Memorial in Mexico City Honors Drug War Dead, and Spurs a Debate Randal Archibold - The New York Times
go to original January 24, 2013

A series of rusted metal slabs amid reflecting pools in a corner of Mexico City’s biggest park, the memorial now stands as an accidental metaphor. (Josh Haner/The New York Times)

MEXICO CITY — Reeling from a drug war that has killed tens of thousands and a boom in violent crime in general, Mexico has built a memorial to victims of violence. But like a crime scene still under investigation, it sits off limits behind white tarp, wrapped in questions and uncertainty.

A series of rusted metal slabs amid reflecting pools in a corner of Mexico City’s biggest park, the memorial now stands as an accidental metaphor for the fog and doubts that swirl around the country’s layered debates on violence and victimhood.

Rushed to completion by President Felipe Calderón, whose six-year term was overwhelmed by the explosion of violence, the site has not yet publicly opened. On Nov. 30, in Mr. Calderón’s last 90 minutes in office, his administration sent a short e-mail to reporters announcing that the memorial was complete and in the hands of the civic groups that had called for it.

But in fact the transfer of the military-owned site has been mired in bureaucratic delays, and there remains disagreement over who the victims are — particularly in the bloody war against drug cartels and other organized crime that has consumed the country.

“We are fighting a war against an enemy we don’t know,” said Viridiana Rios, a Mexican researcher at Harvard University and former adviser to the Interior Ministry who is studying drug war deaths. “We need to answer to the public. There are claims many of the victims are innocent. I would like to know if that is the case.”

Few debates in the country are as divisive or politically charged as that over the storm of violence in recent years, with mass shootings and bodies hung from bridges, evidently the work of cartels, but also other killings, violent robberies, kidnappings and extortion that may or may not be the work of organized crime.

A year ago, Mr. Calderón’s government released its last count of presumed drug-war dead — 47,515 since the end of 2006 — and then refused to release any further data, with his aides saying later that the count, dependent in part on reporting from state agencies, was not precise.

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