A hundred thousand, at least. One hundred thousand missing people. Unknown location. A hundred thousand holes of absence, nailed to the hearts of families. Families who denounce, seek, demand government support to find them. Families that continue searching while the authorities (that is to say) leave the files in oblivion (if they open them at all) or lose them. In a photograph we would see piles and piles of papers that are covered with dust. Dead file, ruined.
In Argentina, thirty thousand “neither alive nor dead,” they said. In Chile, at least two thousand detainees disappeared. Under military dictatorships that ruled by terror: terror of the tortured who were able to return to the world of the living after the hell of torture; terror of those who never returned or appeared years later in some clandestine grave. Emptiness that no “justice” can fill. Emptiness that only the truth could clarify, one day.
In Mexico, without a dictatorship, where one lives in a democracy and “governs for the people” (that is to say), forced disappearances accumulate, at the hands of armed forces that should protect us; at the hands of organized crime, tolerated by the State or denied by it; disappearances at the hands of gangs or criminal individuals who bet on inefficiency, neglect of indifferent, tired, overwhelmed, complicit officials.
How do you live after the disappearance of a loved one? How do you endure days and months and years of searching against the current? Years and years of going back and forth through bureaucratized offices, years of investigating everywhere, years of locating clandestine graves, days and days doing or supervising themselves, mothers and relatives, the work of collecting bone fragments and locating specialized teams in identify human remains. Days and days supervising the exhumation of corpses that, sometimes almost by force, is carried out by some “authority”. In a mourning without mourning, between rage and despair, hope and despair.
According to a recent report, families who have had to spend their days in this way end up getting sick: hypertension, diabetes, depression, anxiety, cancer. They remind us of the families of murdered women in Ciudad Juárez, for example, where some parents died of cancer, out of frustration, a feeling of helplessness, corrosive anguish.
Many resist, despite everything. With or without illness they keep going. Like Marisela Escobedo and so many other women and relatives who lost their lives or health in search of their murdered daughters, women and families resist collectively against adversity, uncertainty, the passage of time, in search of their disappeared beings. Tracking mothers, seekers, organized in nuclei that give themselves and give hope in a country of graves (it is said soon). We applaud your resilience. They are an example of resistance, solidarity and fight against death, degradation, oblivion. “If I don’t look for you, who will look for you?” she asks.
Neither the horror at the emptiness left by a hundred thousand people (who did not swallow the earth but are no longer with their loved ones), nor the admiration for their relatives have been enough, however, to ignite such a collective indignation that they demand, with them , and oblige the State to assume its obligation to protect life and liberty; and demand that the Executive receive the mothers and listen to them, with attention and respect.
One hundred thousand lives cut short. How many more?
Disappearances don’t just happen in conflict zones taken over by organized crime. In Iztapalapa, young university students disappear, like Mariela Vanessa four years ago. In Valle de Bravo, girls and adolescents disappear when they leave school, families report it, the authorities know it, they send a policeman for a few days and then they close their eyes.
What’s the matter?
The obligation to prevent corresponds to the State; the obligation to investigate and punish as well. We, citizens, have to ask ourselves if we can continue living in a country where, day by day, the black hole of evil devours human lives, and raise our voices.
culture criticism
transmutations
She is a professor of literature and gender and cultural criticism. She has a doctorate in Latin American literature from the University of Chicago (1996), a master’s degree in history from the same university (1988) and a bachelor’s degree in social sciences (ITAM, 1986).