Preservation or Conservation? Two Frameworks on the Right to Truth in the Mexican Drug War

In this article, I suggest two frameworks to acknowledge the past in Mexico during the War on Drugs (2006–). When President Calderon Hinojosa (2006–2012) and his successor Pena Nieto (2012–2018) militarized public security forces, the perpetuation of violence became the latest symptom of state practices undermining accountability. By using media and the national archives, the state has operated within a framework of conservation. It performed indirect censorship by spending millions of dollars on government publicity, fostering a media dependence on state income, and it also fulfilled a normative to protect personal data from historical documents and their access. If the archive exists at the core of memory institutions, such as museums or national archives, it is disseminated through conservation practices that have two functions: to uphold the truth, and to play a role in nurturing identity within the national project. Therefore, conservation occurs when curating and protecting the archive and, indirectly, the state itself. I then address another framework that has been influenced by the international discourse on human rights. The use of alternative digital journalism in Mexico concerning news reports on collectives that search for their disappeared present these stories as a form of open archive. By granting spaces for remembering, the distribution of memory comes to exist within social media, news portals, and other non-formal means of circulation such as film festivals or international award competitions. As a result, the mediation achieved travels as a form of civic preservation, occurring outside memory institutions.

In this article, I suggest two frameworks to acknowledge the past in Mexico during the War on Drugs (2006-). When President Calderón Hinojosa (2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010)(2011)(2012) and his successor Peña Nieto (2012-2018) militarized public security forces, the perpetuation of violence became the latest symptom of state practices undermining accountability. By using media and the national archives, the state has operated within a framework of conservation. It performed indirect censorship by spending millions of dollars on government publicity, fostering a media dependence on state income, and it also fulfilled a normative to protect personal data from historical documents and their access. If the archive exists at the core of memory institutions, such as museums or national archives, it is disseminated through conservation practices that have two functions: to uphold the truth, and to play a role in nurturing identity within the national project. Therefore, conservation occurs when curating and protecting the archive and, indirectly, the state itself. I then address another framework that has been influenced by the international discourse on human rights. The use of alternative digital journalism in Mexico concerning news reports on collectives that search for their disappeared present these stories as a form of open archive. By granting spaces for remembering, the distribution of memory comes to exist within social media, news portals, and other non-formal means of circulation such as film festivals or international award competitions. As a result, the mediation achieved travels as a form of civic preservation, occurring outside memory institutions.

Introduction
Digital media can be used as a source of emancipation. As Milan (2015) points out, the years 2005-2015 indicate the era of transparency and social media activism. In Mexico, the emergence of a generation of news portals that shared that same ethos can be traced to these years, some of which I consider to be alternative to commercial media. Alternative media can be understood as participatory and critical in the sense that it seeks to provide critical media content which can contribute to societal transformation (Fuch and Sandoval, 2009). The public visibility of such content should ideally rely on independent income, but must also consider commercial financing in order to broaden their scope, where the participatory aim is to give opportunities to voicing social concerns, and more importantly, such visibility must be in regard to the role these media play in a context of capitalism. Therefore, the critical content it provides lies in 'pointing at the unequal, dominative, and nonparticipatory character of contemporary society…' that may lead media to assume the position of the oppressed (Fuch and Sandoval, 2009: 146). The goal of this article is therefore to discuss the moment in which such media became a form of collective memory of resistance 1 parallel to the period of violence and lack of accountability from commercial media. The following precedents stand out in this regard. The first is the Neo-Zapatista uprising (1994) with the Medios Libres and the Indymedia grassroots movement during the alter-globalization demonstrations (1999)(2000)(2001)(2002)(2003)(2004)(2005).
This signified the first global movement against capitalism. By grasping the possibility of reinventing oneself through media interaction and connectivity, civic organizations of local influence gained international scope, fostered by the Internet.
Largely regarded as a democratic turn during the neoliberal era, the people of Chiapas put forward their identity as a form of resistance against the NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), and then later against the state. 2 They sought dialogue not 1 Canal seisdejulio (1988) is probably one of the first examples of alternative media in Mexico that focused on democratization. It documented practices ranging from institution-oriented projects to revolutionary ones. It emerged prior to the technological convergence of analogue and digital content. 2 It was precisely their usage of media that helped to protect them against repression.
Navarro: Preservation or Conservation? Two Frameworks on the Right to Truth in the Mexican Drug War 3 between peers or indigenous people alone, but more broadly with a civic, global crowd that also searched for a subjective voice in the hope of suppressing the utilitarian logic. Secondly, Bennett's and Segerberg's (2012) conception of connective action best describes the pro-democratic waves of protests from 2009-2013 in conjunction with the 2.0 web platforms and emergence of social media. As governments became more and more reliant on corporate surveillance, as the Edward Snowden revelations show (Milan, 2015), so did online networks. #YoSoy132 replicated the #Indignados in Spain, France, and other southern European countries spread by the protests that began in the Arab world. Citizens became media producers and news creators, and went from being accidental witnesses to media activists (Mortensen, 2011) and event creators. Therefore, they reinforced their subjectivity while seeking social change.
Thirdly, the networked architecture of the Ayotzinapa case in 2014 became a global phenomenon, in light of the current state of macro-criminality, precisely because it benefitted from the previous media practices (and nodes) that the #YoSoy132 social movement left behind (Gutiérrez, 2015). Fourthly, the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity (2011) had given voice to the Movement of the Disappeared prior to that, creating a news agenda that was not part of the mainstream news; online alternative journalism soon picked it up (Gibler, 2017;Martínez, 2017;Quintana, 2017;Lorot, 2018), with independent journalists setting up their own portals and thereby making an indirect impact on the main media industry in which the transformation of news production unified amateur and professional media through social movements. This is what I refer to as a ' civic framework of preservation' that follows the trend of the human rights discourse. As I will show, the relevance of this emancipatory usage is that it seeks to contest several practices that the Mexican state has carried out for decades, either by conditioning commercial or mainstream media, or by other means that operate as a form of conservation that strives, ultimately, to forget.
I want to clarify that the media's potential for emancipation lies within its social usage. Which is to say that I do not refer to the Western narrative of media as a liberating and democratizing tool, as is often the ideological subtext when digital But what kind of public memory is achieved if for many years there have been no clear-cut boundaries between mainstream media and the state? Largely exposed by many scholars and organisations such as Article 19, the state of the media in Mexico is, to say the least, disconcerting. Most organizations which were and still 3 In the same vein, I will not cover the allegation of technology as a form of cultural homogenization and how it plays into a continuation of imperialism in the global age, including the perpetuation of technological dependence in less wealthy nations. Nor will I explore the critical studies of media theory that places the Internet as the latest arena for exploitation. The reason for this is because it is not within the scope of this text. For a review in this regard, see Fuch,C,Dean,J,or Aouragh,M and Chakravartty,P. 4 Set in the mid-1950s in Algeria, the author gives an account of how the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) took over the radio by broadcasting The Voice of Fighting Algeria, and how a communication channel of the colonizer was transformed to serve for the purpose of liberation. But Fanon's example goes beyond this subversion usage. What is insightful is the creative and social outcome. He assures that whenever the broadcast was interrupted or made inaudible, listeners that gathered around to tune would explain the narrative in their own terms, partly recreating events based on facts, but also by re-elaborating on it with a mixture of consent, aspiration and faith. This made them participants in the struggle whilst compensating for the lack of a signal. Thus, in spite of the censorship or the technological flaws, radio listeners were suddenly encouraged to address the revolution in a moment of impasse. Needless to say, if critical content is broadcasted, the government can intimidate or corrupt the media because it conditions news organizations by threatening their income. It is true that during the analogue era these practices were far more severe than now, but that does not mean that they are gone altogether. On the contrary, with all the plurality it represents, the online world is still very much intimidated by this scheme to this day, and worse, not only by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), but by a dozen more of recent creation. As a result, political parties participate in the media, co-opting it (Guerrero, 2016). The latest example in this regard is the usage of bots in Twitter and Facebook, as well as the unfolding scandal of Cambridge Analytica, with which, through a third party, political organizations have managed to sway the media. While this case evidences the influence of locally-used technologies to shape affections, as well as how they character political and social frames on a macro-scale, behind lies a power structure interested in keeping its privileges. What is novel here is that through these transnational corporations, propaganda and manipulation comes from global organizations, not just national actors.
Indeed, state-sponsored content must be understood as undercover censorship.
That is the first action that can be interpreted as a form of conservation because the state gains power over most mainstream media by controlling its income and therefore by eliminating freedom of speech and neutrality. It is important to point out that if corporations like Televisa cannot resist the conditions of their biggest client-the government-then smaller media organizations that are struggling to survive will face the same challenge under worse conditions. While sources of income to raise media's independence are not inexistent as such, they remain insufficient, and therefore critical and media representing plural points of view become more of an exception than a rule. Historically, media has also been an ally to those in power. According to Article 19, when digital media formats first emerged, the corresponding taxes were inferior to what was required, and many radio concessions were also provided for in exchange for silence (Artículo 19 Oficina para México y Centroamérica, 2018). When trusting these concessions to the hands of few but extremely powerful families (10 families own 70% of the country's private radio stations), frequencies for community radios were excluded. Therefore, both the main media corporations and emerging new ones have reaped the benefits of the marketing of democracy, reconfiguring new forms of control in the digital sphere. As a result, journalistic practices that emerged from this symbiotic relationship did not ' create investigative journalism based on data, or on an evaluation of public policies, or government programs, public expenses, nor did they try to build a public agenda apart from that of the discourse and conflicts of the political elite' (Guerrero, 2016: 58). This also explains the lack of social content within mainstream news organisations.

The state behind the historical archives
Another example that illustrates the state operating under a logic of conservation is its use of historical archives. A recent law has enabled the state to anonymize the information of the Dirty War and any document related to enforced disappearances or other crimes committed in the past. 5 The National General Archive has decided, under this criteria of protecting personal data, to safekeep the information of those involved. Therefore, by obeying the norm, the government promotes a recurrent violation of the right to information, assuming a political position over the right to truth (Ruelas, 2016), especially historical and state violence-related truth. And yet, Mexico holds international obligations for truth-seeking; the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights signed an agreement for the establishment of an office in 2002.
However, since 2013, Mexico has denied entry to international experts following the cases of the disappeared, and currently, the overall assessment is one that indicates has not resulted in better accountability; the sources of violence have multiplied from local gangs to cartels and all the illicit commercial activities involved. Besides, violence is not a matter of criminal activity alone. Violence is the cyclic outcome of impunity.
Previously, it was the state that carried out detentions and disappearances against political opponents. Now, one must add actors who are involved in powerful illegal industries and state collusion (Mata 2017, as cited in Yankelevich, 2017). It is in this regard that the state operates within a frame of conservation as well. On the one hand, conservation in a professional sense is a series of practices carried out to protect patrimonial or historical documents so that they survive the passage of time, usually in reference to their physical formats. However, with the recent law on archives, truth matters little, and what counts is history linked to a national project, even if this means being negligent because, as Rigney (2014) states, the nation as the traditional framework for collective memory reinforces itself through its institutions. Mexico extends the usage of the archive to a Western and Mestizo modern state ideal, neglecting the original populations. A form of internal colonialism (González, 1965) can be read by linking the original diversity to the dominated. This is the only possible reading for denying the value of finding truth in the Dirty War, for example, which had mostly indigenous communities in Guerrero as subjects to enforced disappearances. Even if by the 1970s, the promotion of human rights became a valid understanding of national interest for many states, Mexico's compliance to it was never addressed in facts (Keck and Sikkink, 1998).
Indeed, if radicalized populations were not perceived as vulnerable or innocent then, Calderon's official narrative of human lives during his Drug War is similar, when he claimed that 90% were killings of cartel members (Ramos and Gomez, 2010). In the name of public security, human rights are often violated and justified because the targets are allegedly 6 criminals. In the first case, though the drive was ideological, the armed conflict broke out after the population demands went unheard and criminalized for years, via democratic venues. In the second case, the Drug War has an economical drive because marginalized civilians, including teenagers and children, found social mobility in organized crime, or many may have had no choice but to join the bands. proves that the archive is a source that helps identify narratives and conceptual frameworks of the state, and one from which we can reconstruct fragments of truth (Dorantes, 2018). In this case, it would seem that the state desires to conserve itself through safekeeping the archives.
One of the recommendations that Article 19 made to the state was to withdraw control from the access to historical information. As for access to the archives from the Dirty War, Article 19 identified Congress as the body that has the ability to oblige any public servant to give account if he or she is obstructing the free flow of information (2017), a message that has long gone unheard.
Therefore, the archive in possession of the state is also worked on under a logic of conservation because it is linked to this formalistic conception. This helps to understand national history as identity that is crafted and maintained through the controlling actions of the archives. While there is no doubt that collective memory is institutionalized through the archives, fueling certain notions and meanings through its practices, mediations and reproductions, the way in which the past is dealt with is relevant precisely because it refers to a moment in time when facts should have been clarified in order to understand the present as a form of repeated atrocities.
Rigney (2012) points out how memories of history are artificial and impersonal, as well as nation-oriented. If one faces gaps in history, it is done from the top-down process of creating memory that the nation, as the framework of collective memory, traditionally provides. That is to say, the 'imagined community', or an imposed shared sense of 'history' is fostered by memory institutions such as archives, educational materials, memorials, and museums (Huyssen, 2004). Whereas Anderson notes, memory lies afar from its citizens, because it is the product of ' an artificial composite dependent on mediation and on the power of media to reach larger territories' (Anderson, 1999: 617) that reinforces the nation as the customary memory.
Consequently, the less mediated the memory is, the less it will be considered as part of collective memory, at least under Halbwach's notion of collective memory.
As for the identity of the state, Couldry (2011)  Moreover, when I referred previously to state collusion, it is because the Mexican state follows the logic of accumulation, which includes the link between legal and illegal, private and public, through a micropolitics of terror that targets any actor that impedes this. These actions, disguised as national (or private security), are the latest expression of the Mexican state's identity as a form of neoliberal governmentality, a term used by Calveiro (2018) where disappearances and enforced disappearances are the catastrophic outcome of such practices. Therefore, it is not a matter of collusion between a few state actors with criminals alone, nor one of impunity, but the very model of growth that the state follows which also pushes violence in certain regions.
To put it in other terms, we do not find censorship through the usage of government publicity alone, nor through the denial to truth in the historical archives, but rather in the very actions the state has carried out for decades.  In this sense, the movement for the disappeared in Mexico, with the Ayotzinapa Normal students as its most persistent case, stands apart from previous movements and at the same time, resurfaces many pending topics (López, 2017: 61): The struggle of the disappeared is not inscribed in a logic of opposition or a class struggle, nor can it be found in progressive movements against conservatives, or in the left or right-winged ideologies. Its coordinates are more related to justice, the restoration of peace, and the search for truth.
The problems it embodies are transversal and touch every social sphere.

Alternative media as a framework of preservation
When targeting an audience for unification, as Jodelet's (1993) idea of mass media memory explains, alternative journalism offers the following perspective. As exposed before, alternative media is understood as critical media that ideally has marketable means to gain visibility (Fuch and Sandoval, 2009). But this is in order to avoid smallscale participatory media that tends to fragment public sphere (Habermas, 1991), something that Fuch and Sandoval attribute to the misconception that all alternative media must sidestep commercial financing. However, as part of the capitalist system, financial resources are required for production and distribution, even if the Internet reduces the costs and enables a more interactive participation. Unless these media organizations have very local driven interests, journalists wishing to reach emancipatory goals through alternative media must try to have sufficient resources for gaining more visibility in addressing the structural inequalities of capitalism, which in return translate to reaching wider audiences (Fuch and Sandoval, 2009: 143-5).
A way to address this is not necessarily a market-driven enterprise. For example, a sociopolitical crisis can lead to combining information demands with high quality journalism, which is what alternative journalism did. Therefore, when I mention preservation, I am referring to the appropriation and the will to keep alive a particular content in terms of legacy, in this case, to narratives of action from collectives who search for their disappeared. The media portals I refer to as having this commitment, are, among others, Periodistas de a Pie, Animal Político, Ríodoce, Más de 131, Sin Embargo, Desinformémonos, RompeViento, Somos el Medio, and Aristegui Noticias 7 with the final one ranked as the most popular news portal in Mexico in 2017 and 7 Due to its success, Aristegui Noticias can be considered as one of the main news organizations even if it is widely regarded in the Mexican press as independent, which is to say not a participant in commercial media in the traditional sense as explained in this article. However, if one follows Fuch's notion of ideal alternative media (2009), this could also be an example to a certain extent. The portal offers critical content by promoting a progressive discourse to news and breaks the mode that all commercial media is aligned to the state. It holds a healthy equilibrium by voicing official and civil society positions, but maintains an interest in professionalization over participatory practices, which separates it from alternative media. Indeed, Aristegui Noticias is a rare example of prosperous, top quality, commercial journalism of editorial and commercial independency. Truth  in the Mexican Drug War   15 2018 (Newman, Fletcher, Kalogeropoulos, Levy and Nielsen, 2018). All these portals were able to identify an information demand slot missing on commercial media that nonetheless was crucial. In return, reporting on these stories provided their identity and consolidation because it contributed to raise investigative journalism.

Navarro: Preservation or Conservation? Two Frameworks on the Right to
There are two features to this: the distribution is on a smaller scale, and such reporting is carried out with the goal of broadcasting and distributing content immediately. This differs from reporting a testimony of the historical past. In tune with Jodelet, communication scenarios modify our frameworks of memory; in this sense, the mass catastrophe currently underway in Mexico is shaping collective memories around the disappeared by communicating this process without the traditional time/space span of commemorating or contesting, because the news stories circulate while the situation is evolving: The long process required for mass memory to be created is over, and instead, humanizing the subject who's also a victim, and enhancing his or her agency is now carried out from the very beginning, unlike classical memory formations that were constructed over long periods of time.
As mentioned, the news organizations listed above emerged during the War on Drugs, and they ensure accessibility to content in order to share it through stories, web documentaries, hybrid websites, interactive infographics, special editions, forms of memorials and investigative work so as to give continuity to cases of the disappeared. They strive to fill the gaps left out by the lack of investigation and truthseeking of authorities. Though most media platforms I refer to may not have the expressive interest in keeping a particular memory alive, nor do they work collectively, their journalistic practices do refer to civic agency through the acknowledgment of commemorating social performance in a historical context of violence. Preservation comes into play when we consider the usage of media content as an archive, but not under a form of conservation as the state ensures-which is linked to power and identity control-but rather as 'second-order memory that preserves what has been forgotten' (Assmann, 2008: 106). The notion of preservation refers to a civic form of memory mediated by informal circuits that keep valuable content available to the public. Instead of focusing on victimhood as the source of subject identity that memory studies classically refer to, the stress here lies in resistance through stories When referring to communicative acts that pursue such a quest, I consider them as emancipatory, not just because they have the freedom to express content on their own terms, but because they are projects that have pushed the limits of the making of news itself. By creating alternative spaces of communication, these kinds of acts promote other spaces alien to social norms and legislations (Milan and Hintz, 2013;as cited in Milan, 2015); they are in fact going beyond their informative function because they revive local content and independent producers and voices, but more importantly, they pursue 'the escalating cultural and mediatic censorship of imagination', (Milan, 2013: 3;as cited in Milan, 2015). Therefore, to understand these emancipatory communication practices, it is worth noting that they follow a two-way process: they are emancipatory as a form of structural reform at both the production level of news (Milan, 2015), and at individual and collective levels by emancipating actors, either by becoming a meeting place of training and reflection, as the collective Periodistas de a Pie has become, or by exemplifying inspirational work, casting the subjects of their journalism as representatives of agency. The outcome of this process is also emancipatory when they provide quality work, thus promoting the freedom of expression, the right to information and the right to truth.
Strictly speaking, the work of journalists is seldom tied to memory; recordkeeping is the task of historians. But given the nature of the past as a variation across time and technology, journalism could be considered within the framework of collective memory, too (Zelizer, 2008). Even if the commitment that journalism may have to the past is unclear, and the constant flow of news reshapes the presentincluding the mediation of the organizations' own editorial board-there is no doubt that these news portals divide the memory ownership that has traditionally been attributed to the nation. They produce work that can be regarded as a retention of a short-lived this memory may be (Zelizer, 2008).
That is why these news portals are important. Unlike traditional broadcast platforms, their notion of relevance and pertinence is essentially different. They The content of these pending topics is referred to explicitly in the news and their brother portals that are advertised on the site which ultimately lead to award-winning works, NGOs, and other links mediating information related to the crisis, such as reports. In this respect, their interest in keeping the users engaged also reveals a profile of agency by promoting participation, access, and by sharing related content as well as inviting users to their activities while promoting like-minded third parties. Unlike the reasoning of conservation that the state manufactures through its memory institutions, these portals serve as ready-touse, accessible consultations of documents and reports that sustain the news they create.
Therefore, the opportunities digital media offers lie within the tangled tension of claiming space to the digital versions of traditional media outlets such as Milenio.
But this tension is also present when keeping the space open for public participation, and in maintaining in circulation the state of impunity prevailing for each case of violence in the War on Drugs. What must be also highlighted is that these alternative portals stress, over the permanence of special reports or investigative work, the debt the state has to historical subjects. It is in this respect that some news portals which recently emerged are linked to social movements and a framework of safekeeping a collective memory. This is seen in the cases of Desinformémonos or Somos el Medio, which are both inspired by the Zapatistas or the autonomous indigenous communities of Guerrero. Periodistas de a Pie has the explicit aim to provide a human rights approach to news. This is a key element that distinguishes alternative media from commercial media.
It offers critical content where victims of violence are participants of news not only by providing their testimony alone, but by making visible their struggle which is of social and geopolitical concern. One example is collaborators Daniela Rea and Alberto Najar's award-winning En El Camino, a microsite that covers the routes of migration, from Central America to the US. According to Periodistas de a Pie member Ramirez (Gorostieta, 2016), the published material is the result of fellow journalists of the collective and other reporters that are locally based along the route, hoping to be given space to their reports that, for security reasons, have been turned down by other media. After some years, the microsite has created a demand for financing regional journalism. Another example is Pie de Pagina, a website where due to its relevance in human right topics, finance has been be obtained to do a full coverage of certain stories that were previously rejected by the editorial committee.
A second method for remembrance is linked to the idea exposed previously.
Periodistas de a Pie achieved a strategy of scaling the issue through recognition. Rea. Writer Enrique Osorno is correspondingly part of the rewarded work. The circulation of their work in festivals opens up the topic to other types of audiences, for example, by escalating the work from a local to an international scene.
There are two more actions that enable Periodistas de a Pie to distribute their work and impact the preservation of social performance to contest forgetting.
Their offices serve as a multipurpose learning center, holding workshops, seminars, and special training courses to allow exchange with experts for professionalizing journalism and linking it to human rights. The presence of civilians and reporters learning together runs parallel to their activities of diffusion on the portal, as well as on their Facebook and Twitter accounts, thus creating a network of local citizens and media professionals whose reflection and usage of the digital and national emergency becomes a press source. They reinforce the usage of digital tools and the promotion of alternative forms of media for investigating, but also for building bonds and fostering support-a

Conclusion
Two decades ago, it was the nation, through its memory institutions, that had the means to mediate memory. Today, the more our mediations rely on platform networks, the more content is likely to be created and preserved by many, which has led to the global scenario of communication in which voices of agents outside of the state are also heard.
With the example of Periodistas de a Pie, alternative journalism provides tools and the framework for a reading of what public space is, as well as what the national emergency has meant in terms of citizenship. By researching the topics of the disappeared, they are assuming that their news portal is a space for convergence and memory. Periodistas de a Pie gives an account of a social performance alien to state participation. This is opposed to the logic of opacity that the state has performed for decades. By controlling the AGN documents, and by subordinating the commercial press, the state has been covered until very recently, having maintained a conservationist approach to history.
I would like to finalize by quoting Todorov's (n.d.)  one can go beyond the logic of victims and perpetrators. What's more, it must impose justice beyond singular cases. Any form of communication that serves emancipatory practices must bear in mind that, regardless of the collective memory it identifies itself with, 'the good use of memory is the one that helps a just cause, and not the one that conforms to not repeating the past'.