Mexico is currently facing a severe crisis of enforced disappearances, with more than 133,000 people officially registered as disappeared. This situation is marked by the continuous discovery of clandestine graves and the existence of thousands of unidentified bodies in burial sites, common graves, and forensic facilities. These dynamics do not correspond to remnants of past political violence, but rather to an ongoing context of state-criminal violence.
Despite the scale and persistence of these violations for more than six decades, there has been no formal political transition and no comprehensive or effective transitional justice process to address either past or contemporary violence. While certain initiatives associated with transitional justice have been implemented, these have remained fragmented, hindered by power dynamics, and primarily oriented towards past abuses, leaving current patterns of violence largely unaddressed. At the same time, the involvement of state actors as perpetrators further complicates the applicability of conventional transitional justice frameworks.
In this context of sustained enforced disappearances, institutional failure, and limited formal justice responses, grassroot documentation has emerged as a central form of resistance. Families of the disappeared have become key justice actors, placing documentation at the core of their strategies. Through these practices, they gather evidence, search for their loved ones, preserve memory, and articulate claims for truth, justice, non-recurrence, and reparations, often operating with, beyond, and against the State.
This research examines how these family-led documentation practices produce and sustain forms of truth and justice in a context that does not correspond to dominant transitional justice models. It conceptualises Mexico as an aparadigmatic transitional justice setting, where the scale of violence resembles “transitional” contexts, yet no formal transition has occurred and no coherent transitional justice framework exists to address ongoing violence.
The project engages with transitional justice primarily as an analytical lens. This enables the examination and understanding of how family-led documentation practices interact with, challenge, and exceed dominant frameworks, while remaining attentive to how families themselves articulate their justice struggles. In this sense, transitional justice serves both as an entry point for analysis and as an object of critical reflection, allowing the project to examine its assumptions, boundaries, and applicability in contexts such as Mexico.
This research contributes to the GROUNDOC project’s objective of rethinking transitional justice from the ground up, and seeks to bridge the gap between theory and practice, in line with victims’ lived realities.
