The Symbolic Dispute over the "Peace-Building" Between the Government and the Catholic Church in Morelos, Mexico

The Mexican government has implemented a series of public policies for "violence prevention" and "peace-building" to face the violence associated with drug trafficking and organized crime in Mexico; while the Mexican Catholic Bishops' Conference promotes initiatives in the same direction.

In the state of Morelos, which corresponds to the Roman Catholic Diocese of Cuernavaca, high rates of violence put the problem on the public agenda as one of the central issues; turning the "peace-building" in a scenario of symbolic dispute in which various visions of peace, and of the world, are expressed and dispute.

This paper makes an analysis of the "peace marches" convened by the Catholic Church in the state of Morelos (Mexico) during the years 2014 and 2015 from the perspective of the link between religion and territory. We analyze the use of space in these marches and the processes of desemantization and resemantization that happen in the geography of religious practices during such events; assuming that performed territorial markings generate spaces of transactions between the faith community and the civil society.

We seek to show that analyzing the use of space and territorial markings in this particular process, allows us to analyze the convergence between the political and the religious fields that happen there, as the physical space operates according to certain social logics and allows us to observe worldviews clashes in a social microcosm.