The Mexican Drug War is a series of conflicts surrounding the Mexico\u2019s 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 Arag\u00f3n\u2019s 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]<\/a> 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 \u201cfemicide,\u201d which refers to the \u201cmisogynous murder of women by men, was coined in response to Cuidad Juarez\u2019s largely publicized frequency of female murders which that failed to receive adequate governmental attention.<\/p>\n

Miguel Arag\u00f3n\u2019s work can be used to argue for an examination of the ways in which the media\u2019s disaster coverage and also stress the importance of the media\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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, Arag\u00f3n\u2019s art serves as a reminder of the ways in which people can compartmentalize violent disaster images so as to maintain a barrier between \u2018us\u2019 and \u2018them\u2019 in order to reduce psychological anguish. By removing the \u2018us\u2019 and \u2018them\u2019 the viewer is forced to reconsider the implications of this particular disaster.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cfemicides\u201d 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]<\/a><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n