Rehumanizing the Disappeared: Spaces of Memory in Mexico and the Liminality of Transitional Justice

Abstract

The fact that you don't know if he is alive, if he is getting enough to eat, if he is cold or what happened to him is so hard to deal with.-Doña Maria | 728 American Quarterly victims of disappearances on the micro level is connected to national political processes of the liminality of transitional justice. Describing different practices and discourses of families of the disappeared and conceptualizing them as processes of rehumanization, the article shows the multiple transitional frictions in the Mexican case. 2 Reflecting on the violence in the current "war on drugs" and the recent opening of the first memory museum in Mexico, the Casa de la Memoria Indómita (House of Untamed Memory), I also argue that memory practices around the disappeared in Mexico continue to be part of a social countermemory rather than of collective or national memory.

Bureaucratically Missing: Capital Punishment, Exhumations, and the Afterlives of State Documents and Photographs

“…This can be seen as an attempt to restore individual personhood and dignity in the form of even a temporary tombstone bearing the individual's biographical details above graves that were previously unmarked (see Figure 10). 65 The placards are seemingly produced for the benefit of the families who come to witness the exhumations and view the remains.…”

Missing in Mexico: Denied victims, neglected stories

“…The "catastrophe of identity" as Gatti (2008) calls the crime of enforced disappearance, is symbolically undone by the actions of the families. The fight for rehumanization aims at giving their stolen identities and their eliminated dignity and humanity back to the disappeared by performing political rituals in public spaces against oblivion and denial (Karl, 2014). One other important aspect of the relatives' struggle is the constant demand for the punishment of the perpetrators and, moreover, the demand that their abducted relatives should no longer be considered criminals and terrorists, but social activists, people who fought for the rights of all Mexicans during the Dirty War.…”

“…Such processes in Mexico can be considered "transitional frictions", a term Alexander Hinton uses to refer to the "complexities of the encounter between global/transnational mechanisms and the local realities on the ground" (2010: 9). All these ambivalent transitional frictions are part of a state of "liminality of transitional justice" (Karl, 2014). For as long as the lack of answers perpetuates the state of liminality of the families of the disappeared, the national process of transitional justice will be stuck in a similar state of liminality.…”

“…opened a private museum in the historical center of Mexico City documenting their actions since the 1970s, and exhibiting photographs of the disappeared. The museum is called "House of the Indomitable Memory" (Casa de la Memoria Indómita) in reference to the irrepressible determination to keep the memory of the disappeared alive, despite all the obstacles that Mexican governments have so far put in their way (Karl, 2014).…”

“…In this article, I want to emphasize the mostly invisible "fight for rehumanization" (Karl, 2014;2014a) in which the families of the dehumanized disappeared participate, the conflictive memory politics in Mexico and the ambivalent transitional justice process. I will briefly describe the initial intent of clarification sought in the cases of the disappeared by the government in the late 1990s while Mexico was still under the Party of the Institutionalized Revolution (PRI) regime.…”