Carolina Robledo Silvestre Carolina Robledo Silvestre is a Conacyt Professor attached to the Center for Research and Higher Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS), Mexico City. He specializes in socio-anthropological studies on justice, violence and politicization of survivors of serious human rights violations in unconventional conflict contexts. She is the author of the book Social and Political Drama of Mourning: The Disappearances of Tijuana's Drug War, published by El Colegio de México in 2017, and numerous articles in English and Spanish about forced disappearance, access to justice and clandestine burials. He currently coordinates the Research Group in Social and Forensic Anthropology (GIASF) and leads the CIESAS institutional project "Formation of a laboratory of legal and forensic anthropology," whose objective is to promote a space for the exchange of knowledge regarding legal strategies. and policies of social movements in defense of individual and collective rights.

Temáticas

Combing history against the grain: reflections on the search and exhumation of mass graves in Mexico

  • Carolina Robledo Silvestre

Keywords: forced disappearance, exhumations, mass graves, truth.

This article proposes to reflect on the multiplication of illegal burials of human remains in Mexico at the beginning of the 21st century, based on its coercive power as a mechanism of terror, but also on its ability to promote collective action, challenge the official truth and act as an autopsy of the politico-social regime of precariousness and neoliberal inequality. Based on the experiences of the relatives of missing persons in search, the tensions not yet resolved around the right to the truth are raised in the face of the expansion of cruelty that exposes the irregular burial of the dead, and it is invited to think about the epistemological and ethical challenges faced by witness-researchers in these warlike landscapes.