Diary of Mexican Disappearance. Between Precedent and Excess

Abstract

Since events in Latin America’s Southern Cone in the 1970s, the label disappearance has become a consolidated category in international law and is circulated on the international stage in various localized patterns of violence that differ from those in which it originally arose. In Mexico, it gained remarkable momentum as a result of the so-called War on Drug-trafficking. Since then, and based on that precedent of international consolidation, a wide variety of victims caused by this war have been allocated to this category, and, in the meantime, a great deal of professional experience and know-how has been generated. However, the institutionalized definition of enforced disappearance is too limited to account for new emerging cases, since not all of them fall into this category. Between this precedent and the current excesses, the article deals with the question of disappearance in contemporary Mexico, where the phenomenon is alive and kicking. The paper resorts to materials generated by fieldwork, shaping a four-handed ethnography which explores different scenarios where disappearance is (re)defining itself in the Mexican context.