5 - Living the Drug War

Summary

Introduction

In the final year of Felipe Calderón's presidency, the ongoing threat of violence had become a mainstay in daily Mexican life. This was a violence both lived and reported; it was now common for citizens to inhabit a space of constant precarity, where media representation of the conflict seen in news reports and stories provided a permanent reminder of this lack of personal security. Editorial staff themselves were likewise subject to the volatile nature of the period and faced the same uncertainty. Recalling Anabel Hernandez's (2012, p. 9) assessment of Calderón's political legacy, more than fifty journalists were murdered and a further thirteen disappeared during this sexenio, though figures from the Human Rights Watch and the Associated Press now place this higher (Relly and González De Bustamante, 2014, p. 109). This, coupled with the countless deaths and disappearances of the war's victims, points to the emergence of a necropolitical climate, where citizens are subject to the ceaseless tyranny of death.

While the families’ public response to growing violence and impunity was the focus of my discussions in the previous chapter, here I will turn to analyse the residual effects of the drug conflict on those Mexicans working and living within the conditions of war. In contrast to the mobilised international protest movement examined in the previous chapter, the documentary features analysed here focus on fixed spaces, a cemetery in Culiacán, Sinaloa and the border city Tijuana in Baja California. As gang territories and drug routes, these spaces are permanently occupied by an oppressive and inescapable climate of terror.

Via two distinct documentary lenses, this chapter will examine a representation of the lives of those working in these conditions. The first film to be analysed, Natalia Almada's El Velador (2011) / The Night Watchman, follows the daily routine of a night watchman in Jardines del Humaya, a vast and still growing cemetery in Culiacán that is the resting place of some of Mexico's most notorious drug lords as well as their victims. Almada's film locates the viewer in a necropolis, a classification which bears further scrutiny in the context of State-sponsored violence. With no didactic voice-over used to narrate the film, the viewer is positioned as a silent observer of daily life in the cemetery space.