In-Depth Photos of Mexico’s Cartel Violence Go Beyond the Bodies

Dead bodies make for some of the most shocking photos to come out of Mexico’s drug wars, but they only tell a small part of the story. While Mauricio Palos’ portfolio about violence in Mexico contains a disturbing image of a decapitated head lying casually under a box, overall the images are more poetic, more thoughtful. The bodies are there, they’re just not the focus.

“Mexico is multifaceted country and it’s impossible to see this story from only what’s going on in the streets,” says Palos.

Palos, 32, grew up and still lives in Mexico. The project includes photos of protesters during the 2012 presidential elections and of ranchers and hunters in the area near San Luis Potosí because he knows the story of violence is more complicated and layered.

“Overall this project was triggered by the idea of violence, but more broadly it’s also an ethnographic study of Mexico,” he says. To understand the violence, he says, you have to understand the country.

The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) won the presidency in 2012 after being sidelined for a dozen years. For the 71 years before that, it had a strangle hold on Mexican politics and was known for cutting deals with the drug cartels and turning a blind-eye to their operations. During the 2012 elections is was accused of buying votes and paying television stations for favorable coverage. It’s this context that makes photos of the protest a necessary part of the project.

The rancher photos in San Luis Potosí are inspired by the story of Don Alejo Garza Tamen, 77, a ranch owner who killed four members of a cartel who tried to take over his ranch for their own purposes. Palos couldn’t visit that exact ranch, but he found and photographed another ranch that he thought was similar to try and give a sense for what it’s like to live in the kinds of rural areas threatened by the cartels who like to use the ranches for hideouts and training areas. The story is an understandable microcosm of the larger, incomprehensible problem.

Palos calls this section of the project “La Ley del Monte,” or the law of the mountain. It’s a term used to describe those places that sit outside the law for various reasons. For him it’s an appropriate title for these rural areas that often have to defend themselves because no one else will. But it’s also an apt title for the entire project (which he hopes to turn into a book) because the violence in Mexico has created its own set of rules.

In the section called “Come and Take It,” Palos photographed people who have fled the violence and re-settled in the United States, including Marisol Valles Garcia, who shot to fame after she took the police chief job in the border town of Praxedis. It was news not only because she was so young, just 20 years old, but because of the danger she put herself in. Her predecessor was tortured by cartels and then beheaded. Valles Garcia lasted just a couple months before the death threats forced her to flee.

In another story, Palos photographed the residents of Ayulta, Mexico, who evicted both the cartels and the government from their town because they said they couldn’t trust either. The town is one of several in Mexico that have taken the law into its own hands because of a lack of trust in the government. The goriest photos in the project are from Juarez and Acapulco, which have both been areas of intense violence.

Palos, who recently joined the Boreal Collective, is currently in Mérida, the capital of the state of Yucatan, working on a story about the long history of conflict between the indigenous communities there and the various groups who have tried to enslave or exploit them. It’s another story that doesn’t seem to fit neatly into the theme, but Palos says there’s a thread. The drug war isn’t just about drugs he says, but also about economic disparities, control of land, and racial hierarchies, all of which fueled the conflicts in the Yucatan.

“What we experience today reaches back into these moments,” he says. “I realize that at this point the story seems messy, and it’s complex journey, but it will all come together.”