Telling Images: Forced Disappearance and Territorial Displacement in Recent Mexican and Colombian Documentary Graphic Novels

Abstract

Territorial displacements, stolen lands, repression, targeted assassinations, and forced disappearances among rural communities in Mexico and Colombia are constant threats that generate complex and urgent questions on the fragile conditions in which the residents of these communities live their day-to-day lives. In this article, I examine recent graphic novels that take an ethical stand to discuss local events in their connections to drug-trafficking, para-State, and other contemporary forms of violence. While there are divergent reasons, conditions and challenges for the creation, distribution, and reception of these graphic novels in such contexts, their authors use similar semiotic and literary mechanisms to imagine and represent these types of violence, and aim to include voices usually omitted, and/or displaced in the narration of these conflicts. I argue that it is precisely due to these inclusions that the role of these works in the politics of narrative and memory of armed conflicts in these Latin American countries is essential for the recognition of new human geographies and cartographies generated by the forced disappearance and uprooting of these communities using violence.