To aid research on 'The Bodies and the Archive: Bureaucratization of Violence and Communal Exhumation in Mexico'

In September 2014, 43 students were attacked and forcibly disappeared by police in the town of Iguala, Mexico. The Ayotzinapa Case, as it is known, caused an international outcry and a domestic political crisis. In the following weeks, the surrounding countryside was discovered to be saturated with mass graves, and a crisis of sovereignty began to emerge around bodily remains. As the willingness of the Mexican state to investigate became less and less credible, families took up the role of searching for the disappeared and caring for the dead. No longer waiting for authorities to act, brigades of family members began to symbolically and materially enact attributes of the state. What started as groups of people getting together on Sundays to go to the mountains in search of bodies, is developing into a nation-wide social movement. What does it mean to find a murdered body in Mexico today? What does it mean for it to become evidence? Building on anthropological scholarship on bureaucracy and forensic evidence, I examine the encounters of brigades and state authorities. I explore the currently existing regime of justice and its evidentiary practices, interrogating how bodies in the ground are translated into terms legible to the law, and how their existence as evidence is transferred to documents within archives. As a whole, this project investigates social processes of public truth production by bringing into conversation forensic and humanitarian exhumations, alongside recent critical perspectives on bureaucracy, bearing in mind longstanding approaches to the anthropology of death and the anthropology of the state, to address how dead bodies become evidence and how truth claims circulate around and through them.