Geographies of Pain: The Mexican Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity and the Configuration of Spaces of Victimhood

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Garcia de Alba Diaz, Ana Catalina
- Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Geography

Abstract

Since 2006, Mexico has been embedded in a severe humanitarian and social crisis brought about by Calderon's drug war security strategy. On March 2011, the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity (MPJD), a social movement of victims was created in reaction to the growing death toll of drug related violence, the increase in human rights violations and the perception of a systematic effort by the government to belittle social costs of the war by manipulating the official narrative. Through protest marches, the MPJD articulated spaces of shared victimhood and set the path for victims' pain to be collectivized and politicized. This thesis illustrates how the spatial aspects of the official narrative of the drug war are countered by the emotional geographies constructed by the MPJD. These spaces of pain allowed for distinct emotional geographies that capture media attention to motivate collective action setting the foundations for reconstructing the social pact.

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