Embodied justice: the everyday quest for truth and healing among Maya survivors

The paradigmatic impunity surrounding the 1997 Acteal Massacre in Chiapas, Mexico, has radically reshaped survivors’ diverse senses of justice. Following the controversial 2009 Supreme Court rulings that invalidated survivor testimonies from the legal record and ordered the release of those convicted in the case, the Maya organization Las Abejas developed an alternative form of justice they call ‘Otra Justicia.’ More than a response to impunity, this decolonizing approach transcends retribution by centering relationality and healing to strengthen survivors’ political autonomy. Through it, Las Abejas have reimagined justice by creating social spaces to collectively articulate, disseminate, and transmute the traumatic memories that the state has attempted to silence. Drawing on collaborative ethnographic research with Las Abejas, I argue that Otra Justicia challenges Western legal frameworks by mobilizing survivors’ bodies and emotions as both the medium of its practice and the measure of its realization. Through an exploration of Otra Justicia’s emergence and praxes, the product of a ‘dissident legal pluralism,’ I illustrate how Maya survivors challenge the racism and epistemic violence of the Mexican judiciary by relying on embodied forms of justice aimed at reaffirming the truthfulness of their testimonies and healing the harmful effects of impunity in their bodies and communities.