30/10/13 Mexican Jihad

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Documenting the Visual Narrative of the War on
DrugsbyMichelleGarca
Michelle Garcas piece analyzes the relevance of
deconstructing the visual discourse of the War on Drugs
in Mexico, and examines what the Mexican Jihad tumblr
has to say about it. The tumblr takes images out of their
contextanddisplaystheminawaythatisabletoexpress
thewayPresidentFelipeCaldernandhiscabinetgaveso
much importance to communicating a need of fighting the enemy through a display of bravado in military
parades and other type of photo ops. Garcas text helps us think about these more subtle mechanisms of war
ideologization and morale boosting that the former government has used to persuade Mexicans and the
international community that the military intervention has to go on until the colossal enemy is subdued and
destroyed.WB
Everywhere he looks, madness has taken hold. Bodies strung from bridges, bodies dissolved in acid. Men roam
across cities and small towns carrying automatic weapons. The dead are his age as are the killers, the enemy might
have studied with him in high school back in Oaxaca. Drug war they say in English, la guerra contra el narco
(war against the narco), they call it in Mexico, titles that explain the killers and the killings, titles repeated by the
press, the president, and experts who claim to decode the meaning and motives in the work of criminals.
Alberto Bustamante was a skinny college freshman one month shy of his 21st birthday when, in 2006 Felipe
Calderon rode into the presidency and declares a war against the narcos, drug traffickers whose powdered and
herbal merchandise fills the bongs and noses of gringo lawyers, college kids and empty nesters. But in Mexico,
narco turf battles were to blame for massacres and beheadings including in the president's home state of
Michoacan. The Mexican president speaking of freeing young Mexicans from drugs,[1] sent in the military,
eventually deploying tens of thousands across the country.
The visual evidence of war quickly followed[2] Military caravans roll down handsome boulevards and onto dirt
roads, helicopters carry troops into marijuana fields, burning bales of weed, images of handcuffed men with
somber faces strategically positioned behind piles of weapons and cash. War obliterated the complexities of the
narco enginecorruption, impunity, and a dismal economy that produced thousands of unemployed, under
educated young men who make for ideal candidates as look outs, drivers, smugglers, and hit men. With war neat
lines are drawn and camps are formed in a fight of good versus evil.
Calderon told his neighbors to the north that his was a war to free the young Mexicans from drugs and to free
Mexican society from slavery on the part of organized crime based on money and technology.[3]
But if Calderon was leading the charge of the good, Alberto found him a shocking portrait of heroism. It's a
war, you see that there are dead but its also a war on psychological level and that's what makes it very shocking,
says Alberto hunched over his laptop in the cafe he owns with some friends. It becomes shocking when, every time
you see the president he's dressed in a suit behind a podium giving a speech and then to see him dressed in military
style.
Last year as Calderon's term began winding down and the death toll arrived at 70,000[4]-90,000 dead in six years,
DESAPARECIDOS
AYDANOSAMANTENERNAR

ESTADODELAREPBLICA
MEXICANJIHAD
MEXICANJIHAD.TUMBLR.COM
SeptiembreenVeracruz:
represin
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y a periodistas. Septiembre marc
un parteaguas en los sistemas de
represin en Veracruz, la nueva
Polica Estatal Acreditable lo mismo
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el Noreste del pas, en esta ocasin se
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golpeo algunas zonas de Nuevo
Len
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Para evitar un secuestro, un grupo
de migrantes armados peda 8 mil
dlares a otro grupo de migrantes
que bajaron del tren en la
comunidad de Agua Azul, municipio
de
Bailarelvalscontigo,Pap
Carta a mi pap, Rafael Garca vila.
Pap, te extrao, donde quiera que
ests, ojal te vuelva a hablar para
que veas cmo estoy de grande ahora
y para decirte cunto
Homenajeaunhijoausente.
Un da ms sentada frente a la
computadora y no s cmo empezar
a escribir lo que siento. No s si
quienes lean esta carta logren
entender el significado de
Gritarlealsilencio
A mi hijo Edson: Hace cuatro aos
que te arrancaron de mi lado. Estoy
sufriendo. Hay tristeza y dolor
porque no s de ti. Me siento
incompleta, mutilada, me faltas t,
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30/10/13 Mexican Jihad
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depending on who you believe. To mark the war of his generation, Bustamante produced his own psy-op, distilling
the madness onto a mix tape. Mexican Moslem mix tape[5], he would call it, a cheeky rebuke to the Mexican and
U.S. governments' war rhetoric of equating the narco enemy with terrorists, and the fight against narcos with the
U.S. War on Terror. And because Bustamante was in with the club kids, the artists, he played the mix at a dance
party in Mexico City, that megalopolis ringed by mountains. Mexican Moslem was his anthem for a generation
branded with the name 'narco', a collection of phantasmagorical electronica tracks writhing and agitating and at
times invoking mourning with touches of Lady Gaga and influenced by musicians who go by the name, 'Viva la
violencia.' Long Live the Violence!

Link to music[6]
From the dance floor, Bustamante lobbed his anthem onto the online media battlefield, he says, to put in public
view my personal vision of what was going on. He paired the Mexican Moslem soundtrack with his online
scrapbook from Calderon's war, a collection of images culled from flicker, instagram, twitter news, sites and blogs.
He named it Mexican Jihad[7], calling it a gift to his president.
The images were meant to shock his viewers into reconsidering ubiquitous photographs of war, with its easily
recognizable narrative of a force for good-the government- battling against agents of evil, the narcos. I realized
that the images that I had kept no one recognized. I would show someone the images and they would say, where did
that come from? The News!he says.
But what Mexican Jihad turned out to be, for those following the six years of bloodshed and unsolved murders, one
of the most poignant and critical commentaries of the visual story of Mexico's drug war. Mexican Jihad reaches
behind simplistic, neatly drawn lines of war and clear cut camps of good versus evil by training its focus on the
visual war narrativefor a violence in which very little is known about how killed and why. Bustamante, however,
with his eclectic collection of published images, online feeds and screen shots, extends his critique to include the
press for reprinting the images with little or no scrutiny and the public for imbibing the entire package.
Mexican Jihad's kaleidoscopic trip through war begins with a replica of the painted mural inside a narco
museum, housed within a military training center, that showcases the hardware and bling confiscated from
narcos. The triptych depicts Mexican soldiers charging at fields of cannabis and opium across the distinct regions
of the country. What follows is an unbroken series of gifs and images and conspicuous absence of words, to
capitalize, as Bustamante says, on public's predilection for scrolling through sites like porn.
From the leftist magazine Proceso, to more mainstream outlets, to narco blogs and the foreign press, all carried
much of the same government orchestrated photo-ops that communicated one idea: WAR. There were military
caravans rolling down handsome boulevards and onto dirt roads, helicopters-borne troops raiding marijuana
fields, burning bales of weed, images of handcuffed men with somber faces strategically positioned behind piles of
weapons and cash[8]. Bustamante, a budding architect with a sharp eye for the control and use of space, sifted
through the constant stream of images that saturated his world guided by personal and political taste.
Further along, President Calderon is seen with a green light radiating from his eyes. The photograph was taken
during a presidential event in the enormous zocalo, public square, when spectators locked green lasers on the face
of the hugely unpopular war president. It's civic protest taking place of the president, in public, on national TV.
You are protesting on the face of the president, he says with a smile. That's beautiful.
Bustamante then points to a photo of the crime scene from the Villas de Salvarcar massacre in Ciudad Juarez when
16 teenagers celebrating a birthday inside a private home were shot down by gunmen.
The president initially intimated that the victims had been involved in organized crime, but after a public
excoriation by parents of the young athletes and promising students, Calderon later apologized.
Ripped from their context, Bustamante's collected images of nationalism, military parades, and photo-ops of
Calderon with his military leaders take on a sinister look. A huge billboard that reads no more weapons seems
mocking when weapons are in the hands of everyone. This is as grotesque as a beheading, says Bustamante.
This is the actual power, the actual decision.
The Mexican government and organized crime groups used images to vie for control over the public's perception of
power, says Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, a university professor and expert on organized crime on the Texas-Mexico
border. Criminal groups scrawled messages in blood and tacked to corpses. Their was purpose was--'If I can do
this there is no one to protect you. When I take this from you there is nothing you can do.' And the government, she
says, joined in its enemy's game. It didn't improve institutions, it didn't improve justice. It wanted something
PRENSAAMENAZADA
CONTADOR DE VISITAS
Este conteo no incluye las de Menos Das Aqu ni las visitas
particulares a proyectos especiales y redes.
30/10/13 Mexican Jihad
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spectacular.
The stunning images of war, however, obliterated the complexities of the narco engine, corruption, impunity, and a
dismal economy that produced thousands of unemployed, under educated young men who made for ideal candidates
as look outs, drivers, smugglers, and hit men. Such nuance would emerge within the online battlefield, where the
neat lines of war were blurred and Mexicans were bombarded with videos of brutality that went viral. In one,
masked men bludgeoned to death a state attorney general's brother like a pinata.[9] No one knows who wielded the
weapons. In a taped interrogation a woman clutching a rose confesses to having committed extortions. Was she
questioned by police, the military, someone else?[10] A video of a drug cartel execution suggests a nexus between
the military and cartel members[11].
These images are not counted as part of the intense government publicity during the 'drug war' that promoted
everything from the country's security forces to its beaches as seen in ads installed inside New York City subways.
(During Calderon's administration, it's worth noting, government spending on publicity quadrupled reaching $4
billion in 2011 and exceeding the authorized budget by a factor of three, according to an analysis of public spending
by the watchdog group Publicidad Oficial[12].) Indeed Mexican Jihad includes promotional images from El
Equipo[13], the short-lived secretly government financed television program beamed into every home in Mexico that
glorified the Mexican federal police and its mission of good.
Just weeks before the Villas de Salvarcar massacre, Julian Cardona a leading photographer, who has chronicled
the violence in Ciudad Juarez, told me that the story of Mexico's drug war was consisted of a recycling of image,
that created echo or propagation in the national, local and foreign media. Photographs and visuals revolved
around the declared drug war narrative-- security forces out fight ing the narco followed by the parade of the
accused, handcuffed, faced down, whose guilt was implicit, though in most cases, after the cameras disappeared,
detainees were eventually released[14].
In Juarez, at least, Cardona said, young mendead or alive taken as the narco were often low level pushers or
users. Likewise, beyond the camera lens are images capturing state security forces conducting arbitrary detentions,
torturing or disappearing people. It's rare that someone who has had any experience like that would open
themselves so that another image could be considered, he said. Very frequently, you have images of soldiers going
through the streets but not of their victims.
There were no photographs that could illustrate that of the 1,203 homicides cases between 2010 and 2011,
according to an investigation by El Diario de Juarez, only in 59 crime scenes were firearms found, meaning in the
drug war battles only one side was shooting.
But visual criticism requires context, and that is where Mexican Jihad encounters its limits. You'd have to know
what you know for this to make sense, John Mraz said. What makes Mexico's drug war unique is that its visual
story fits within a long history of a government created cultural identity through television, films and photography,
says Mraz, author of Mexico's Looking for Mexico: Modern Visual Culture and National Identity.The images
featured in Mexican Jihad are the very images of nationalism and identity promoted by Calderon to shore up
support for his drug war.
Last year Mexican Jihad jumped from the page to real life when Alberto and some friends mounted a series of dance
parties within the newly unveiled monument to Mexican war history Over four weeks, they hosted djs from some of
Mexico's hardest hit cities at the Estela de Luz, a monument in honor of the bicentanrio of independence and the
Mexican Revolution at the entrance of the presidential palace. While the music played inside, Bustamante and his
collaborators beamed words from an oversized light fixture. They called the event, ESTADO (state), a co-opting of
the government.
Bustamante hands me an event flyer, and one of the sponsors listed is NAAFI, which he tells me represents Navy,
Army and Air Force Institutes, but in reflecting the dismal legacy of the war against the narco he added, now it's
the name of my party.
A few weeks later, on December 1, Enrique Pea Nieto assumed the presidential office and Mexican Jihad lay
frozen in time, Bustamante left the online monument a homage to the war president. The war, he says, isn't the
same under the new president. Gone are the splashy photo-ops with detained men standing in front of weapons and
drugs, the military operations storming into the countryside and Pea Nieto has yet to appear with military brass.
But the number of dead holds steady at a little over 1,000 per month, extortions and kidnappings are rampant.
General impunity continues unabated, 98 percent of homicides committed in 2012 remain unsolved[15]. The only
indication that the war is over is the absence of its images.

30/10/13 Mexican Jihad
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Por::
Fecha:
Twittear

[1] http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=5508
[2] Possible good photo essays to either include in the piece or link to:
http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1651420,00.html (notice the description is precisely the point of
criticism the idea of good versus evil.)
http://projects.latimes.com/mexico-drug-war/#/its-a-war
http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2012/05/mexicos-drug-war-50-000-dead-in-6-years/100299/
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/03/mexicos_drug_war.html
[3] http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=5508
[4] http://www.insightcrime.org/news-analysis/mexican-govts-murder-count-worse-useless
http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jan/11/world/la-fg-mexico-dead-numbers-20120112
[5] http://www.mixcloud.com/demomilton/mexican-moslem-
mixtape/#utm_source=widget&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=flash_links
[6] http://www.mixcloud.com/demomilton/mexican-moslem-
mixtape/#utm_source=widget&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=flash_links
[7] Mexicanjihad.tumblr.com
[8] Possible good photo essays to either include in the piece or link to:
http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1651420,00.html (notice the description is precisely the point of
criticism the idea of good versus evil.
http://projects.latimes.com/mexico-drug-war/#/its-a-war
http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2012/05/mexicos-drug-war-50-000-dead-in-6-years/100299/
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/03/mexicos_drug_war.html
[9] http://tu.tv/videos/hermano-de-patricia-gonzalez-la-pinata WARNING EXTREME VIOLENCE
[10] http://mexablog.com.mx/2010/10/19/confesion-de-una-extorsionadora-antes-de-ser-ejecutada/
[11] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVF6qIEWFtI
http://dir.groups.yahoo.com/group/JudgedMenAllianceForTomorrow/message/2671
[12] http://publicidadoficial.com.-mx/gastofederal
[13] http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jun/01/world/la-fg-mexico-tv-series-20110602
[14] http://.org/newswww.insightcrime-briefs/calderon-80-organized-crime-detainees-free
[15] http://www.animalpolitico.com/2013/07/98-de-los-homicidios-de-2012-en-la-impunidad/#axzz2dstTiffa
Informacin adicional
Michelle Garca
2013
ETIQUETADOCOMO VIOLENCEINMEXICO VISUALNARRATIVE WARONDRUGS
MSENESTACATEGORA:
Poems About Loss
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