INTRODUCTION TAKE REFUGE: HORROR, THE STATE, AND SOCIAL SUFFERING IN TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY MEXICO On September 14, 2011, we awoke again to the image of two bodies hanging from a bridge. One man, one woman. He, tied by the hands. She, by the wrists and ankles. Just like so many other, similar occurrences, and as noted in newspaper articles with a certain amount of trepidation, the bodies showed signs of torture. Entrails erupted from the woman''s abdomen, opened in three different places. It is difficult, of course, to write about these things. Moreover, acts like this are carried out so that we are rendered speechless.

Their ultimate objective is to cause a total paralysis from horror--an offense that is committed not only against human life but also, above all, against the human condition. In Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence (trans. William McCuaig)--an indispensable book for thinking through this reality, as understanding it is barely possible--Adriana Cavarero reminds us that terror emerges when the body trembles and flees in order to survive. The terrorized fear and, upon finding themselves within the grasp of dread, try to escape by fleeing. Horror, the Latin root of which leads us to the verb horreo, is far beyond the fear that so frequently alerts us to danger or threatens to transcend it. Confronted with Medusa''s head, which is a body that has been rent beyond a recognizable human form, the horrified open their mouths and, incapable of uttering a single word, incapable of articulating the disarticulation that fills their gaze, mouth wordlessly. Horror is intrinsically linked to repugnance, Cavarero argues. Stripped of their agency by stupefaction and immobility, frozen in a scene of eternal marble statues, the horrified stare and, even though they stare fixedly or perhaps precisely because they stare fixedly, they cannot do anything.

More than vulnerable--a condition we all share--they are defenseless. More than fragile, they are helpless. As such, horror is, above all, a spectacle--the most extreme spectacle of power. What we Mexicans at the beginning of the twenty-first century have been forced to witness--on the streets, on pedestrian bridges, on television, or in newspapers--is, without a doubt, one of the most chilling spectacles of contemporary horror. Bodies sliced open from end to end, chopped into unrecognizable pieces, left on the streets. Bodies extracted in a state of putrefaction from hundreds upon hundreds of mass graves. Bodies thrown from pick-up trucks onto crowded avenues. Bodies burned in enormous pyres.

Bodies without hands or without ears or without noses. Disappeared bodies, unable to claim their suitcases in the bus stations where their belongings have arrived. Persecuted bodies, bodies without air, bodies without a voice. This is horror in its essence. This is the current version of a kind of modern horror that has also shown its most atrocious face in Armenia, in Auschwitz, in Kosovo. In the case of Mexico at the end of the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-first, horror is intimately tied to a misnamed war--the military conflict initiated by Felipe Calderón in 2006 as he tried to legitimize a dubious election victory. The Mexican Drug War or the War Against the Narco has been from its very beginning a War Against the Mexican People. As such, this conflagration is deeply linked to the neoliberal State rollbacks on welfare and social rights granted by the 1917 Mexican Constitution, and it is linked, too, to the surge of a ferocious group of global capitalists generically known as Narcos.

It is a horror created by a State that, in full submission to the economic interests of globalization and colonialism, has done nothing more than repeat time and again that famous gesture of the betrayer: a metaphorical washing of the hands. That''s how, since the period following the Salinas reforms in 1989, while still violating central agreements that Mexican society had achieved after more than a decade of fighting in the era of the 1910 Mexican Revolution, the neoliberal Mexican State has turned its back on its obligations and on its responsibilities, surrendering before the unrelenting logic, the lethal logic of maximum profit. It is this State, which rescinds its responsibility for the care of the bodies of its constituents, that I call the Heartless State in these essays. State is a verb, not a noun; State, like capital, is a relationship. When in a unilateral movement the Mexican State, administered by an enthusiastic generation of Ivy-League educated technocrats convinced of the supremacy of profit above life, withdrew protection and care for the bodies of its citizens, the open, in Giorgio Agamben''s terms, was produced. Right there, on that atrocious stage, the bodies of its citizens, even more than vulnerable--which is a regular state of the human condition--became helpless--which is a circumstance artificially generated by the unilateral forms of violence produced by torture. In its indifference and neglect, in its instrumental notion of the political and even the public, the Heartless State thus produces the eviscerated body: those chunks of torsos, those legs, and those feet, that interior that becomes exterior, hanging. In a lucid essay about what is wrong with today''s world, humanist Tony Judt compares the level of aggression and neglect that citizens suffer in totalitarian societies to societies where State insufficiencies allow impunity and violence.

The latter, without a doubt, is the case in Mexico. On the day that the President of the so-called democratic transition, Vicente Fox (2000-2006), uttered on air, in a cynical tone that is still chilling, the phrase "why should I care?" when participating in a dispute involving TV stations but that easily reflected his ideas about social welfare as well as the role of the State in social and cultural life, syntactic and contextual foundations were set for our particular form of horrorism. That group of ferocious businessmen of the first postmodern globalization (if we keep in mind that, as Eduardo Grüner argued in El fin de las pequeñas historias ("The End of Little Narratives"), the great modern globalization began in 1492) have conspired--with organic if not filial speed--to form a Pontius Pilates State built on the logic of maximum profit. A product in some cases of the inequalities and hierarchies of a State in evident regression, the Narco strategically and successfully worked for decades to validate itself as an essential entity. The corridos and narco-novels of this early period often presented a sympathetic portrait of men who grew up in poverty only to become Robin Hood types that gave to their communities what the state was not able to or not interested in providing. Newspaper articles and the media also contributed to a social imagery of narcos as the B-side of the state when, as Oswaldo Zavala has argued in Los cartels no existen ("The Cartels Do Not Exist"), they were so intrinsically enmeshed with the state machinery as to become one with it. Government corruption as much as the atrocious executions that have become the Narco''s signature have demonstrated what was easy to disguise from the beginning: drug traffickers are businessmen prepared to go as far as necessary--which frequently means that space where the human condition ends--in order to ensure and, above all, increase their profit. We Mexicans have been forced to be witness to the reduction of the body to its most basic form as a producer of capital through both the maquilas and other transnational companies during the final third of the twentieth century.

The bare body has emerged, too, when the narcos and the state, when the narco-state, has used the unilateral and spectacular violence of torture against the population. Mouths gaping, hair standing erect over goose bumps, cold as statues, truly paralyzed, many of us have done nothing more than what you do when faced with horror: part your lips and mouth wordlessly. As Cavarero recalls, even Primo Levi argued that the important witnesses, those that have returned alive from an encounter with horror, are usually incapable of articulating their experience of the events. I insist: this is horror and nothing but horror. That is why it exits. This is its very root. On the other end of the spectrum, however, is suffering--there are multiple ways in which pain allows us to articulate an inexpressible experience as an intrinsic criticism against the sources that made it possible in the first place. When everything falls silent, when the gravity of the facts far surpasses our understanding and even our imagination, then it is there, ready, open, stammering, injured, babbling: the language of pain, the pain we share with others.

And this is the importance of suffering. The political need to express how you cause me pain, to say "I grieve with you," and to tell you my story, which is yours because, from the singular--though generalized--perspective of we who suffer, you are my country. Hence the aesthetic urgency of saying, in the most basic and also the most disjointed language possible, this hurts me. Because Edmond Jabès was right when he critiqued Adorno''s dictum: it isn''t that after horror we should not or cannot write poetry. It''s that, while we are integral witnesses to horror, we must write poetry differently. Can writing demand the restitution of a State with heart, like the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who confronted the atrocities of the military dictatorship in Argentina, and like the Arpillera movement in Chile, which tried to challenge Pinochet''s horror, and like the relatives of the disappeared in Mexico who tread on this land of open graves looking for their loved ones, claiming both justice and restitution? Can writing accompany them--.