Necroterritories and sacrificial zones: Forensic scenarios in contemporary Mexico

Abstract

This paper seeks to develop the term necroterritories from a philosophical reflection on the forced disappearance of persons and clandestine graves as materializations of spaces of violence and zones of sacrifice. It considers the recent rise of the spatial turn and the forensic turn in Latin America to address the intense and profound conflict generated through hyperliberal economies in the deployment, dissemination and increase of forced disappearance of persons and clandestine graves as analytical windows. From this register, the efforts made by collectives and searchers become witness cases linked to the zones of the sacrifice of bodies-territories located in the state of Puebla that offer elements to deploy and develop a conceptual approach. These social coordinates will be the starting point for the inquiry on the transformations of the bodies-territories put into play in such scenarios, installed from the sociospatial damages. The understanding of the singularity of such sacrificial and necroterritorial dynamics is knotted in the extension of the body-territory as a scenario of violence and a place where spaces are reconfigured in clandestine burial fields. We conclude on the distinctions of institutional and economic strengthening to quantify and compensate the damages caused, as well as the impact that the economic flow produces on the socio-environmental scenarios and what it means in terms of crystallization of violence and the annulment of cultural devices anchored in the ritual forms of burial as something immeasurable that alters the meaning of life and death.