Join CMS Director Claudio Lomnitz and Sociologist Fernando Escalante in a talk about what it is to talk about 'violence' in Mexico after the "Ayotzinapa Case."
This event is part of the Fall 2020 Violence and New Mores Workshop series. Registration is currently closed. However, this event will be broadcasted live on The Center for Mexican Studies' Facebook page: facebook.com/cmscolumbia.
Ayotzinapa: The events of the night of September 26th, 2014.
The night of September 26th, 2014, was one of the most violent nights in the community of Iguala, Guerrero. Not only did the most outrageous violent events cause the death of several people, but they also led to the forced disappearance of 43 students of the local rural Teachers' College, Ayotzinapa. Such events became the crime scene, wherein the local police and members of an organized crime cartel participated.
Upon this scene, the federal government began an investigation. However, the investigation quickly ignited the idea that this tragedy was somehow echoed the late Tlatelolco Massacre, which happened on October 2nd,1968, in Mexico City.
With that respect, Sociologist Fernando Escalante has been long interested in the Ayotzinapa's case and focused his works on the small details that surround the night of September 26th, 2014. His interpretation of the this night also led him to focus his research on the symbolic interpretation that the Mexican press and reports of experts in the matter gave to this event, as well as the relevance that street expressions have in building a suspicious take that questions the accuracy of the reports published by the State.
Escalante argues that this interpretation of how the State presents information to the public, in general, sheds light on how the Mexican people comprehend the country's social and historical 'reality.' Having based his research on the Marshall Sahlins' model, Escalante writes and talks about the mechanisms that allowed the interpretation of the case of Ayotzinapa and the Massacre of Tlatelolco to be based on a wrongful and distorted description of how these events came to be.
