What does a country that sows corpses reap? “Death,” answers Tania del Río, feminist sociologist, activist and author of Las Traceras (Aguilar), a book that explores the lives and stories of searching mothers in Mexico and analyzes the phenomenon of enforced disappearances in the country.
They, the “dog women,” as Del Río calls them, are organized groups searching for missing people across the country. In Sonora, Sinaloa, Guanajuato, Tamaulipas, Veracruz, Colima… groups of relatives – mostly women – often go where the state does not go to look for their relatives. Since these groups have little or no resources, they have chosen to search for their relatives themselves. The absence weighs on them like a sword of Damocles, preventing them from moving forward. There is no sadness, there is no certainty, only doubt and the hope of finding her dead or alive one day. Only in this way will they reach an end to the torment that eats them up inside and that forces them to go out on the streets every day. “The work of the search mothers is proof that the state is not functioning,” says Del Río, who is originally from Sinaloa, one of the most violent states in Mexico and the scene of disputes between drug trafficking groups.
On the other hand, as the author mentions, disappearance aims to “erase a person’s social identity, reduce his legal status, leave him anonymous, prevent the right to a dignified burial and to say goodbye to his family.” “. Tania del Río defines herself as a “social observer” who gradually reveals the consequences of violence, impunity and lack of justice for victims. “In this country, 25 people disappear every day. “A very high number for a country that is supposedly not at war,” asks the author. A country where clandestine graves continue to appear despite the indifference of a large part of society and the refusal of the state. “Indifference is one of the most precise and subtle forms of violence,” he comments. “The country has lived together so often with impunity that it often holds a Eucharist out of fear. But have you gotten used to it? A question that can be answered with silence,” he explains. A silence that traps society in a violent context that perpetuates itself. With more than 110,000 missing people in Mexico, there are only 36 punishments for enforced disappearances, while impunity is almost 94%, according to the portal “Where the Disappeared Go”.
“For me it is a war that has no clear goal and in which citizens live every day in their flesh and in their bodies,” replies Del Río, who criticizes the strategy of leaving the army on the streets to carry out security tasks . . The latest horror episode occurred just a few weeks ago, after the disappearance of five young people and five friends who were partying in Lagos de Moreno, Jalisco, and were allegedly murdered by drug traffickers. So far, no arrests have been made and the bodies of the boys have not been found, leaving a trauma in society that is difficult to repair, just like the disappearance of the 43 students from Ayotzinapa. “In recent years, the profile of the disappeared has been dominated by young men aged between 19 and 30 who have been turned into cannon fodder. Almost an entire generation of children has been lost, which also affects the country’s economic cycle,” he adds.
The moment their names disappeared was when their mothers went looking for them. Not long ago, trackers were housewives, salespeople and professionals who were forced by violence to become forensic specialists, doctors and scientists. Del Río tells some of his stories. “We started by not letting the prosecution decide for us. “We take the shovels and go out into the mountains, to the lagoons, to the rivers, to the properties, to the wells… All with the same goal: to look for them and find them, where they are and how they are,” says Isabel Cruz in search of her son and who represents the voice of so many families. Among the many voices of mothers included in the book, Cruz’s is poignant: “The mother of a missing person has three options: sit and cry, kneel and pray, or go searching. You decide!”
Over the years, they learned to dig up corpses with picks and shovels, identify pieces of bone, navigate the desert, and recognize the foul smell of decomposing bodies. “What surprises me about them is that they were only able to survive by shedding their bodies. In this unity of pain, they became brothers and then supported each other,” the author remembers. Her direct intervention in the search for the graves puts her in the sights of those who have no interest in uncovering the horror. Direct attacks against search engines have increased over the past three years. In the state of Guanajuato alone, five activists were murdered while searching for their relatives. We talk about how this fight wears you down, it wears you down so much that in the end many of them even died from it. Issues related to this search.
The author takes a tour of history to explain that enforced disappearances have occurred in Mexico since the 1970s. A practice that was then used by the army and other companies to eliminate political critics – as in the Aguas Blancas massacre – and that is still used today They are also used by drug trafficking groups. “It also happens that the authorities seize them and hand them over directly to organized crime, which makes the bodies disappear. They have come to invent recipes to dissolve bodies, to calcine them, so that no trace can be found,” explains he.
For Del Río, the existence of so many graves in the country – around 2,710 according to official figures – means that the perpetrators are doing their bidding. And that there is great inefficiency of the state and the overwhelmed institutions. “Every grave is an act of impunity if we assume that the bodies of the people buried were victims of enforced disappearances and certainly other related crimes such as kidnapping, human trafficking, femicide, torture, etc.” Therefore, it should be important, in addition to that “The location and the way in which they were found, as well as the level of violence inflicted on the bodies,” he mentions in the book.
“Violence is as old as human history, but within a legal system the permissiveness of the state is notorious,” emphasizes the author and concludes with a reflection on the government’s position, which “makes coordination strategies and coordination policies impossible.” Solution . “The state is responsible for what is happening because it allows this violence, it neither saves the victims nor prosecutes the guilty. If that doesn’t happen, we’ll be even less able to talk about repairing the damage,” he adds.
It is not known exactly how many groups of seeking fathers and mothers there are in the country, although they are already present in almost all states. “The only solution I see to change this is for us to create support networks, solidarity networks, grievance networks at the citizen level. This requires a certain amount of rebellion and disobedience. But it is important not to lower your head. In isolation they fuck us, in isolation they kill us. Isolated, they disappear from us.”
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