In the last two decades the border region in the north of the country, Ciudad Juárez in particular, has faced a landscape dominated by various types of violence tied not only to the presence of drug trafficking and organized crime but also to that generated by the punitive intervention on the part of the Mexican state. In this sense, rethinking the explanatory frameworks in relation to theoretical-methodological approaches has constituted one of the key tasks in contexts where, in the words of Rossana Reguillo, fear takes possession of a present in crisis and as an expression of a collapsed landscape.

This commentary on Rossana Reguillo's article "Essays on the abyss: politics of the gaze, violence, technopolitics" analyzes the author's research on the ways of looking at violence and technopolitics in the history of anthropology and other social sciences in Mexico. How to combine diverse strategies to capture complexity? It also deals with the role of affects and electronic corporations in the segmentation and "totalizations" of material or symbolic goods and political opinions, as well as when they try to manage diversity.

The war on crime has brought, for the past 13 years, a spiral of violence that has left deep scars on Mexican society. Every day, mass media records the expressions of the failed security strategy, although they do it mostly to beautify and spectacularize it. In the middle of the coverage by the major news outlets, war victims have opted for other practices, particularly the families of the disappeared, who use the materiality of images to create search files that help others visualize the absence of their loved ones.