Drug Wars – American Disasters

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They are nothing more than a burnt outlines, hollow images lying dead on paper. They empty and anonymous. These pieces, as part of Miguel Aragón’s “Juarez Series”, are chilling windows into Juarez, the heart of the Mexican drug trade, and one of the deadliest cities in the world.

Since 2007, drug wars in Juarez have claimed the lives of over 10,000 men, women, and children. At stake: entry to the American drug market valued around $40 billion.[1] It is a war that is constantly changing shape, having evolved from a war between large and powerful gangs into a daily battle between more central and localized drug cells. The method of the fighting the war has changed as well. Dating from the Nixon administration in the United States to the end of President Calderon’s term in Mexico, authorities from both nations waged a full out war on drugs that debatably spilled more blood than it saved. Currently, however, President Nieto is enacting a policy change that promotes education for youth and conditional cash transfer programs to reduce drug violence.

Miguel Aragón’s piece, however, reminds us that despite all of the policy changes, Juarez is far from safe. His piece makes the war personal, forcing us to step back from the numbers and ideologies that muddle the debates, and to look at the war. Really look at the war. When looking at the painting we become emotional and feeling beings.

And when I do, I feel uneasy. Aragón’s piece is quiet and subdued. A sense of thoughtfulness draws me near and it serves as a reminder, in Aragon’s words, that “our physical existence is finite.” The violence rages on in Juarez and yet Aragón chooses to create images that are still and colorless.

But these images are grounded in reality. Aragón sources photographs from the media of Juarez and transforms images of violent deaths into really beautiful works of art. He uses a laser to create cardboard matrixes, and as the cardboard burns away, a layer of soot is created that is subsequently transferred to the paper. In this way, Aragón creates a great deal of tension as he transforms photographs of brutal slaughterings and makes them in quiet works of art. The tension between the two demands that we pay attention.

In a city where murder is a part of everyday life, as common as a breath, we fear desensitization will outshine compassion. But Aragón’s piece directly challenges this notion – mandating that we rethink disaster as a feeling people. Because while numbers and dates are helpful in understanding of disaster in an intellectual and removed way, that way is only a part of the puzzle. But Aragon’s series is unique as the war continues today; Juarez is not our history, but our present. And allowing Aragón to retool how we think about disaster helps us to not only understand our past, but also enables to make better decisions and policy changes today.

[1]. Jeremy Relph, “Growing up in the World’s Deadliest City” Buzzfeed. 7 March 2013 http://www.buzzfeed.com/jeremyrelph/growing-up-in-the-worlds-deadliest-city

The Mexican Drug War is a series of conflicts surrounding the Mexico’s massive illicit drug trade. It involves Mexican drug cartels, the Mexican government, including its army and police forces, Mexican vigilante groups, and the US government. This paper will analyze the disaster that is the Mexican Drug War as it relates to the border city of Ciudad Juarez. While this may seem unnecessarily limited in scope, an examination of Ciudad Juarez is valuable both because it is the artist Miguel Aragón’s native city and thusly the subject of his work and because of the exceptionality of its violence (it was only recently surpassed as the murder capital of the world).[1] The 10,500 murders it saw between 2007 and 2012 stemmed largely from the feuding between two rival drug cartels, the Sinola and Juarez Cartels, but also from a culture of violence that seems to target female victims with impunity from legal recourse. In fact the term “femicide,” which refers to the “misogynous murder of women by men, was coined in response to Cuidad Juarez’s largely publicized frequency of female murders which that failed to receive adequate governmental attention.

Miguel Aragón’s work can be used to argue for an examination of the ways in which the media’s disaster coverage and also stress the importance of the media’s role in disaster response. His art is created by taking grotesque images of victims published by the media and, through a process of laser burning on to cardboard and then imprinting the resulting soot onto paper, creates a sort of negative that, though portraying the same image, forces the viewer to more thoughtfully evaluate what they are seeing. His method is vastly important to this argument; by choosing to retool images that have already been published by the mainstream media, his art acknowledges the necessity of the media’s publicizing of brutality while simultaneously expressing the need to alter their message. This can be understood as a warning against the dangers of desensitization for two reasons. Firstly, by muffling the image and thus muting the brutality, he forces the viewer to fully investigate the image in order to ascertain what it portrays. In doing so the reader must fully consider the images implications in a way that might otherwise be unlikely given the dearth of grotesque images that the viewer is likely to reflexively ignore due to a desensitization to such emotionally taxing images.

Additionally he removes defining facial features; this allows for increased empathy from the viewer by portraying victims as a relatable human form rather than someone of a distinctive background. This is a particularly interesting feature of his artwork when considering in conjunction with the danger of desensitization; as grotesque images become ever more circulated, Aragón’s art serves as a reminder of the ways in which people can compartmentalize violent disaster images so as to maintain a barrier between ‘us’ and ‘them’ in order to reduce psychological anguish. By removing the ‘us’ and ‘them’ the viewer is forced to reconsider the implications of this particular disaster.

This message is particularly important in a city that seems to embody desensitization. Despite, at its peak, seeing nine homicides a day, most of which were organized executions, Cuidad Juarez provided little support for its residents. Not only are “femicides” rarely investigated but the city still fails to receive adequate aid due to inexcusably rampant corruption. The local police force formed a crime collective that was employed by the Juarez Cartel, the federal police force and army often utilized torture and planted false evidence in order to extort money, and federal prosecutors took on far less than one percent of the murder cases.[2]

Although Cuidad Juarez could benefit most from this argument of desensitization, it is not to say that these lessons should be contained to the disasters of Juarez or even of the Mexican Drug War. Rather, due to the increased degree with which media pervades daily life and frequency with which it reports on disasters this danger of desensitization is becoming all the more relevant.

[1] http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/10/15/mexicos-ciudad-juarez-is-no-longer-the-most-violent-city-in-the-world/

[2] http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/in-mexicos-murder-city-the-war-appears-over/2012/08/19/aacab85e-e0a0-11e1-8d48-2b1243f34c85_story.html

Tag: Drug Wars

“Juarez Series” Rising from the Ashes

The Dangers of Desensitization: Miguel Aragón and the Mexican Drug Wars