Ayotzinapa 43: The Political Aesthetics of Drone Protest Graffiti

Mexico has a unique history of deploying man-hunting drones in its militarized arsenal of security patrols to control narco traffickers, bandas criminales and dissident populations. Considered to be the drone capital of Latin America with one of the first Drone Academies to teach the myriad aspects of drone piloting, Mexico is at the forefront of drone surveillance technology. It is also at the vanguard of Drone Art Performance. Angered by what is perceived as militarized surveillance warfare and a violent culture of corruption that operates with impunity, Mexican phygital graffiti artists and activists have responded in collective protest to these post-panopticon tactics with its own counter-hegemonic warfare—Droncita, Mexico’s first grafitera drone. Droncita is an emerging art form that combines the ethical and subversive aesthetics of graffiti street art to physical spaces high above the ground to offer new models of spectatorship, testimony, participation, and political agency. First deployed after the disappearance of 43 students from Ayotzinapa teacher training college, Droncita represents a discursive space to revision art and humanity. This qualitative research demonstrates how surveillance technologies have been refocused and redeployed as an aesthetic genre of political activism and performance to challenge dominant discourses on militarized power.