IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/raagxx/v108y2018i2p327-336.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Against the Evils of Democracy: Fighting Forced Disappearance and Neoliberal Terror in Mexico

Author

Listed:
  • Melissa W. Wright

Abstract

On 26 September 2014, Mexican police forces in Iguala, Guerrero, attacked and abducted four dozen students known as normalistas (student teachers); some were killed on the spot and the rest were never seen again. Within and beyond Mexico, rights activists immediately raised the alarm that the normalistas had joined the country's growing population of “the disappeared,” now numbering more than 28,000 over the last decade. In this article, I draw from a growing scholarship within and beyond critical geography that explores forced disappearance as a set of governing practices that shed insight into contemporary democracies and into struggles for constructing more just worlds. Specifically, I explore how an activist representation of Mexico's normalistas as “missing students” opens up new political possibilities and spatial strategies for fighting state terror and expanding the Mexican public within a repressive neoliberal and global order. I argue that this activism brings to life a counterpublic as protestors declare that if disappearance is “compatible” with democracy, as it appears to be within Mexico, then disappeared subjects demand new spaces of political action. They demand a countertopography where the disappeared citizens of Mexico make their voices heard. Activists demonstrate such connections as they compose countertopographies for counterpublics across the Americas landscape of mass graves, prisons, and draconian political economies, mostly constructed in the name of democracy and on behalf of securing citizens. Understanding how Mexico's activists confront the intransigent problems of state terror, spanning from dictatorships to democracies, offers vital insights for struggles against policies for detaining and disappearing peoples there and elsewhere in these neoliberal times.

Suggested Citation

  • Melissa W. Wright, 2018. "Against the Evils of Democracy: Fighting Forced Disappearance and Neoliberal Terror in Mexico," Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 108(2), pages 327-336, March.
  • Handle: RePEc:taf:raagxx:v:108:y:2018:i:2:p:327-336
    DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2017.1365584
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/24694452.2017.1365584
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/24694452.2017.1365584?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. William J Payne, 2021. "Queer urban activism under state impunity: Encountering an LGBTTTI Pride archive in Chilpancingo, Mexico," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 58(7), pages 1327-1345, May.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:raagxx:v:108:y:2018:i:2:p:327-336. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/raag .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.