, for example) who have been promoting initiatives that have tended to dispel the astonishment of the literary arena. Consider at least three projects set up on the Internet, all three of them launched or carried out during 2010, all three supported by writers and journalists. The first, which in some respects was the catalyst for the other two, is the group blog Our Apparent Surrender—a platform created and animated by the Catalan-Mexican writer Lolita Bosch, where a number of literary texts on violence (essays, poems, stories, articles) are reproduced that have been published in various other places, an archive in a permanent state of construction which, as it creates a critical corpus, generates debate within it and launches new texts.

The second is the Web site 72 Migrants—a “virtual altar” to the 72 Latin American migrants murdered in Tamaulipas in August 2010—devised by the Mexican journalist Alma Guillermoprieto and made up of funerary texts by 72 writers, one for each of those killed. The third is the collective blog Fewer Days Here—a daily inventory of the victims of violence in Mexico, an archive which from the time of its establishment, on September 12, 2010, to date, contains more than ten thousand entries like this: “The charred remains of a man were reported found shortly after ten in the morning this past Monday, when a scavenger stumbled across them in the Moctezuma community of the Xalapa Territorial Reservation.” It’s clear that these projects—and the last two especially—are implementing a strategy that is precisely the opposite of the government’s. Faced with an imprecise heap of dead bodies: clarifying, recognizing, naming. Faced with victims: mourning. Nowadays it’s no longer necessary to gather evidence to demonstrate that the trauma is beginning to dissipate. Nowadays the sense of stunned astonishment has been definitively overcome in the Mexican literary arena.

Just one event, the killing of Juan Francisco Sicilia, the son of poet Javier Sicilia, and of six others on March 28, 2011, in Cuernavaca, Morelos, managed to shake up the literary world and put right in its center, once and for all, the subject of the war against the drug trade. The death of young Sicilia was followed by statements signed by a number of writers, all of them more or less questioning the state campaign against the drug trade, and the most intense debates within the Mexican intellectual arena since the 2006 presidential elections, whether on the legalization of drug use, or on the effectiveness of the marches, among those who still support the official strategy and those who demand a rethinking or even a complete cessation of the offensive. One way or another, the dilemma that for two or three years silenced the large part of Mexican intelligentsia—is it Calderón or is it the traffickers?—has been dismantled and what seems to have been established in its place is another formulation, which is obviously more suited to critical debate: it is the fault of the traffickers, it is the responsibility of the government. More important still: the death of Juan Francisco Sicilia inspired the most numerous displays of public mourning since the conflict began. On Wednesday, April 6 more than thirty-five thousand people marched in Cuernavaca, with Javier Sicilia at their head, and tens of thousands of others were protesting simultaneously in thirty-eight cities around the country and a few abroad. The Cuernavaca march, half funeral procession, half political protest, which involved both people with candles and people with placards, set out from a place that is more or less neutral, the Monument of the Dove of Peace, and paused at two obviously political sites—a military zone and the Legislative Congress—before ending up at the city’s central square, opposite the Government Palace. At each of the three stops, Sicilia—a devout Catholic and self-confessed leftist, a combination that makes each group as uncomfortable as the other—read different texts, all three of them quite singular hybrids of a funeral oration and a political pamphlet. It all culminated that same night, and in a decidedly combative fashion, when Sicilia issued the  governor an ultimatum—either solve his son’s murder  before April 13, or resign—and announced that he and others would camp out in the main square of Cuernavaca until one or the other had happened. It might seem imprecise to use the word mourning to describe such a public, political demonstration as this was, or as that which took place in early May, a march from Cuernavaca to Mexico City and a massive rally in the capital’s Zócalo Square. That is the view of those who, prior to April 6, demanded that the marches should not be politicized and who, from that day on, lamented the fact that mourning—which for them was a private and religious matter—should have degenerated into politics. But mourning does not degenerate into politics: mourning is politics. How to recall the dead? Which dead? Who is to recall them? In what space is this to happen? When? Finding answers to any of these questions implies the adoption of a polemical position, most especially in times of war or generalized violence. Institutions, bureaucracies, hierarchies, laws, codes: all these are set in motion when someone mourns for a person who has died. The mere fact of recalling is already a political act: the person recalling resists the passing of the past, reconstructing in a biased way what has happened and bringing into a present a ghost that is ready to be given meaning. The idea that it is impossible to mourn and simultaneously be politically active is therefore just a trap: another invitation to melancholia.

Maybe it is because the origin of these demonstrations was the killing of seven people, or perhaps because at their head marched a father who had just lost his son, but only very few people have ventured openly to censure the movement, and many others have been obliged to hide their reservations, or their outright hostility, behind a couple of feeble moral criticisms. First, that the movement does not adequately condemn drug trafficking, and instead of railing against the cartels, it pins responsibility on the government. Second, that in lamenting the deaths of forty thousand people the movement is ignoring the fact that in doing so it is crying not only for the victims but also for the thousands of murderers  who have been executed. The first criticism scarcely needs to be refuted: do you really want the demonstrators to choose as their interlocutors the cartels rather than the elected authorities? Do you really think citizens should be demanding public safety from criminals rather than from those who govern them? As far as I’m aware Calderón is president of the country, and it’s up to his government to ensure a peaceful, secure civil life. As long as this remains the case, and violence continues to devastate the land, there is nothing more sensible and democratic than going out onto the streets to shout and criticize and jeer and condemn and make demands of Calderón’s government.

It is true, on the other hand, that nowadays it isn’t possible to mourn for all the victims of violence in Mexico, identified and unidentified without, in the process, ending up sitting vigil for thousands of murderers. Yes, in an ideal situation it would be best to know the identities and stories of those who have died, to distinguish between victims and murderers and then proceed accordingly. But this, evidently, is not an ideal situation, and here the victims and the murderers lie side by side in the same graves. In this situation a citizen, unable to retrieve the bodies and identify them for himself, ultimately has two options: either he does nothing and allows the trauma to become normalized, or he performs a general, collective mourning of the dead, accepting that in the process he will be including thousands of criminals. At one extreme, there is that sense of astonishment: waiting and watching as they pile up the dead—how many of them? And on the other,  the decision to act—an action that is polemical but is after all an action, at least: running the risk of including murderers in his mourning on condition that he can recover his power of agency and go out into the streets and voice his complaints to the government and bewail the destiny of thousands of beings who have been tortured, disappeared, murdered. Isn’t it evident that one option leads to melancholia and that the other, while morally disputable, fires up whoever chooses it and contributes toward activating a civic life that is being depressed, almost destroyed, by the climate of violence?

Ultimately it’s this that is the most beneficial about the movement led by Javier Sicilia: and a movement is exactly what it is. At this precise moment, as I write, a column of hundreds of people, with Sicilia at their head, the Convoy for Peace, is making its way along a Durango highway, heading toward Saltillo, having just left Cuernavaca and stopped at five of the country’s cities. We should hope that on its way the convoy will grow and receive the support of different groups—then it will be possible to criticize them, its contradictory makeup, the Pancho Villas, the perredistas, too (these are the militants from Mexico’s Party of the Democratic Revolution). There is no doubt that, as the days go by and the procession approaches its final destination, Ciudad Juárez, the movement will fire off new statements, new texts—then there will be things to say about them: about the poetic tone, as well as the ambiguity of the imagery, as well as Sicilia’s Messianism. It’s fine like that: we must pay attention to whatever happens along the way, and criticize it, if we want; rather this than to go on pretending that this movement is a purely spiritual one, and therefore scarcely possible to criticize, and that it does not damage interests or create new ones or contribute toward reconfiguring public debate. In any case, what is most important is not what happens along the journey, but the journey itself: the fact that right now hundreds of people are making their way along a Durango highway and that just by doing this they are widening the horizons of public life and breaking the oppressive dichotomy of our times (either it’s Calderón or it’s the traffickers) to introduce new social actors onto the scene—next of kin, poets, the fathers of the disappeared, citizens prepared to give the dead some meaning.

A march might not seem much, and some people must be fed up with them by now. But what is undoubtedly true is that the marches called by Sicilia have brought something new, a breath of oxygen, into the country’s political life, and have had major consequences. Three or four months ago, nobody was marching to question the official campaign against the drug trade and these highways were things to be rushed across, fearfully. Three or four months ago, Mexican intellectuals—with a few isolated exceptions—sat petrified in their cubicles and their libraries, and now a poet is marching at the head of a multitude—does poetry embody something now? Three or four months ago, a feeling of generalized unease and disturbance was depressing almost all of civil society, and now this same feeling is propelling tens of thousands of people out onto the streets and organizing groups of citizens. This isn’t all that much? Of course, containing the violence requires more than just a march, and no demonstration will be able, alone, to provoke what this country most needs: profound structural changes, a radical redistribution of resources. But it’s important to be candid: there is something important happening right now—and it’s thanks to a father who refuses to allow his son to be dragged into nothingness.

—April 2011

An earlier version of this text was read (in Spanish) on April 29, 2011, at a symposium held at the Graduate Center of the  City University of New York.


[1] All these have been taken from the website: menosdiasaqui.blogspot.com

[2] “Five presumed members of ‘La Linea’ held” – El Economista, 13th August 2010.

[3] “Missing, more than 5000 people since 2006: CNDH” – El Economista, 2nd April, 2011.

[4] “156 Graves Found in Five Years” – Reforma, 19th April, 2011.

[5] “Homicides and the violence of organized crime,” Nexos, February 2011.

[6] Precarious life: the powers of mourning and violence, London and New York, Verso, 2004, p. 37.

[7] Sigmund Freud, from vol. XIV of the Standard Edition, The Hogarth Press, tr. James Strachey, 1957.

[8] Roland Barthes, “The Photographic Message,” tr. Stephen Heath – in Image-Music-Text, Fontana, 1977.

[9] Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary; tr. Richard Howard; Notting Hill Editions, 2011, p.80.

[10] “Afterword: After loss, what then?,” in Loss: the politics of mourning, eds. David L. Eng and David Kazanjian, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2003, p. 468.

Políticas del duelo

“Acapulco, 18/sep [2010]. Dos hombres no identificados, descabezados en el municipio de Coyuca de Catalán. Las cabezas son lanzadas a una embotelladora de refrescos desde dos vehículos en marcha. Una tiene los ojos vendados con cinta industrial gris. No se han localizado los cuerpos.”

“Juárez, Chihuahua, 27 de diciembre [de 2010]. En las calles de Jarudo y Sierra Candelaria, en la colonia el Jarudo, dos jóvenes estudiantes fueron acribillados y calcinados con bombas molotov en la pick up silverado roja en la que viajaban. El primero, de 18 años, era estudiante del Colegio de Bachilleres y el segundo era estudiante de la carrera de Educación Física de la Universidad de Chihuahua; sin que hasta el momento se conozcan sus nombres.”

“Aguascalientes, Aguascalientes. 19 de febrero [de 2011]. Un hombre  fue encontrado sin vida, degollado, en la carretera estatal 77 oriente.”

“Acapulco, Guerrero, 7 de marzo [de 2011]. La policía halla tres cabezas dentro de bolsas de plástico en el túnel que conecta al puerto con las afueras de la localidad. Se encontró un mensaje donde se advertía que se había actuado en represalia a un asesinato durante un intento de secuestro.”

“Chihuahua, 26 de abril [de 2011]. Dos mujeres jóvenes fueron asesinadas a balazos en la colonia Barrio Azul. No se han proporcionado nombres de las víctimas.”1

1

Empezar así, exponiendo algunos crímenes, recordando algunas muertes, puede parecer sospechoso: un arranque demasiado amarillista, una temprana extorsión sentimental. Pero aquí se habla justo de eso, de hombres y mujeres asesinados en México desde diciembre de 2006 hasta la fecha, y qué se le va a hacer: sencillamente no hay manera de hablar de este asunto y eludir a la vez los componentes escatológicos y afectivos que supone.
¿De cuántos muertos se habla, exactamente? Según cifras oficiales, divulgadas por el presidente Felipe Calderón el pasado 12 de enero, de 34,612 –es decir, de 34,612 homicidios relacionados con el tráfico ilegal de drogas y con el combate del gobierno federal a la delincuencia organizada. Para estas fechas, principios de junio, esa cifra ha sido ya desbordada y debe de haber rebasado los cuarenta mil homicidios –y contando.

¿Qué se sabe de esos crímenes? Se sabe, al menos desde hace cinco meses, gracias a la extraordinaria investigación de Fernando Escalante Gonzalbo (“Homicidios 2008-2009: La muerte tiene permiso”, Nexos, enero de 2011), que la violencia en México se ha multiplicado radicalmente durante los últimos tres años y medio. Se sabe que, después de dos décadas de una sistemática tendencia a la baja, la tasa nacional de homicidios se disparó un cincuenta por ciento en 2008 y otro cincuenta por ciento en 2009. Se sabe que en 2008 hubo 5,207 ejecuciones, en 2009 otras 6,587 y que solo durante el año pasado se registraron 15,237 homicidios vinculados con la delincuencia organizada. Está ya también claro que la violencia creció en todos los estados de la república (salvo en uno: Yucatán) y que los mayores incrementos tuvieron lugar precisamente en las entidades donde se implementaron los famosos “operativos militares”. El ejemplo más brutal de todo esto es, claro, Ciudad Juárez: en 2007 –año en que inició el operativo militar en la zona– se contaban 14.4 homicidios por cada cien mil habitantes; tres años más tarde ya se alcanzaban los 108.5 homicidios por cada cien mil habitantes, la tasa más alta de cualquier ciudad en el mundo.

¿Qué se sabe de los muertos? Bastante menos y no todo confiable. De acuerdo con la Secretaría de Seguridad Pública, 2,076 policías municipales, estatales y federales fueron asesinados en México entre diciembre de 2006 y agosto del año pasado.2 De acuerdo con la Comisión Nacional de Derechos Humanos, de enero de 2006 a marzo de 2011 8,898 cuerpos no identificados fueron enterrados en el país y 5,397 personas fueron denunciadas como desaparecidas.3 De acuerdo con una nota periodística, a estas alturas ya superada, durante la administración calderonista se han encontrado 647 cadáveres en 156 fosas clandestinas.4 De acuerdo con otras cifras, salpicadas aquí y allá, en diarios y sitios de internet, alrededor del cincuenta por ciento de los individuos acribillados en balaceras, enfrentamientos y ajustes de cuentas no son nunca identificados y al menos doce mil cuerpos sin identificar han sido enterrados en fosas comunes a lo largo del país en cuatro años y medio. Aunque decir cuerpos es muchas veces decir demasiado; más bien: cabezas, torsos, brazos, piernas, pies, descompuestos o calcinados, baleados o mutilados, de los que cuelga una pequeña etiqueta con las iniciales NN –no nombre.

No nombre. Ese es el saldo más visible de estos cuatro años y medio de combate a la delincuencia organizada: una enorme, amorfa pila de muertos en la que se tocan y se mezclan los cadáveres de capos y militares y sicarios y policías y alcaldes y secuestrados y secuestradores y dílers y migrantes y coyotes y campesinos y obreros y periodistas y civiles, miles de ellos anónimos y enterrados en fosas comunes, sin ceremonia ni duelo alguno. Esa es la imagen que ocupa y satura de un tiempo para acá la discusión pública en México: un impreciso, indecible montón de cadáveres, tan grande y pesado que curva el espacio y atrae hacia sí todas las conversaciones. En ese punto han terminado por coincidir las miradas y las voces de numerosas figuras públicas: dejados atrás los motivos que auspiciaron la campaña federal contra el narcotráfico, un número creciente de escritores y académicos y periodistas y blogueros y twitteros ha acabado por centrar su atención en los efectos de esa campaña –es decir: en los muertos. ¿Cuántos son? ¿Quiénes son? ¿Cómo explicarlos? No se exagera, de hecho, si se dice que hoy tiene lugar, a la mitad de la esfera pública mexicana, una encendida disputa: una disputa por esos muertos –por negarlos o nombrarlos, por estigmatizarlos o martirizarlos, por silenciarlos o significarlos. Los muertos están ahí, por miles, mudos e impotentes, relativamente anónimos, y no son pocos los actores sociales que pugnan por apropiárselos e incorporarlos de un modo u otro en distintos discursos ideológicos.

2

Se dice con frecuencia que el gobierno federal no tiene una estrategia –una estrategia clara, sólida, sostenible– para combatir la delincuencia organizada. Rara vez se agrega que sí cuenta con un puñado de tácticas de comunicación muy obvias para intentar minimizar las secuelas de ese combate. En un principio, cuando los datos sobre el incremento de la violencia todavía no se colaban en la opinión pública, la maniobra consistía sencillamente en negar el incremento, en atribuírselo a una supuesta ilusión mediática. Lo mismo Calderón que los secretarios de Estado y los responsables de los aparatos de seguridad insistían en que no había crecido el número de crímenes, solo la atención que los medios le prestaban, y hasta reconvenían a la prensa y a las televisoras por publicitar crímenes no más constantes pero sí más espectaculares que antes. Tiempo después, cuando la evidencia ya señalaba que los homicidios crecían, y aun ahora, cuando está confirmado que estos se han disparado, el gobierno insistió e insiste en localizar el problema: acepta que la violencia está desatada pero, agrega, solo en unos cuantos sitios. Declara, por ejemplo, Alejandro Poiré, el siniestro secretario técnico del Consejo de Seguridad Nacional: “70 por ciento de los homicidios sucedieron en 85 municipios del país”.5 Detalla: 36 por ciento de ellos tuvieron lugar en solo cuatro municipios –matemáticas con las que cree demostrar que “el conflicto que representa la violencia no está esparcido por todo el país” y es, al parecer, un asuntillo local: cosa de ayuntamientos y regidores y síndicos.

Como tampoco es tan fácil ocultar la violencia, el gobierno opta cada vez menos por negarla o localizarla y cada vez más por adjudicársela casi en exclusiva a los cárteles de la droga. Hay, en la retórica oficial, una violencia: la que ejercen las bandas de narcotraficantes contra otras bandas de narcotraficantes. Hay una causa: el reacomodo de poder entre esas bandas. El argumento es que los enfrentamientos y las ejecuciones se han multiplicado porque la campaña gubernamental ha sido efectiva y, al capturar o eliminar a ciertos capos, ha creado vacíos de poder en el interior de los cárteles que los sicarios colman con balas. Es decir: que el aumento de los crímenes es muestra de que el gobierno le va ganando la guerra a los grupos criminales. Este no es el único absurdo: también se tuerce la lógica para señalar la culpabilidad del narcotráfico sin reconocer la responsabilidad del propio Estado. Dicho de otra manera: se oculta que el número de homicidios –cometidos ciertamente, injustificadamente, imperdonablemente por las bandas criminales– solo se disparó cuando el Estado emprendió una desorganizada, improvisada cruzada contra ellas y sobre todo en los lugares donde este más ha operado. A estas alturas ya apenas importa si esa cruzada era o no necesaria. Cuatro años y medio después de iniciada esa campaña es obvio que el gobierno es responsable directo de la escalada de la violencia y que es también su responsabilidad frenarla y revertirla.

La política del gobierno federal ante los aproximadamente cuarenta mil muertos no es menos irresponsable. Casi mecánicamente se declara: las víctimas no son víctimas sino verdugos, los muertos eran miembros de bandas delictivas y han sido ajusticiados por otras bandas delictivas. El Consejo de Seguridad Nacional precisa: 89 de cada cien muertos estaban vinculados con el narcotráfico. Rara vez se aclara qué tipo de narcotraficantes eran: si capos y sicarios o campesinos que plantaban mariguana o migrantes “levantados” y obligados a llevar un paquete de un lado a otro. Rara vez se presentan pruebas para demostrar los nexos del asesinado con el narcotráfico: aparentemente el solo hecho de que el crimen ocurra en un “contexto de ejecución” es prueba suficiente de que la víctima “era miembro de la delincuencia organizada” (otra vez el siniestro Poiré). En miles de ocasiones no se identifica plena, convincentemente a los muertos: a veces porque los cuerpos están tan descompuestos y desmembrados que no hay manera de identificarlos, a veces porque es más fácil tildar de narco a un muerto que ni siquiera tiene un nombre para defenderse.
Una a una, estas estrategias gubernamentales han ido perdiendo credibilidad y eficacia. ¿La tesis de la ilusión mediática? Hoy hay muchísima información a la mano que demuestra que el incremento de los homicidios no es una ficción, no es un simulacro. ¿El argumento de que la violencia está acotada a unos pocos sitios? Es insostenible ahora que el conflicto ha rebasado el norte del país y ha infectado a entidades antes tan tranquilas, como Colima, y a ciudades que, a pesar de todo, conservaban cierto estatus de oasis vacacionales –Cuernavaca y Acapulco.

¿La idea de que prácticamente toda la violencia es producto de la rivalidad entre bandas delictivas? Aunque parcialmente cierta, no sirve para explicar la complejidad de la violencia en México (hay más violencia que la del narco: violencia social, económica, racial, de género) ni para entender las brutales masacres colectivas contra civiles. Mayo de 2010, Taxco, Guerrero: 55 cuerpos en el respiradero de una mina. Agosto de 2010, San Fernando, Tamaulipas: 72 cadáveres en una fosa clandestina, todos migrantes latinoamericanos, todos ejecutados con “tiros de gracia”. Noviembre de 2010, Acapulco, Guerrero: 20 turistas michoacanos, previamente reportados como desaparecidos, todos con rastros de tortura. Marzo de 2011, San Fernando, Tamaulipas: otra fosa clandestina, 183 cuerpos, casi todos molidos a golpes, pasajeros de autobuses comerciales secuestrados en su camino de una ciudad a otra. Abril de 2011, Durango, Durango: decenas de fosas clandestinas, cuerpos encontrados casi a diario, 228 cadáveres hasta el momento. ¿Cómo explicar esto, todo esto, con los esquemas que ofrece el gobierno?

Esos crímenes y otros muchos más, tal vez menos grotescos pero también perpetrados contra hombres y mujeres al margen del narcotráfico, han terminado por deslegitimar el último argumento oficial: que casi el noventa por ciento de las víctimas eran miembros de bandas criminales.

Un caso en particular, decisivo en la discusión pública, abolló para siempre ese argumento: el episodio en que Calderón se apresuró a calificar de “pandilleros” a quince adolescentes asesinados el 31 de enero de 2010 en Villas de Salvárcar, Juárez. Cuando se descubrió que los jóvenes eran estudiantes y no tenían nexos con pandilla alguna, quedó claro que la categoría de pandillero así como, por lo menos, las nociones de narco, cómplice, ejecución y ajuste de cuentas son eso: categorías que el gobierno federal asigna a hechos y cuerpos, a veces con rigor, a veces irresponsablemente. En otras palabras: se mostró que la práctica gubernamental consiste menos en identificar a los muertos que en atribuirles una condición y que esa atribución es, puede ser, dudosa o sencillamente errónea. Con lo que se vuelve, entonces, al principio: a esa pila turbia, informe de cuarenta mil cadáveres escasamente identificados.

3

Está claro que el gobierno federal pudo haber actuado de otro modo. En vez de desdeñar y estigmatizar a los muertos, pudo haberse apropiado de miles de ellos y aprovecharlos en su campaña contra el narcotráfico. Apropiarse y aprovecharse de los muertos: no son expresiones felices, es cierto, pero son prácticas regulares dentro y fuera de los Estados. Los gobiernos suelen utilizar a los muertos: volviéndolos mártires de una causa, achacándoselos al adversario, empleándolos como abono y bandera de ciertas políticas. En este caso, la administración de Calderón pudo haberse esforzado en identificar a las víctimas inocentes del conflicto y en reconocerlas como mártires de la campaña contra el narco. Pero para ello, para incorporar a las víctimas a un relato, primero hay que tener un relato y el gobierno federal no cuenta con ninguno. Cuatro años y medio después de su arranque, la cruzada contra los cárteles de la droga todavía no se acompaña de una narrativa convincente; cuarenta mil muertos más tarde, las autoridades aún no terminan de disipar la sospecha de que lanzaron la campaña improvisadamente, angustiados por las expectativas económicas y por la sombra de ilegitimidad que se cernía sobre ellos, desprovistos de un guión previo, sin anticipar los móviles de la acción, los roles de los personajes, el desenlace de la empresa. Todavía no hace mucho Calderón meditaba sobre si la ofensiva militar que él había ordenado era o no una guerra: dijo que no, al otro día varios periodistas le dejaron saber que otras veces él mismo había dicho que sí lo era.

El asunto es que el gobierno federal no solo se ha negado a reconocer y a velar a las víctimas: también ha obstruido el duelo de los otros. Un poco en el papel de Creonte (“en esta ciudad no se le honra, ni con tumba ni con lágrimas”, Antígona), Calderón se ha empeñado en disipar toda posibilidad de un duelo colectivo. No es solo que no haya convocado –como se ha hecho en tantos otros sitios– a una jornada de luto nacional; es que de un tiempo para acá –como dejó ver su primera reacción ante las marchas tras el asesinato de Juan Francisco Sicilia– asume toda manifestación pública de duelo como una traición al Estado, como una prueba de complicidad moral con el narcotráfico. Para desalentar esas prácticas, para entorpecer la conmemoración de un duelo público, el gobierno opera de la manera ya señalada: descalifica a priori a los muertos. Simultáneamente, da cuenta de esos muertos de una manera mecánica, con un lenguaje técnico, pesadamente burocrático, como si con eso neutralizara la carga política y afectiva de los cadáveres y desalentara la empatía de los ciudadanos con ellos. Qué mejor ejemplo de esto que la malograda “Base de datos de homicidios presuntamente relacionados con la delincuencia organizada” que el gobierno federal lanzó en enero de 2011 y que un mes después cambió su nombre a “Base de datos de fallecimientos ocurridos por presunta rivalidad delincuencial”. Ahí, en esa fosa común cibernética, los muertos son registrados no con un nombre y ni siquiera con una etiqueta que sugiera que alguna vez fueron seres humanos; los muertos son acomodados en una de tres categorías: “muertes violentas por ejecución”, “enfrentamiento” o “agresiones contra la autoridad”.

Según Judith Butler, “lo que sigue a la prohibición de profesar duelo en público es un estado de melancolía generalizada”.6 Uno puede suponer que Freud, o al menos el Freud de “Duelo y melancolía”, hubiera estado de acuerdo con ella. En ese ensayo de 1915 Freud encontraba que ambos estados, el duelo y la melancolía, tienen un origen común, la pérdida de alguien o algo amado, y que comparten en principio los mismos síntomas: “pérdida del interés por el mundo exterior […] pérdida de la capacidad de escoger algún nuevo objeto de amor […] extrañamiento respecto de cualquier trabajo productivo que no tenga relación con la memoria del muerto”. La diferencia, apuntaba, es que el sujeto en estado de duelo sabe qué ha perdido mientras que el melancólico no atina “a discernir con precisión lo que se perdió” y sufre de un “enorme empobrecimiento del yo”. En la melancolía se sufre difusa, patológicamente, y el sufrimiento solo merma la autoestima del sujeto; en el duelo, por el contrario, se sufre una pérdida concreta y el sufrimiento cumple una función: “cada uno de los recuerdos y cada una de las expectativas en que la libido se anudaba al objeto [al objeto amado: al muerto] son clausurados, sobreinvestidos y en ellos se consuma el desasimiento de la libido”. Es decir: “una vez cumplido el trabajo de duelo, el yo se vuelve otra vez libre y desinhibido”.

Ahora bien: ¿es posible hablar en el caso mexicano de un estado de melancolía generalizada? ¿Se puede decir que esa enorme, imprecisa pila de muertos y la carencia de un duelo público han terminado por sumir a la ciudadanía en un estado de rumia melancólica? ¿Se puede respaldar ese argumento con los repetidos artículos editoriales que hablan del pesimismo de la sociedad mexicana y con esos estudios estadísticos que detectan, o creen detectar, altos porcentajes de abatimiento y acedia entre los mexicanos? No sé si se pueda hablar en esos términos (“ciudadanía”, “mexicanos”) y temo que emplear una categoría así de psicológica, melancolía, acabe por evaporizar un problema eminentemente social y político. Estoy seguro, por otro lado, de que es posible y sensato hablar de trauma. Se puede seguir a Roland Barthes y señalar que “el trauma es precisamente aquello que suspende el lenguaje y bloquea la significación”: esa imagen-golpe que no puede ser verbalizada ni insertada en un relato que la explique, esa experiencia-choque “de la cual no hay nada que decir”.7 Se puede afirmar que la violencia desatada en México a partir de finales de 2006 ha sido padecida de ese modo por la sociedad civil: como una experiencia traumática, como un hecho que pasma y enmudece, que elude las narrativas de significación habituales, que se resiste lo mismo al discurso oficial victorioso que a los relatos ciudadanos victimistas.

Es más o menos fácil percibir esa sensación de pasmo aquí y allá, en blogs y diarios, en las repetidas jeremiadas de unos o en las desesperadas metáforas con que otros intentan comprender la dimensión de lo ocurrido. Que si se dispusieran todos los cadáveres en línea recta se uniría el Zócalo de la ciudad de México con la ciudad de Toluca. Que si se guardara un minuto de silencio por cada muerto habría que callar durante veintisiete días. Que si se apilaran los cuerpos frente al Ángel de la Independencia, que si se enviaran cuarenta mil sobres a Los Pinos, que si etcétera. Una sensación de azoro semejante, la misma conmoción posterior al trauma, era visible hasta hace no mucho en el campo intelectual mexicano. En un principio, la escalada de la violencia no se vio acompañada por una escalada de la discusión pública. Más bien al contrario: mientras el conflicto se intensificaba y los muertos empezaban a acumularse, la producción cultural en torno al narcotráfico parecía seguir la inercia de siempre –novelitas sobre el narco, reportajes sobre los capos, críticas más o menos puntuales de este o aquel detalle de la ofensiva gubernamental. Aun ahora, cuatro años y medio después, no hay un ensayo que intente explicar integralmente el conflicto, ni una novela que pretenda representar “la violencia”, ni un discurso que se aventure a asimilar en su seno a esos cuarenta mil, dispares, inclasificables cadáveres.

Así está bien: los relatos, los grandes relatos, tienden a tranquilizar –y aquí no se trata de eso. Se trata de superar el trauma sin ocultar la herida. Se trata de transitar de la melancolía al duelo no para sobreponerse y echar tierra sobre los muertos sino para abandonar el pasmo y recuperar la agencia perdida: dejar el estado de shock, adoptar una postura crítica. Ese duelo imposible del que hablaba Derrida: que nos ayude a llevar al muerto dentro de nosotros mismos a la vez que nos recuerde que el muerto fue siempre otro, es siempre otro. Ese duelo lúcido, tenso, que experimentó y describió, otra vez, Barthes: “Duelo: no aplastamiento ni bloqueo (lo cual implicaría un ‘lleno’), sino una disponibilidad dolorosa: estoy en alerta, esperando, espiando la llegada de un ‘sentido de vida’.”8

Y después –escribe Judith Butler– hay algo más que no se puede “superar”, que no se puede “trabajar”, un acto deliberado de violencia contra una colectividad, seres humanos convertidos en seres anónimos debido a la violencia y cuya muerte rezuma anonimato en la memoria. Esa violencia no puede ser “pensada”, constituye un asalto al pensamiento, niega el pensamiento en el sentido de recolección y rescate. Pero ¿qué surge entonces en lugar del pensamiento? O ¿qué nuevo pensamiento surge? No es como si se dejara de pensar; después de esa ruptura interna, el pensamiento sigue, y esa continuación está fundada y estructurada sobre esa ruptura, arrastra la ruptura como la seña de su historia. Podríamos decir, en una manera benjaminiana, que el pensamiento emerge de las ruinas, como las ruinas, de esa devastación. No representa su reverso, su superación, su vida más allá de la muerte. […] El resultado es una agencia melancólica que no puede reconocer su historia como pasado, que no puede capturar su historia a través de la cronología y que no sabe qué es salvo aquello que sobrevive, la persistencia de cierta incertidumbre que persigue al presente.9

4

Uno podría rastrear, con más o menos detalle, las fisuras de ese estado de pasmo, la progresiva superación de ese trauma en el campo literario mexicano. Para hacerlo habría que ir tarde o temprano más allá de los medios convencionales –libros, periódicos, revistas– y atender la creciente actividad crítica de los escritores en blogs, Twitter y redes sociales, soportes que, al revés de los otros, permiten seguir en tiempo real los acontecimientos y fijar posturas inmediatas, sin la intermediación de un editor o el fardo de la elaboración “literaria”. Habría, también, que ir más allá de los grupos intelectuales obvios y encontrar dentro y fuera de México a algunos escritores emergentes (Lolita Bosch y Jorge Harmodio, por ejemplo) que han servido como promotores de iniciativas tendientes a disipar el pasmo del campo literario.

Piénsese, por lo menos, en tres proyectos colgados en internet, los tres comenzados o realizados durante 2010 y los tres sostenidos por escritores y periodistas. El primero, y de algún modo el catalizador de los otros dos, es el blog colectivo Nuestra aparente rendición –una plataforma creada y animada por la escritora catalana-mexicana Lolita Bosch donde se reproducen muchos de los textos literarios (ensayos, poemas, cuentos, crónicas) publicados aquí y allá en torno a la violencia, un archivo en construcción permanente que, a la vez que crea un corpus crítico, genera discusiones a su interior y dispara nuevos textos.

El segundo es el sitio web 72 migrantes –un “altar virtual” para los 72 migrantes latinoamericanos asesinados en Tamaulipas en agosto de 2010, ideado por la cronista mexicana Alma Guillermoprieto y compuesto con los textos fúnebres de 72 escritores, uno para cada muerto. El tercero es la bitácora colectiva Menos días aquí –un recuento diario de las víctimas de la violencia en México, un archivo que desde su fundación, el 12 de septiembre de 2010, hasta hoy contiene más de diez mil entradas como estas: “Los restos calcinados de un hombre fueron reportados poco después de las 10 de la mañana de este lunes, cuando un pepenador se topó con ellos en la colonia Moctezuma de la Reserva Territorial de Xalapa.” Está claro que estos proyectos, y en especial los últimos dos, implementan una estrategia opuesta a la del gobierno. Frente a la imprecisa pila de cuerpos: aclarar, reconocer, nombrar. Ante las víctimas: el duelo.
Hoy ya no es necesario reunir indicios de que el trauma empieza a disiparse. Hoy esa sensación de pasmo ha sido definitivamente superada en el campo literario mexicano.

Un solo hecho, el asesinato de Juan Francisco Sicilia, hijo del poeta Javier Sicilia, y de seis personas más el pasado 28 de marzo en Cuernavaca, Morelos, terminó de sacudir el campo y puso en su centro, de una vez por todas, el tema de la guerra contra el narcotráfico. A la muerte del joven Sicilia le siguieron desplegados firmados por numerosos escritores, todos cuestionando en menor o mayor grado la campaña estatal contra el narcotráfico, y las disputas más intensas al interior del ámbito intelectual mexicano desde las elecciones presidenciales de 2006, ya sobre la legalización del consumo de las drogas, ya sobre la efectividad de las marchas, ya entre aquellos que aún respaldan la estrategia oficial y aquellos que demandan un replanteamiento o hasta un cese de la ofensiva. De un modo u otro, la disyuntiva que acalló durante dos o tres años a buena parte de la intelectualidad mexicana –o Calderón o el narco– ha sido desmontada y en su lugar parece haberse establecido otra fórmula, desde luego que más conveniente para la discusión crítica: la culpa es del narco, la responsabilidad es del gobierno.

Aún más importante: la muerte de Juan Francisco Sicilia ha inspirado las manifestaciones de duelo público más numerosas desde que empezó el conflicto. El miércoles 6 de abril más de 35 mil personas marcharon en Cuernavaca, con Javier Sicilia al frente, y otras decenas de miles se manifestaron simultáneamente en 38 ciudades del país y en algunas del extranjero. La marcha de Cuernavaca, mitad procesión fúnebre, mitad protesta política, seguida lo mismo por personas con veladoras que por gente con pancartas, partió de un punto más o menos neutro, el Monumento de la Paloma de la Paz, y se detuvo en dos sitios claramente políticos, una zona militar y el Congreso legislativo, antes de terminar en el zócalo de la ciudad, frente al Palacio de Gobierno. En cada una de las tres paradas Sicilia –católico devoto e izquierdista confeso: mezcla que pone incómodos tanto a unos como a otros– leyó textos distintos, los tres singulares híbridos de oración fúnebre y panfleto político. Todo culminó esa misma noche, ya de manera decididamente combativa, cuando Sicilia fijó un ultimátum a las autoridades –o la resolución del crimen de su hijo antes del 13 de abril o la renuncia del gobernador del estado– y anunció que él y otras personas acamparían en el zócalo de Cuernavaca hasta que una u otra cosa sucediera.

Podría parecer inexacto el uso de la palabra duelo para describir una manifestación tan pública y política como esta o como la que le siguió a principios de mayo, una marcha de Cuernavaca a la ciudad de México y una masiva concentración en el Zócalo de la capital. Eso piensan, aquellos que, antes del 6 de abril, demandaban no politizar las marchas y que, a partir de esa fecha, lamentan que el duelo –para ellos un asunto privado y religioso– haya degenerado en política. Pero el duelo no degenera en política: el duelo es política. ¿Cómo recordar a los muertos?, ¿a qué muertos?, ¿quién recuerda?, ¿en qué espacios?, ¿cuándo?: resolver cualquiera de estas preguntas implica adoptar una postura polémica, sobre todo en tiempos de guerra o de violencia generalizada. Instituciones, burocracias, jerarquías, leyes, códigos: todo esto es puesto en movimiento cuando uno rinde luto a un muerto. El solo hecho de recordar es ya una práctica política: el que recuerda se resiste a dejar pasar el pasado, reconstruye sesgadamente lo sucedido y trae al presente un fantasma listo para ser significado. La idea de que no es posible profesar duelo y hacer política al mismo tiempo es, por tanto, una trampa: otra invitación a la melancolía.

Quizá porque el origen de estas manifestaciones es el asesinato de siete personas, o tal vez porque al frente de ellas marcha un padre que acaba de perder a su hijo, solo unos pocos se han aventurado a censurar abiertamente el movimiento y otros muchos han tenido que ocultar sus reservas, o de plano su animadversión, detrás de un par de débiles críticas morales. Primero, que el movimiento no condena debidamente al narcotráfico y, en vez de vociferar contra los cárteles, responsabiliza al gobierno. Segundo, que el movimiento lamenta la muerte de cuarenta mil personas y no atiende que al hacerlo llora no solo a las víctimas sino a miles de verdugos ejecutados. La primera crítica apenas si necesita ser refutada: ¿de veras se desea que los manifestantes elijan como interlocutor a los cárteles de la droga y no a las autoridades electas?, ¿en realidad se cree que los ciudadanos debe exigir seguridad pública a los criminales y no a los gobernantes? Hasta donde yo recuerdo es Calderón el presidente de este país y es a su gobierno al que toca garantizar una vida civil pacífica y segura. Mientras esto siga siendo así, y la violencia continúe arrasando el territorio, nada más sensato y democrático que salir a las calles y gritar y criticar y abuchear y condenar y exigir al gobierno de Calderón.

Es verdad, por otra parte, que hoy no se puede rendir luto a todas las víctimas de la violencia en México, identificadas y no identificadas, sin terminar velando, de paso, a miles de verdugos. Es cierto que, en una situación ideal, lo mejor sería conocer las identidades y las historias de los muertos, distinguir entre víctimas y verdugos y proceder en consecuencia. Pero esta, está claro, no es una situación ideal y aquí las víctimas y los verdugos se tocan en las mismas fosas. Aquí el ciudadano, incapaz de recoger los cuerpos por sí mismo e identificarlos, al final solo tiene dos opciones: o no hace nada y deja que el trauma se naturalice, o rinde un duelo general, colectivo, a los muertos, aceptando que en el proceso incluirá a miles de criminales. En un extremo, el pasmo: esperar y mirar cómo se apilan ¿cuántos muertos? En el otro, una acción polémica pero al fin y al cabo una acción: correr el riesgo de incluir a los asesinos en el luto con tal de recuperar la agencia y salir a la calle y reclamar al gobierno y lamentar el destino de miles de seres torturados y desaparecidos y asesinados. ¿No está claro que una opción arrastra a la melancolía y que la otra, aunque moralmente discutible, enciende a quien la elige y contribuye a reactivar una vida ciudadana deprimida, casi aniquilada, por el clima de violencia?

Al final eso es lo más valioso del movimiento encabezado por Javier Sicilia: que es, precisamente, un movimiento. Justo ahora, mientras escribo esto, una columna de cientos de personas, con Sicilia al frente, la Caravana por la Paz, avanza por una carretera de Durango, rumbo a Saltillo, luego de haber salido de Cuernavaca y haberse detenido en cinco ciudades del país. Es de esperar que en su camino la caravana crezca y reciba el apoyo de distintos grupos –entonces ya podrá criticarse: que su composición contradictoria, que los Pancho Villa, que los perredistas. Es seguro que, conforme pasen los días y la comitiva se acerque a su destino final, Ciudad Juárez, el movimiento despedirá nuevas declaraciones, otros textos –entonces ya podrá decirse: que el tono poético, que la ambigüedad de las imágenes, que el mesianismo de Sicilia. Así está bien: hay que atender lo que sucede en el camino y, si se quiere, criticarlo; mejor eso que seguir fingiendo que este movimiento es puramente espiritual, por tanto apenas criticable, y que no daña intereses ni carga otros ni contribuye a reconfigurar el debate público. De cualquier modo, lo más importante no es lo que ocurre en el camino sino el camino mismo: el hecho de que ahora mismo cientos de personas recorren una carretera de Durango y de que nada más al hacerlo ya ensanchan la vida pública y rompen la agobiante dicotomía de estos años (o Calderón o el narco) para introducir nuevos actores sociales en el escenario –deudos, poetas, padres de desaparecidos, ciudadanos dispuestos a hacer significar a los muertos.

Una marcha puede parecer poca cosa y a estas alturas algunos ya estarán hastiados de ellas. Pero lo cierto es que las marchas convocadas por Sicilia han supuesto una novedad, un soplo de oxígeno, en la vida política del país y han tenido consecuencias capitales. Hace tres o cuatro meses nadie marchaba para cuestionar la campaña oficial contra el narcotráfico y esas carreteras se atravesaban rápida, temerosamente. Hace tres o cuatro meses los intelectuales mexicanos –salvo casos aislados– persistían petrificados en sus cubículos y bibliotecas y ahora un poeta marcha al frente de multitudes –¿ahora la poesía encarna? Hace tres o cuatro meses una generali-zada sensación de malestar y desconcierto deprimía a casi toda la sociedad civil y ahora esa misma sensación dispara a la calle a decenas de miles y organiza a grupos ciudadanos. ¿Poca cosa? Desde luego que para contener la violencia hace falta algo más que una marcha y que ninguna manifestación conseguirá provocar por sí sola lo que este país más necesita: profundos cambios estructurales, una radical redistribución de los recursos. Pero hay que ser sinceros: algo importante está pasando ahora –y ese algo se debe a un padre que se resiste a que su hijo sea arrastrado a la nada. ~


Una primera versión de este texto fue leída el 29 de abril durante un coloquio celebrado en Graduate Center, City University of New York.

NOTAS
 
1 Estas entradas han sido tomadas del sitio menosdiasaqui.blogspot.com.
2 “Detienen a cinco presuntos miembros de ‘La Línea’”, El Economista, 13 de agosto de 2010.
3 “Desaparecidas, más de 5,000 personas desde el 2006: CNDH”, El Economista, 2 de abril de 2011.
4 “Hallan 156 fosas en cinco años”, Reforma, 19 de abril de 2011.
5 “Los homicidios y la violencia del crimen organizado”, Nexos, febrero de 2011.
6 Precarious life. The powers of mourning and violence, Londres y Nueva York, Verso, 2004, p. 37. (Traducción del autor.)
7 “El mensaje fotográfico”, La semiología, Buenos Aires, Tiempo Contemporáneo, 1972, p. 125.
8 Diario de duelo, México, Siglo XXI, 2010, p. 91.
9 “Afterword: After loss, what then?”, Loss: the politics of mourning, eds. David L. Eng y David Kazanjian, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2003, p. 468. (Traducción del autor.)

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