Between heads, corpses and guns: An exemplar analysis of videos related to Mexican drug war

Our main interest is on videos disseminated on the web about assassination and executions of people presumably connected to drug cartels and drug war. Some of these materials have generated a policy reaction by the means of creating legislation on journalism. Such kind of media has been also forbidden and stigmatized as apology of delinquency and crime. We have selected some samples to shape our visual discurse corpus to be analyzed. This paper will describe the methodological challenges we have faced to gather and classify the sample and to analyze it with rigour beyond of ethical and political restrictions. we focussed the followings questions to generate debate: What sort of naivety is needed to describe such materials? How is possible to identify its basic components? How these audio-visual materials serve to create social fear and the atmosphere of terror Mexican people is living in any circumstances? How is built the horror using corpses and bloody bodies? How is changed the social order by means of such visual discurse?

In a posmodern and post-structuralist perspective the cultural meaning of such videos is examined highlighting the limits and scope of traditional approaches. What is the data to be constructed, de-constructed and analyzed in such kind of videos? Critical visual discurse analysis appears as necessity but framing this audio-visual production is quite problematic.