Hope Amidst Horror: Documenting the Effects of the "War On Drugs" Among Female Sex Workers and Their Intimate Partners in Tijuana, Mexico

Abstract

Sensationalistic media coverage has fueled stereotypes of the Mexican border city of Tijuana as a violent battleground of the global drug war. While the drug war shapes health and social harms in profoundly public ways, less visible are the experiences and practices of hope that forge communities of care and represent more private responses to this crisis. In this article, we draw on ethnographic fieldwork and photo elicitation with female sex workers who inject drugs and their intimate, non-commercial partners in Tijuana to examine the personal effects of the drug war. Drawing on a critical phenomenology framework, which links political economy with phenomenological concern for subjective experience, we explore the ways in which couples try to find hope amidst the horrors of the drug war. Critical visual scholarship may provide a powerful alternative to dominant media depictions of violence, and ultimately clarify why this drug war must end.

Keywords: Mexico; critical phenomenology; drug war; hope; injection drug use; photo elicitation.

Figure 1

View of Tijuana from inside a couple’s home. Despite rapid economic development throughout Mexico and in the border region during recent decades, the economic gains have not been distributed equally. We spent most of our time with participants in their homes, which were basic and often substandard in terms of building materials, protection from the elements, and physical safety. Nevertheless, couples decorated these spaces to feel like home. Photograph by Angela Robertson Bazzi 2011.

Figure 2

Photograph of a Green party political ad: “We offered the death penalty, we got 70 years in prison for kidnappers. Let’s go get life in prison for murderers and kidnappers.” Geraldo took this photograph in 2011 because it reminded him how much of his life he has spent incarcerated, primarily related to drug charges.

Figure 3

One of many picaderos in Tijuana. Photograph by Geraldo 2011.

Figure 4

The Tijuana River Canal. Homeless migrants and people who use drugs have lived inside the western section of El Bordo since the 1980s and have been constant targets of policing and forced displacement. For example, a 2015 operativo (field operation) involving municipal and military law enforcement and local health authorities forced upwards of 500 people into drug rehabilitation programs lacking evidence-based services (Guerrero 2015). However, people have since returned to live and use drugs in El Bordo. Photograph by Jennifer Syvertsen 2011.

Figure 5

Injecting in private spaces like Celia and Lazarus’s apartment shields individuals from multiple health risks, including police harassment and the unsanitary conditions of public injection. While sharing needles or ancillary equipment heightens HCV/HIV risk, using in a private space may decrease infectious disease transmission because people injecting have more time to prepare and use their drugs, thereby reducing the risk of accidentally mixing up needles, cookers, cottons, water, or other injection equipment. Photograph by Lazarus 2011.

Figure 6

Photograph by Ronaldo 2011.

Figure 7

A couple’s “dangerous safe haven” in the Zona Roja. Many photographs taken by couples depicted the intimate spaces inside their homes. Photograph by Mariposa 2011.

Figure 8

“Tijuana is not sick;” #amemosTJ (#WeLoveTJ [Tijuana]). Counterpunching the threatening arcomensajes (warning messages left by drug cartels near crime scenes intending to terrorize the public; see Pérez, Pérez, and Pérez 2013), explicit “scenes of confrontation” across the city offer messages of hope amidst the failing drug war. Photograph by Jennifer Syvertsen 2015.

Figure 9

A mural created by people who inject drugs. Underneath the building, someone wrote “Esperanza,” or the Spanish word for “hope.” Plans are underway for future collaborative art projects to channel creativity and raise social consciousness about drug use along the border. Photograph by María Luisa Mittal 2015.