Violence and value in the migratory passage through Central America: The Cadereyta massacre (2012) and the struggle to have the bodies returned

Abstract

This article shows the relationships laden with violence within the dynamics of cross-border mobility from the history of nine Hondurans and their grieving families. The case occurs in the broader context of the crude contemporary production of the Central America–Mexico migratory corridor, as well as the different forms of conflict that emerge around it. This context is marked by a logic of terror and death that becomes a structuring condition of the contemporary dispute for space, especially in the border areas, among diverse actors that include the state, organized crime, and migratory movements. In this transnational field, the dispute for space, rather than for the control of a perimeter territory, takes place around the control of certain specific circulation dynamics that are vertebral in the regional configuration of the capitalist global model: the movement of people and goods. These complex and dynamic territorialization processes are taking place along with the dynamic configuration of sovereignty, in which the operation of organized crime, migratory mobility, and the processes of formation of the state define a field of power characterized by a logic of war.