María Bacilio | Anarchic Justice: Responding to the "Enforced Disappearance Apparatus" in Mexico

Since at least the 1950s, Mexico has endured the systematic practice of enforced disappearance. During the second half of the twentieth century, communist guerrillas groups constituted the first generation of victims. From the 1990s to the present, however, women (such as workers in Ciudad Juárez), Mexican citizens, and migrants have formed a second generation of victims. The persistence and devastating consequences of this practice—today reflected in more than 130,000 forcibly disappeared persons—compel us to ask how Mexico arrived at this situation and why enforced disappearance has become the predominant form of violence in the country. In this lecture, we will argue, drawing on a field-philosophy approach to testimonial accounts, that only by understanding enforced disappearance as a power apparatus can we fully apprehend the legal-political structure underlying Mexico’s dramatic situation. This perspective also enables us to show why the political and ethical organization of the mothers of the first and second generations of victims—known respectively as the Doñas (“the ladies”) and the Buscadoras (“the searchers”)—could only give rise to what we term anarchic justice.

ABOUT OUR GUEST SPEAKER

María Bacilio (Ph.D. École Normale Supérieure de Paris) is a philosopher and writer whose research focuses on violence, biopolitics, power, civil war, ontological anarchy, insurrection, justice and memory with a special focus on Mexico and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Her book project provisionally titled From Bare Life to The Demand for Anarchic Justice: Enforced Disappearance in Mexico proposes a philosophical approach to enforced disappearance in Mexico (since the counterinsurgency until nowadays) and suggests that the maternal resistance that has appeared to face this power apparatus could be understood as a new paradigm of justice, namely, anarchic justice. Her research has received support from the Académie Française, the Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst (DAAD), the Centro de Estudios Mexicanos y Centroamericanos, the Graduate Program Translitterae, among others. She has been visiting lecturer in the Philosophy Department at the École Normale Supérieure de Paris and at the Cycle Pluridisciplinaire d’Études Supérieures de Paris. In 2017, she was awarded the Gustavo Baz Prada Medal from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México after her internship in a women’s psychiatric prison in Mexico City.

DISCUSSANT

Susana Draper, Professor of Comparative Literature, Princeton University
 

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Program in Latin American Studies | View More Events
Co-hosted with: Princeton Institute for International & Regional Studies

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