Guilty: a citizens trial in Sonora declares its verdict. Claudia Díaz Symonds. All rights reserved.
In the 1990s, the trial of former President Carlos Salinas, “Juicio a Salnas”, was put on at the El Hábito bar in Mexico City. With the national flag and the sound of beating drums serving as the backdrop, a savage appeared on the dimly lit stage. In a shamanistic ritual the actor, wearing the hide of a beast on his shoulder, presented the audience with an effigy of the ex-president: a bald puppet with big ears, naked at first then masked, dressed in prison stripes and brought to trial for having tried to wipe out his entire tribe. The theatrical trial a form of social resistance that is straining the normative forces of political order in Mexico: the so-called popular or citizens’ trial.
Its defining characteristic is the use of legal discourse genres–the courts and the law–to dramatize conflict. In just over a decade, these judicial spectacles have moved from the cabaret stage to the public arena. This brief satire of “transitional justice” actually has a dramatic contemporary echo. Last November an oversized effigy of Mexico’s current president, Enrique Peña Nieto, was burned at a demonstration in support of the 43 missing students of Ayotzinapa. Somewhere between these two symbolic executions lies the phenomenon of the street trial.
