A series of unplanned events led to the seizure of the facilities of the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) on República de Cuba street in Mexico City. A victim who was tied to a chair, groups that passed him food through the window, and the request to use the bathroom, ended with the facilities being taken over by feminist groups of different kinds. In the meeting room and part of Rosario Piedra’s office were the families of the disappeared. We’re not going in there,” Yesenia Zamudio warned me.
On the other hand, there was the black block, a sign that hung over one of the doors that led to the central patio announced with its name, that no one outside the group could enter. After passing the entrance, the floor was full of groceries, clothes, water and other items that people donated, a few weeks after the takeover, some of those groceries were given away to the people who lined up outside the newly named “Okupa Cuba ”. In the background, in the center and on the floor, in an improvised exhibition, the intervened paintings of Madero, Juárez, Morelos and Hidalgo were exhibited. The paintings that, by the way, were the reason for several disagreements once the value they had after being intervened was known. The heroes entered and left the building to be photographed at press conferences, until finally nobody knew about their whereabouts, the last statement regarding the fate of the paintings is that they were still hidden inside the building. It is not known, and once the building is returned to the authorities, it may never be known.
I saw a map of the place drawn with pen and good wishes.
—This room will be for children, right now we put a television there so that the children of the girls who are here can take classes. Workshops will be held in this other space. Here we can also receive those who need shelter. —One of the girls with whom I later asked about the legality of selling or auctioning something that is not yours (the paintings) told me, she had a very particular perspective, government buildings and institutions are public and must comply with the purpose for which they were created, but what if they don’t comply? If they aren’t serving the people?
Many of the women who were in the first weeks of the CNDH takeover had the intention of using the property as a place to give refuge to women victims of violence. There were artists, lawyers, activists and curious. The intention was gradually dismantled through two sides, that of the problems between the different groups of women, and the second, the institutional, those who took refuge there were denounced and prosecuted, which forced them to leave, and in other cases , persecuted and singled out in the media. Patience played on the side of the authorities, until only three women remained in the building.
Several months ago, a woman who sought to take a victim was greeted with insults. I tried many times, without luck, to return to the building to see what was left. From the live broadcast made by those who were inside, at the time when the police were trying to recover the place, the number of paint cans caught my attention. The operation of the Secretariat of Citizen Security of the CDMX was millimetric, taking as an excuse the attack on a woman and her vehicle by four hooded women who lived inside the Republic of Cuba building and wanted money to continue financing their movement, policemen surrounded the place, they recovered it and three women were presented before the public ministry. All in the last hours of a Friday of Holy Week.
“And if necessary, we will take over the Ministry of the Interior,” one of them said when everything seemed possible. The victims’ movement that put the federal and local governments in check, time wore him down, and his story will no longer be told to give rise to the main note, the discussion of the Electricity Reform. A powerful symbol persists about what could have been possible, and with it, the question: where are the paintings?
Mexican journalist, host, broadcaster, writer and communicator
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Mexican journalist, host, announcer, writer and communicator. She hosts the program “A Todo Terreno” on MVS Radio. She has written for various publications and worked in different spaces on radio and television.