Should art be socially / politically engaged? Or can art escape this and only play a cathartic role ? Or is all art political by definition ?
The Murder of Nadia Vera (1983-2015)
by Lucia Naser
On 31 July 2015 five people were found tortured and murdered in an apartment in Mexico City: Alejandra Negrete, Nadia Vera, Yesenia Quiroz, Mile Virginia Martín, and Rubén Espinoza. Two came from Veracruz, one was a journalist and one was an activist—a very important member of the dance community in Mexico. Nadia Vera.
Since 2007, around 160,000 people have been murdered in Mexico, and between 26,000 and 40,000 have been disappeared. A total of around 200,000 people, gone. Ninety percent of these crimes are unpunished. Organized crime has become uncontrollable not only because of the weakness of the state, but because the government itself is infiltrated to its core. Cartels have moved from “only” trafficking drugs, to every part of the spectrum of crime: from illegal mining to human trafficking and slavery, to extorting local businesses, no matter how small. Death has become the cheapest way to make business: either to silence or to retire someone now useless. “Necropolitics,” as Achille Mbembe has called it (http://www.dartmouth.edu/~lhc/docs/achillembembe.pdf).
One of the worst places is the state of Veracruz, whose current Governor, Javier Duarte, has been linked multiple times to the criminal group Los Zetas, famous for its ruthlessness. According to the human rights group Article 19, Veracruz is particularly dangerous for journalists. Since Duarte took office in 2011, 19 journalists have been killed—the highest number in Latin America.
Nadia Dominique Vera Pérez was well known to many of us. She was our colleague, a woman who worked as a producer and cultural promoter. She produced the Cuatro X Cuatro International Dance Festival—crucial for the promotion and development of Mexican dance—in Xalapa, Veracruz. She also produced the Oftálmica Film Festival in the same city. At the time of her murder, she was organizing the Mexican tour of the Spanish musician Albert Plá.
As an anthropologist, Vera strongly believed in the potential of the arts to create social transformation. Nadia was very active on behalf of human rights and freedom of expression; she was against the injustices of an oppressor government and in solidarity with the victims, the dead, and the disappeared of our country. More than once, Nadia expressed her fear: she felt watched, marked. More than once she was threatened because of her political activism in Veracruz.
In a letter written and signed by hundreds of institutions, independent companies and groups, and artists the Mexican art community expressed its grief and voiced its condemnation of the multiple murders, torture, and rape of Alejandra, Nadia, Yesenia, Mile, and Rubén in an apartment in central Mexico City on 31 July 2015:
This is not an isolated case, and it illustrates the escalation of violence across the country. The mathematics of terror under which we live add more victims everyday to the already thousands. People are murdered (close to 160,000 since 2007), disappeared (between 26,000 and 40,000), raped, and abused in all kinds of horrifying ways without consequence. There is a pact of impunity signed by those who hold our government hostage to their interests. Neoliberalism has come to its purest form of cruelty in a situation like this. Bodies only matter as assets. The outrage we feel is very strong, and the strategies to face the facts are not yet known. (https://ninadianinadie.wordpress.com/english/)
I met Vera and her brothers Shanti and Sendic (named after the Uruguayan political and revolutionary leader Raúl Sendic) virtually in 2013 through their work as producers of the Cuatro X Cuatro International Festival. These three, with great effort, led the festival for nine years. In 2015, I arrived in Xalapa in May just as the festival was stripped of almost all the (already minimal) government support it had. This was a sign of the hostility of the local government. Because a big part of the program had to be canceled, we decided to organize personal exchanges and discussions focused on the topic of political resistance and physical exposure to violence.
Once in Xalapa and in the company of Vera and a few other local artists, on 15 May I tweeted: “While I co-coordinate a workshop on body, exposure, and violence, it’s me who has everything to learn” and then “All fine, but there are snipers on the rooftops and the Army walks through the streets with covered faces.” Coming from Uruguay, a country where democracy—understood as guaranteed fundamental rights—is relatively settled (although we did experience the violence of military-state terror for 30 years) the strongest hypothesis I came up with regarding the use of masks by the Mexican police was that in Mexico the same agents who are supposed to take care of your security are those who may cause your death. Most people need to deny the evidence of the truth of this. Terror pushes people to deny what they see every day.
I had been to some Mexican cities with high levels of violence before, like Morelia or San Luis Potosí, but I had never felt as much fear of undercover surveillance as I did in Xalapa. I never saw my colleagues so distressed, so cautious, so scared.
Vera was one of the most frightened—despite her uninhibited, rebellious, explosive personality. She warned us all the time not to do this or that. Never light a joint in the street. Never stare at a cop. Indoors she was the opposite: extremely generous and expressive. Though she was born in Chiapas, she had lived in Xalapa for several years, before moving recently to Mexico City. The reason: to protect her life. She told us that she felt safer there, because, after all, in the City you were not going to end up lying in a ditch as happened in Veracruz.
Still, she told us of how badly the Xalapa police treated her. In 2012, she had been assaulted by the police during a demonstration of the #YoSoy132movement (http://www.alcalorpolitico.com/galerias/base.php…#). In October that same year, while she was demonstrating in remembrance of the 1968 student massacre in Mexico City, agents raided her home. Her friends recall that she joked: “My place was already such a mess, they had to clean up a little so that I noticed somebody had broken in” (Facebook post; name withheld). In November, female police officers dragged her down the street and beat her for expressing her disapproval of Duarte (http://plumaslibres.com.mx/2015/08/02/).
They threatened her life, as she herself testified straight to the camera in the documentary Veracruz, the Forgotten Mass Grave: “We hold Javier Duarte Ochoa, governor of the state of Veracruz, along with his entire cabinet, fully responsible for anything that may happen to all of us who are involved and organized in this movement: scholars, students, and the civil society in general. We want to be very clear: our security is the responsibility of the state, but instead, it is the state that is directly ordering the repression” (http://rompeviento.tv/RompevientoTv/?p=2031)
In spite of being extremely worried, Vera underestimated the danger. Maybe she thought that the police raid of her house satisfied their desire to scare her, or that, even though she was already marked by the police after being beaten and detained at demonstrations, something like this—being murdered—could not happen in the safety of her new neighborhood, la Colonia Narvarte, in the centrally located, middle-class section of Mexico City. A neighborhood filled with friends.
In Vera’s house and after being systematically threatened, censured, spied on, and persecuted, Rubén Espinosa was also murdered while trying to protect his life by auto-exiling himself from Veracruz (for more about Espinosa see the New Yorker [http://www.newyorker.com/…/who-killed-ruben-espinosa-and-na…], the New York Times [http://www.nytimes.com/…/the-murder-of-mexicos-free-press.h…], Animal Politico [http://www.animalpolitico.com/…/no-quiero-ser-el-numero-13…/], and Sinembargo.mx [http://www.sinembargo.mx/01-08-2015/1435603]). Espinosa was a photo-activist involved in many social movements. He was murdered because he had the courage and the need to face and denounce the crimes committed by and under Javier Duarte´s government.
Just as it was not by accident that Espinosa was staying in Vera’s house—they were friends and also colleagues in their activism—so it was not a random crime that they were tortured, raped, and murdered. Many connections link the Governor of Veracruz—whose police had detained Vera for carrying a sign that read, “Javier Duarte, we are watching you”—to the atrocity that occurred on 31 July in Nadia’s own home. It is commonly held that Espinoza had gone too far by showing on the cover of Proceso magazine Duarte wearing a police hat, a brutal expression in his eyes. The journalist Regina Martinez, also a correspondent for Proceso, had been murdered. Her partners accused the government of Veracruz, who responded by trying to criminalize her for her own death. Duarte declared, “She is to blame for being killed, she isolated herself and so no one could stop the attack, because she was alone in her place and without friends. Her journalistic work was important, but she lost track and she was killed for relating to people she shouldn’t have related to” (http://www.proceso.com.mx/?p=412068).
It is also known that in 2012 Espinoza denounced a police officer who harassed him during a student demonstration, warning Espinoza: “Stop taking pictures or you will end like Regina” (http://www.proceso.com.mx/?p=412068; see also BBC Mundo http://www.bbc.com/…/150803_mexico_asesinato_espinosa_mujer…).
Vera was not a guerrilla fighter. She was not a terrorist or a criminal. Her offense consisted in not giving in, in not shutting up in the face of the oppressing power that has ruled Mexico for years. Social and student movements remember her as the ever-present one in numerous of demonstrations and campaigns: against the rise in public transport prices, against the fraudulent electoral processes, against the disappearance of 43 students from Ayotzinapa. In September 2012 her fellow activists declared: “We were beaten, and three of us tortured and threatened by state police officers. With a gun to our heads we were forced to spout our last words. And once the terror had been planted in us, we were abandoned in a nearby supply center” (Listen to more testimonies about violent episodes of police and state repression http://plumaslibres.com.mx/…/activista-de-xalapa-y-egresad…/. See also the video recorded on 19 January 2015, in which Espinosa meets with authorities asking for safety guarantees for journalists in Veracruz showing that he was aware of the threat he was facing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-tlb0nEHEo&feature=share).
There is an important message sent to us from the Mexican art community. We must listen to it and pass it along:
We find it very important to spread knowledge of her work and life, to talk about her, to highlight her identity. To offer more than just her picture or the idea of her broken body. To at least name her ... to think of her and to emphasize the seriousness of these unacceptable events that have touched us so closely. (https://ninadianinadie.wordpress.com/english/)
In addition to being as bright a person as I’ve met in my life, Vera was a social anthropologist, a cultural promoter, an activist, ever outraged, ever a rebel. She was a sister, a daughter, a friend, a fighter, a lover, a comrade. A tiny body with a gigantic generosity, her death is not casual or trivial: it is political, and it needs to be understood and judged. For her sake as a person and for the sake of the causes she defended. For showing those who pretend everything is fine in Mexico that it is not. I don’t know, Nadia, how death is celebrated in your country, but we have to find a way to honor your life, your force for good. We can start by demanding justice until we run out of voice and ink.
Our Mexican brothers and sisters count on us to spread the word about what is happening. We must put an end to the state of terror and the terror of state in Mexico. We can begin by breaking the international silence about it.
by Lucia Naser
On 31 July 2015 five people were found tortured and murdered in an apartment in Mexico City: Alejandra Negrete, Nadia Vera, Yesenia Quiroz, Mile Virginia Martín, and Rubén Espinoza. Two came from Veracruz, one was a journalist and one was an activist—a very important member of the dance community in Mexico. Nadia Vera.
Since 2007, around 160,000 people have been murdered in Mexico, and between 26,000 and 40,000 have been disappeared. A total of around 200,000 people, gone. Ninety percent of these crimes are unpunished. Organized crime has become uncontrollable not only because of the weakness of the state, but because the government itself is infiltrated to its core. Cartels have moved from “only” trafficking drugs, to every part of the spectrum of crime: from illegal mining to human trafficking and slavery, to extorting local businesses, no matter how small. Death has become the cheapest way to make business: either to silence or to retire someone now useless. “Necropolitics,” as Achille Mbembe has called it (http://www.dartmouth.edu/~lhc/docs/achillembembe.pdf).
One of the worst places is the state of Veracruz, whose current Governor, Javier Duarte, has been linked multiple times to the criminal group Los Zetas, famous for its ruthlessness. According to the human rights group Article 19, Veracruz is particularly dangerous for journalists. Since Duarte took office in 2011, 19 journalists have been killed—the highest number in Latin America.
Nadia Dominique Vera Pérez was well known to many of us. She was our colleague, a woman who worked as a producer and cultural promoter. She produced the Cuatro X Cuatro International Dance Festival—crucial for the promotion and development of Mexican dance—in Xalapa, Veracruz. She also produced the Oftálmica Film Festival in the same city. At the time of her murder, she was organizing the Mexican tour of the Spanish musician Albert Plá.
As an anthropologist, Vera strongly believed in the potential of the arts to create social transformation. Nadia was very active on behalf of human rights and freedom of expression; she was against the injustices of an oppressor government and in solidarity with the victims, the dead, and the disappeared of our country. More than once, Nadia expressed her fear: she felt watched, marked. More than once she was threatened because of her political activism in Veracruz.
In a letter written and signed by hundreds of institutions, independent companies and groups, and artists the Mexican art community expressed its grief and voiced its condemnation of the multiple murders, torture, and rape of Alejandra, Nadia, Yesenia, Mile, and Rubén in an apartment in central Mexico City on 31 July 2015:
This is not an isolated case, and it illustrates the escalation of violence across the country. The mathematics of terror under which we live add more victims everyday to the already thousands. People are murdered (close to 160,000 since 2007), disappeared (between 26,000 and 40,000), raped, and abused in all kinds of horrifying ways without consequence. There is a pact of impunity signed by those who hold our government hostage to their interests. Neoliberalism has come to its purest form of cruelty in a situation like this. Bodies only matter as assets. The outrage we feel is very strong, and the strategies to face the facts are not yet known. (https://ninadianinadie.wordpress.com/english/)
I met Vera and her brothers Shanti and Sendic (named after the Uruguayan political and revolutionary leader Raúl Sendic) virtually in 2013 through their work as producers of the Cuatro X Cuatro International Festival. These three, with great effort, led the festival for nine years. In 2015, I arrived in Xalapa in May just as the festival was stripped of almost all the (already minimal) government support it had. This was a sign of the hostility of the local government. Because a big part of the program had to be canceled, we decided to organize personal exchanges and discussions focused on the topic of political resistance and physical exposure to violence.
Once in Xalapa and in the company of Vera and a few other local artists, on 15 May I tweeted: “While I co-coordinate a workshop on body, exposure, and violence, it’s me who has everything to learn” and then “All fine, but there are snipers on the rooftops and the Army walks through the streets with covered faces.” Coming from Uruguay, a country where democracy—understood as guaranteed fundamental rights—is relatively settled (although we did experience the violence of military-state terror for 30 years) the strongest hypothesis I came up with regarding the use of masks by the Mexican police was that in Mexico the same agents who are supposed to take care of your security are those who may cause your death. Most people need to deny the evidence of the truth of this. Terror pushes people to deny what they see every day.
I had been to some Mexican cities with high levels of violence before, like Morelia or San Luis Potosí, but I had never felt as much fear of undercover surveillance as I did in Xalapa. I never saw my colleagues so distressed, so cautious, so scared.
Vera was one of the most frightened—despite her uninhibited, rebellious, explosive personality. She warned us all the time not to do this or that. Never light a joint in the street. Never stare at a cop. Indoors she was the opposite: extremely generous and expressive. Though she was born in Chiapas, she had lived in Xalapa for several years, before moving recently to Mexico City. The reason: to protect her life. She told us that she felt safer there, because, after all, in the City you were not going to end up lying in a ditch as happened in Veracruz.
Still, she told us of how badly the Xalapa police treated her. In 2012, she had been assaulted by the police during a demonstration of the #YoSoy132movement (http://www.alcalorpolitico.com/galerias/base.php…#). In October that same year, while she was demonstrating in remembrance of the 1968 student massacre in Mexico City, agents raided her home. Her friends recall that she joked: “My place was already such a mess, they had to clean up a little so that I noticed somebody had broken in” (Facebook post; name withheld). In November, female police officers dragged her down the street and beat her for expressing her disapproval of Duarte (http://plumaslibres.com.mx/2015/08/02/).
They threatened her life, as she herself testified straight to the camera in the documentary Veracruz, the Forgotten Mass Grave: “We hold Javier Duarte Ochoa, governor of the state of Veracruz, along with his entire cabinet, fully responsible for anything that may happen to all of us who are involved and organized in this movement: scholars, students, and the civil society in general. We want to be very clear: our security is the responsibility of the state, but instead, it is the state that is directly ordering the repression” (http://rompeviento.tv/RompevientoTv/?p=2031)
In spite of being extremely worried, Vera underestimated the danger. Maybe she thought that the police raid of her house satisfied their desire to scare her, or that, even though she was already marked by the police after being beaten and detained at demonstrations, something like this—being murdered—could not happen in the safety of her new neighborhood, la Colonia Narvarte, in the centrally located, middle-class section of Mexico City. A neighborhood filled with friends.
In Vera’s house and after being systematically threatened, censured, spied on, and persecuted, Rubén Espinosa was also murdered while trying to protect his life by auto-exiling himself from Veracruz (for more about Espinosa see the New Yorker [http://www.newyorker.com/…/who-killed-ruben-espinosa-and-na…], the New York Times [http://www.nytimes.com/…/the-murder-of-mexicos-free-press.h…], Animal Politico [http://www.animalpolitico.com/…/no-quiero-ser-el-numero-13…/], and Sinembargo.mx [http://www.sinembargo.mx/01-08-2015/1435603]). Espinosa was a photo-activist involved in many social movements. He was murdered because he had the courage and the need to face and denounce the crimes committed by and under Javier Duarte´s government.
Just as it was not by accident that Espinosa was staying in Vera’s house—they were friends and also colleagues in their activism—so it was not a random crime that they were tortured, raped, and murdered. Many connections link the Governor of Veracruz—whose police had detained Vera for carrying a sign that read, “Javier Duarte, we are watching you”—to the atrocity that occurred on 31 July in Nadia’s own home. It is commonly held that Espinoza had gone too far by showing on the cover of Proceso magazine Duarte wearing a police hat, a brutal expression in his eyes. The journalist Regina Martinez, also a correspondent for Proceso, had been murdered. Her partners accused the government of Veracruz, who responded by trying to criminalize her for her own death. Duarte declared, “She is to blame for being killed, she isolated herself and so no one could stop the attack, because she was alone in her place and without friends. Her journalistic work was important, but she lost track and she was killed for relating to people she shouldn’t have related to” (http://www.proceso.com.mx/?p=412068).
It is also known that in 2012 Espinoza denounced a police officer who harassed him during a student demonstration, warning Espinoza: “Stop taking pictures or you will end like Regina” (http://www.proceso.com.mx/?p=412068; see also BBC Mundo http://www.bbc.com/…/150803_mexico_asesinato_espinosa_mujer…).
Vera was not a guerrilla fighter. She was not a terrorist or a criminal. Her offense consisted in not giving in, in not shutting up in the face of the oppressing power that has ruled Mexico for years. Social and student movements remember her as the ever-present one in numerous of demonstrations and campaigns: against the rise in public transport prices, against the fraudulent electoral processes, against the disappearance of 43 students from Ayotzinapa. In September 2012 her fellow activists declared: “We were beaten, and three of us tortured and threatened by state police officers. With a gun to our heads we were forced to spout our last words. And once the terror had been planted in us, we were abandoned in a nearby supply center” (Listen to more testimonies about violent episodes of police and state repression http://plumaslibres.com.mx/…/activista-de-xalapa-y-egresad…/. See also the video recorded on 19 January 2015, in which Espinosa meets with authorities asking for safety guarantees for journalists in Veracruz showing that he was aware of the threat he was facing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-tlb0nEHEo&feature=share).
There is an important message sent to us from the Mexican art community. We must listen to it and pass it along:
We find it very important to spread knowledge of her work and life, to talk about her, to highlight her identity. To offer more than just her picture or the idea of her broken body. To at least name her ... to think of her and to emphasize the seriousness of these unacceptable events that have touched us so closely. (https://ninadianinadie.wordpress.com/english/)
In addition to being as bright a person as I’ve met in my life, Vera was a social anthropologist, a cultural promoter, an activist, ever outraged, ever a rebel. She was a sister, a daughter, a friend, a fighter, a lover, a comrade. A tiny body with a gigantic generosity, her death is not casual or trivial: it is political, and it needs to be understood and judged. For her sake as a person and for the sake of the causes she defended. For showing those who pretend everything is fine in Mexico that it is not. I don’t know, Nadia, how death is celebrated in your country, but we have to find a way to honor your life, your force for good. We can start by demanding justice until we run out of voice and ink.
Our Mexican brothers and sisters count on us to spread the word about what is happening. We must put an end to the state of terror and the terror of state in Mexico. We can begin by breaking the international silence about it.