Introduction

Moving on from the photojournalistic and photodocumentary attempts to document the brutality and senselessness of the conflict, this chapter takes a closer look at the representation of the war's victims. After four straight years of escalating numbers of murders, disappearances, kidnapping and general insecurity, 2011 marked the emergence of one of this period's most influential protest movements: the Movimiento por la paz con justicia y dignidad / the movement for peace with justice and dignity.

The movement was started in April 2011 by Mexican poet Javier Sicilia following the murder of his son, Juan Francisco Sicilia Ortega, and six others, all of whom fell victim to the drug-related violence afflicting Mexico at this time. The movement's popularity and the outrage and despair of its participants make clear that the levels of brutality and precarity reached by 2011 constituted a tipping point for Mexican society. Fuelled by the reputation of the movement's founder and figurehead, Javier Sicilia, the movement for peace gained international media recognition including a number of ‘made for TV’ documentary films such as Luisa Riley's Javier Sicilia en la soledad del otro (2013) and Katie Galloway and Kelly Duane de la Vega's El poeta (2015).

While Sicilia played a crucial role in helping to bring together those affected to protest the war, it is the representation of the struggle and experience of the families/survivors that will form the focus of this chapter. For this reason, this chapter looks at two award-winning representations: Pablo Orta's El hijo del poeta (2012) / The poet's son, a five-minute-and-seventeen-second short film about loss and the search for peace, alongside Mónica González's multimedia photoseries Geografía del dolor (2011) / Geography of pain, which attempts to depict the human absences created in Mexicans’ lives as a result of escalating violence. Both of these visual texts take loss and absence as their subject matter and explore individual responses to drug-war violence. These works present the effects of the war on a microcosmic scale in both real and imagined narratives, providing insight into the socio-historical climate in which they were produced. Like the other visual works interpreted in this book, Orta's short and González's photographs reveal the pervasive and debilitating effects of widespread violence on society.