Edith Beltrán**
Unfortunately, we have reached the second anniversary of the forced disappearance of the 43 students from Ayotzinapa.
If you would like to know more about what is happening or why this is happening, we suggest the following books:
About the Drug War and its
relation to the Government(s)
Grillo, Ioan. El Narco: Inside Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency. New York: Boomsbury Press, 2012. Print.
El Narco studies the movement and industry that draws in hundreds of thousands, from bullet-riddled barrios to marijuana-covered mountains as part of a worldwide shadow economy that threatens Mexico’s democracy. El Narco draws the first definite portrait of Mexico’s drug cartels and how they have radically transformed in the last decade.
Call number: HV4997 .C68 2001HV5825 .H234 2015.
Chasing the Scream lays bare what we really have been chasing in our century of drug war—in our hunger for drugs, and in our attempt to destroy them. Three truths are revealed in this study, drugs, addiction, and the drug war are not what we think they are, and there are very different motives to the ones that have been portrayed in the media. Hari relies on personal stories of people around the world.
Call number: HV5840 M4 W37 2012.
Capitalizing on weakened public institutions, widespread unemployment, a state of lawlessness and the strengthening of links between Mexican and Colombian drug cartels, drug trafficking in the country has flourished during the post-1982 neoliberal era. In fact, it has become one of Mexico’s biggest source of revenue, as well as its most violent. Watt and Zepeda throw new light on the situation, contending that the ‘war on drugs’ in Mexico is in fact the pretext for a US-backed strategy to bolster unpopular neoliberal policies, a weak yet authoritarian government and a radically unfair status quo. (Source: Zed Books)
About the Teacher Training Schools and Guerrilla Movements in Guerrero, Mexico
Call number: F1235 A84 2014.
This is the first book in English to chronicle both the history of campesino revolutionary movements and the history of state terror employed by the Mexican government against rural civilians during the 1960s and 70s. It uses previously classified spy reports, intelligence reports, and military documents.
Call number: F1236 .C47 2012.
This book focuses on Mexico’s Dirty War, where thousands of leftists, students, intellectuals, social workers, campesinos, labor leaders, and civilians were harassed, arrested, tortured, and/or disappeared. The book presents narratives of particular armed revolutionary movements as well as thematic essays on gender, human rights, culture, student radicalism, the Cold War, and the international impact of this state-sponsored terrorism.
Children’s books and Graphic Novels Created to Help Explain What is Happening
Herrera, Yuri. Los ojos de Lía. México: Sexto Piso, 2012. Print.
Call number: PQ7298.418 E7986 O36 2012.
The main topic of this children’s book is how to deal with the violence that children deal with every day. In Spanish.
Olmos, Gabriela. Soñé… Canto sobre la violencia. Mexico City: Artes de México, 2013. Print.
This children’s books focuses on children’s dreams, where guns fire butterflies, bombs erupt in laughter, and where danger can be cut with scissors and turned into confetti (featured). In Spanish.
A small group of human rights activists, exemplified by the Chihuahua lawyer and organizer Lucha Castro, works to identify killers and their official enablers.
This graphic novel renders the stories of families ripped apart by disappearances and murders, and the advocacy, protests, and investigations of ordinary citizens who turned their grief into resistance.
About Ayotzinapa:
Ayotzinapa: Forced Disappearances. Madison: Pensaré Cartonera/Axolote, 2015. Print.
Call number: CA16662y.
This bilingual edition recollects the voices of some of the survivors of the Ayotzinapa disappearances and the voices of the people of some of the marches of protest.
Report released on September 6th, 2015, by a group of experts from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights is the result of a six-month forensic investigation. It discredits the findings provided by the Mexican Attorney General’s Office. Among its findings, it mentions a line of investigation that was never considered by the government: the trafficking of heroin and cocaine out of the state of Guerrero. This could explain the extreme violence with which the authorities and the local drug gang behaved during the attack against the Ayotzinapa students. In Spanish.
You can find most of these books at Memorial Library at University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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