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This volume presents an interdisciplinary analysis of the practice of disappearances in Mexico, from the period of the so-called 'dirty war' to the current crisis of disappearances associated with the country's 'war on drugs', during which more than 80,000 people have disappeared. The volume brings together contributions by distinguished scholars from Mexico, Argentina and Europe, who focus their chapters on four broad axes of enquiry. In Part I, chapters examine the phenomenon of disappearances in its historical and present-day forms, and the struggles for memory around the disappeared in Mexico with reference to Argentina. Part II addresses the political dimensions of disappearances, focusing on the specificities that this practice acquires in the context of the counterinsurgency struggle of the 1970s and the so-called 'war on drugs'. The third section situates the issue within the framework of human rights law by examining the conceptual and legal aspects of disappearances. The final chapters explore the social movement of the relatives of the disappeared, showing how their search for disappeared loved ones involves bodily and affective experiences as well as knowledge production. The volume thus aims to further our understanding of the crisis of disappearances in Mexico without, however, losing sight of the historic origins of the phenomenon.

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In this article, we contrast the state-sponsored memory site Memorial a las Víctimas de la Violencia en México with the citizen memorial performed by the Iniciativa Bordando por la paz y la memoria: una víctima, un pañuelo on 1 December 2012. We argue that whereas the Memorial’s solidity, permanence, and strength embody the Mexican federal government’s insistence on denying the state’s responsibility for human rights abuses perpetrated within the framework of the so-called ‘war on drugs’, the flexibility and fragility of the 1 December citizen memorial and its dismantling during the riots on the same day attest to the performativity and contingency of memory-making processes. Furthermore, we claim that the break-up of the embroidery network that took place after 1 December shows that counter-memories are also arenas of dissent, insofar as debates on how to remember remain open and susceptible to conflicting views.

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