Digital Storytelling and the Dispute over Representation in the Ayotzinapa Case

• Published date: 01 May 2018
• Author: María Concepción Castillo-González,María Elena Meneses
• Date: 01 May 2018
• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X18760301
• Subject Matter: Articles

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 220, Vol. 45 No. 3, May 2018, 266–283

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X18760301

© 2018 Latin American Perspectives

266

Digital Storytelling and the Dispute over Representation in

the Ayotzinapa Case

by

María Elena Meneses and María Concepción Castillo-González

Translated by

Margot Olavarria

Comparison of the narratives of civil society and the federal government on YouTube

and Twitter in the case of the disappearance of 43 students in Ayotzinapa, Mexico, allows

the identification of the codes of representation being disputed in this emblematic case of

violation of fundamental rights. Digital storytelling that goes viral and across media offers

the possibility of organizing protest in the offline world. Its reflective attributes favor the

visibility of injustice and permanence on the local and global agenda and in some cases exert

pressure on social actors and authorities to establish mechanisms to resolve the conflict.

La comparación de las narrativas sobre la sociedad civil y el gobierno federal en YouTube

y en Twitter en el caso de la desaparición de los 43 estudiantes en Ayotzinapa, Mexico, nos

permite identificar los códigos de representación en disputa en este caso emblemático de

violación de los derechos humanos. Los relatos digitales que se vuelven virales y pasan a

otros medios ofrecen la posibilidad de organizar la protesta en el mundo fuera de la Red.

Su capacidad de reflejar ayuda a visibilizar la injusticia, manteniéndola como tema impor-

tante en las agendas locales y globales, y en algunos casos también ayuda a ejercer presión

sobre los agentes sociales y las autoridades para establecer mecanismos que puedan resolver

los conflictos.

Keywords: Transmedia storytelling, Ayotzinapa, YouTube, Twitter, Representations

When the September 27, 2014, murder of six people and the disappearance

of 43 students in the state of Guerrero became known, the speeches and images

that began to circulate were not limited to the traditional media. The disap-

peared students were from the Escuela Normal de Ayotzinapa, a teacher-train-

ing school in the most violent state of Mexico and also one of the country’s

poorest: 65.2 percent of the population lives in poverty and 24.5 percent in

extreme poverty (CONEVAL, 2014). The magnitude of the tragedy makes it

necessary to understand this context of exclusion and the history of the school’s

social struggle and the spread of organized crime in the region.

Rural normal schools in Mexico were created in the 1920s to combat extreme

poverty through the training of teachers from marginalized communities. They

acquired a social focus during the administration of President Lázaro Cárdenas

María Elena Meneses is a professor and researcher in the humanities and education faculty of

Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico City Campus. María Concepción Castillo-González is a Ph.D.

student in humanities at that institution. Margot Olavarria is a translator living in New York City.

760301LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X18760301Latin American PerspectivesMeneses and Castillo / Digital Storytelling and the Ayotzinapa Case

research-article2018

Meneses and Castillo-González / DIGITAL STORYTELLING AND THE AYOTZINAPA CASE 267

(1934–1940), which promoted an agrarian-social educational policy (Coll, 2015).

With the establishment of the neoliberal economic model in Mexico in the

1990s, they stopped receiving support and began to disappear. The Ayotzinapa

normal school has been strongly associated with resistance through its training

of social activists and their repression by the state. “Today, in the middle of the

twenty-first century, the cruelty of the Mexican state against the rural normal

schools persists with the same force; there is no state government that has not

worked to achieve their disappearance through all kinds of measures” (Coll,

2015: 84).

The confrontation with the authorities that is part of the Ayotzinapa normal

school’s history has become more complex with the recent spread of organized

crime in the area. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime

(Oficina de las Naciones Unidas contra las Drogas y el Delito, 2016), Guerrero

is one of the main opium producers in Mexico, and illegal businesses there are

a source of economic sustainability and of a complex network of complicity

with the local authorities (Maldonado, 2015). This situation helps to explain the

impunity with which murders and disappearances occur.

One of the hypotheses of the Group of Independent Experts of the Inter-

American Commission of Human Rights about the disappearance of the 43

students points to drug trafficking—Iguala to Chicago, known as “the heroin

route”—as a possible cause of the tragedy. If the students, who usually took a

bus to commute to their different activities, had unknowingly taken a vehicle

loaded with narcotics, this could explain the indiscriminate attack, possibly

perpetrated by the Federal Police, that they met with (GIEI, 2015). The govern-

ment, in its account of the facts, also pointed to organized crime but attempted

to refute any intervention by the federal forces. According to its version, local

police turned the students over to drug traffickers, who then murdered and

burned them in a local dump, presumably because of confusion linked to a ter-

ritorial dispute between the criminal gangs known as the Guerreros Unidos

and the Rojos (Gobierno de la Republica, 2014e). While the facts are still in

dispute,1 what is certain is that the city of Iguala, in which Ayotzinapa is located,

is a drug-trafficking center (GIEI, 2015: 321). It is therefore characterized by a

circle of violence and government complicity confirming Galtung’s (2004) sug-

gestion that visible cruelty is only the tip of the iceberg of structural and cul-

tural violence.

LOCAL TRAGEDY, GLOBAL INDIGNATION

The Ayotzinapa case provoked national and international indignation.

Mainly through the digital ecosystem, society was informed and protests were

organized. In just three months there were 55 protests throughout the country,

a figure that at the time represented more than 40 percent of the citizen mobili-

zations during the Peña Nieto administration (Parametria, 2014). For a better

understanding of the dispute over the Ayotzinapa narratives of the federal gov-

ernment and civil society, respectively, we have analyzed the two actors’ trans-

media storytelling (Couldry, 2012) on YouTube and Twitter. The Ayotzinapa

case generated a vast corpus of books, poems, performances, and songs. In