In Mexico, a New Vocabulary for Grief and Justice

Most Murders in the Country Go Uninvestigated. Activists and Writers Are Coming Together to Demand Accountability

“Almost everyone lost someone during the war,” writes Cristina Rivera Garza in The Restless Dead: Necrowriting and Disappropriation.  

In 2006, Mexican president Felipe Calderón initiated the country’s War on Drugs, which she describes as “a military crackdown on the brutal narcotrafficking gangs that had presumably maintained pacts of stability with previous regimes.” Its toll is estimated to be 360,000 homicides and more than 60,000 disappeared. Rivera Garza refers to it not as the drug war but the guerra calderonista—the Calderón war.

Violence has changed not …