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Karen Moe
a book bubble about
Victim
Biographies & Memoirs
Author Insight
Some Things I've Learned in Mexico
Over the next few weeks, in honour of Mexico and of International Women’s Day, I will be sharing excerpts from some of the things I have learned in Mexico that, in terms of my understanding of systemic violence on a global scale, enriched my book. This focus of Victim that feature Mexico is because on March 8th, 2023 (International Women’s Day), I will be presenting my book at UNAM in Mexico City, the most important university in the country. And, to make it even more exciting, on March 10th, I will be presenting Victim at the Instituto Tecnológico de Oaxaca, the largest public university in the state of Oaxaca. Both of these presentations are so special to me. As a privileged white woman from a so-called First World country, in a country where there are an estimated 12-16 femicides per day and a rape every 2 seconds, it sometimes feels like my personal stories of the sexual violence are hardly relevant. When I was on my Trauma & Triumph Tour across Canada in the fall of 2022, I learned about the horrors of sexual violence that are happening in remote Indigenous communities in my country. I wrote in my journal: “Even though I have been brutalized, I know nothing.” However, regardless of the level of violence, as I say in Victim: all of “[o]ur scarred, vibrant beings are memorials”—sites of vigilance, resistance, and revolution from a culture built with exploitation.
Book Excerpt
Victim
On September 26, 2014, forty-three student teachers from Ayotzinapa, Guerrero, Mexico, disappeared. They were young Indigenous men and were training to teach rural, disenfranchised youth like themselves. Like most incidents in Mexico, with the ins and outs of overt corruption composed of a sticky web of the military, the police, the government, and the cartels, the story is a complicated one and, to this day, over five years later, no one really knows exactly what happened. Except for the fact that the forty-three young men are dead. And disappeared. Even their deaths have vanished.
I moved to Mexico in 2015. I moved there to witness, make art and write about a society that endures violence on a level unimaginable in Canada and the US. I moved here to experience art with guts. Blood. Truth. In 2016, there were nearly 23,000 intentional homicides—the second-highest murder rate in the world, next to war-torn Syria. In 2017, there were 29,168. In 2018, it climbed again to 33,341.1
These murders are rarely of foreigners; they are Mexican people being murdered at such a rate, predominantly because of the war on drugs and the competition to get those drugs to the drug-addicted people in the US and Canada. Ironically, Mexico is blamed for the violence. In one of his ‘Mexico will pay for the wall’ tweets, Donald Trump proclaimed that Mexico could “stop all of this illegal trade if they wanted to immediately.” He continued on in his usual reductionist fashion: “we get the drugs, and they get the cash.”2 He left out the massacre of Mexicans in the process of getting the drugs to Americans.
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