Once and Future Citizens: Exhumed Bodies within Domestic, Regional and International Legal Contexts

• In Event: The Evolving Role of Judicial Agencies

Abstract

This paper explores the spatial and temporal dimensions of citizenship and rights as it examines how domestic, regional and international legal contexts converge and compete during the process of mass grave exhumation in the aftermath of political violence. Latin America - through the jurisprudence of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, attention paid by the UN via special rapporteurs and commissions, and the activism of family members - has arguably been on the forefront in expanding local and regional demands for citizens' right to know, and yet the state in Latin America has not uniformly responded to these demands with a supply of these rights. In fact, this paper argues that these struggles should be viewed through the lens of legal culture, as globalized norms regarding the boundaries of democratic citizenship confront elites defending borders of what it means to belong to "the nation." The paper applies this analytical framework to the ongoing case of the 43 missing students from Ayotzinapa (Iguala), Mexico, in particular the response of the Mexican state to pressures from within and without its borders during and after the exhumation and identification process.

Author

• Stephanie R Golob, Baruch College-CUNY