Former Mexican President Felipe Calderón launched the war on drugs in 2006 as a strategy to dismantle vast drug trafficking networks. That war has cost the lives of thousands of people, many of whom are buried in mass graves. By focusing on a single day in the search for bodies, this ethnography describes and analyzes one of the brutal aftereffects of this security strategy. One key topic is the different ways in which actors stake out the rights of the lifeless bodies in these graves, from the mothers who dig into the earth to find treasures to the state apparatus that attempts to control the process.

This article analyzes the relations between gender, emotions and places, through the idea of women’s geographies of fear. On the one hand, I look into the specific spatial effects of fear of violence in women’s everyday lives and, on the other, I propose some analytical keys that can configure a theoretical-empirical framework of these geographies of fear from a gender perspective, emphasizing the geographical processes that are triggered in the urban experience. Our findings are backed by data from two studies on sexual harassment and other forms of sexual violence in public spaces in the cities of Puebla and Guadalajara, in Mexico.