Diego Enrique Osorno’s aunt spent years listening to the stories of her nephew, then a reporter in Monterrey, about the disappeared who terrified northern Mexico during the worst of President Felipe Calderón’s drug war (2006-2012). “She is a very loving and very sensitive aunt with whom I had a very good relationship,” says the journalist, now a documentary film director, in a café in Coyoacán. “But it wasn’t until he saw Noise that he seemed to understand. And he cried, as if, after so many years, he had suddenly understood the seriousness of the problem,” says Osorno.
Literature, cinema and art about enforced disappearances in Mexico have grown in recent years, in the face of an audience less and less able to grasp the problem. Films like Noise (2022) by Natalia Beristáin, The Thickness of Dust (2022) by Jonathan Hernández, Sin Señas Particulares (2020) by Fernanda Valadez or La Civil (2021) by Teodora Mihai have marked a before and an after in the vision, that Mexico had disappeared of its own accord. “Until not long ago, people thought that if disappearances happened, it was because the person had done something wrong, because they were involved,” explains Osorno, co-writer of Ruido and director of La evaluación , about the 43 disappeared students from Ayotzinapa.
A frame from the film Sin Señas Particulares by Mexican director Fernanda Valadez Corpulenta Producciones
Before films and documentaries, they were the news of the day, the chronicles of the first relatives who dared to raise their voices, the books in which several journalists got together to try to condense a tragedy that then went almost unnoticed stayed. Meanwhile, the numbers continued to rise. 17,000 disappeared in the time of Felipe Calderón, 35,000 during the presidency of Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018). By May 2022, Mexico had to count 100,000 people missing, a number that exceeds the disappearances of any other Latin American government, including the bloodiest times in countries like Colombia, Argentina or Guatemala. In 2022, 39 people went missing every day in Mexico, according to the Interior Department.
Noé Zavaleta is the author of Las buscadoras (2023, published by HarperCollins), a compendium of stories about mothers who put their lives on hold to search for their missing children. For many years, Zavaleta told these stories as a reporter in Veracruz. “I couldn’t imagine reporting on enforced disappearances and human rights violations. I wanted to do sports journalism, carnival chronicles and stuff like that,” he admits. But then the drug war began, from which no one was spared. “It used to be thought that all the disappeared had a reason because they did something bad to end up like this, but then the circle of all Mexicans started to fill up with disappeared people,” he recalls. Until some cases started flooding the media. People couldn’t look away anymore. One such case was the murder of Javier Sicilia’s son and five other people who were with him. He put poetry aside – “I can write no more poetry… poetry no longer exists in me” – and founded the Movement for Peace, which gave a voice to thousands of loved ones murdered and disappeared by the war between the state and the The Narco marched thousands of miles, forcing the whole world to see the dark side of Mexico. In 2016 he also ended his life as a novelist with El deshabitado, where he recounts those terrible days.
Writer Noé Zavaleta poses for a portrait with a copy of his book Las Buscadoras. With kind approval
Then others came along, like the 43 missing students from Ayotzinapa or the case of Miriam Rodríguez, a mother who is looking for her daughter’s killers. Since 2014, she has single-handedly tracked down and arrested most of those involved in her daughter’s disappearance and subsequent murder. She single-handedly pursued criminals, befriended her relatives and pursued them to the darkest corners of the country. They were then turned over to the authorities with all the evidence needed for their detention. In the three years the search lasted, she caught 10 people, but her case garnered a lot of attention and that put her in the drug dealer’s crosshairs. She was shot dead on her doorstep on May 10, 2017, Mother’s Day. Teodora Mihai told her story in La civil, a film that received a standing ovation at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival.
Giovanna Zacarías, who played Alma, the searching mother around whom the film The Thickness of Dust (2022) revolves, took this opportunity to try to capture the pain of those who are left behind when someone disappears. “I don’t know anyone who hasn’t had someone missing or murdered, and there’s no better way to drive out pain than through art. It demonstrates society’s ability to remember and build our identity through art. The film is our grain of sand, a cry of despair that tries to show what the mothers of all the disappeared are going through,” says the actress. The film’s director, Jonathan Hernández, says the title was no coincidence. “It refers to the things that, like the mother-seekers trapped in this tragedy as the world continues to revolve around them, are gathering dust and we as a society let them gather dust, we leave them to be forgotten. To those who stay and to those who left,” she reflects.
Eduardo Ruiz Sosa wrote the novel The Book of Our Absences, a story about enforced disappearances in Mexico, the violence of the drug trade and secret tombs in the north of the country. The author has been working on it since leaving Culiacán in Sinaloa and moving to Barcelona, Spain in 2006. As he wrote, he discovered truths that had been buried in his subconscious for years by listening to his characters. “Absence suspends everything, nothing ends, nothing can begin again,” he reflects.
The Mexican writer Eduardo Ruiz Sosa.Karla Madriz
Natalia Beristáin, director of Ruido, available on Netflix, felt like she had thrown herself into the abyss when she made the decision to make this film. In 2018, she decided to devote herself to “that drive, that need, that intuition” to address the issue as she knew it by making a film. “I thought about it for a long time, I waited for the problem to go away, but no, the number of missing went on into the thousands every year, and suddenly I said, now it’s time to go nowhere “, account. The film, which shows a mother searching for her daughter, was a hit on the Netflix platform, becoming the world’s most-watched show for more than six days.
Have we reached a turning point?
“Perhaps, although there is still a long way to go.” I remember that in one of the presentations of the film I was in, a girl told me that she had grown up with her cousin all her life. They were very close, but they broke up a few years ago. The cousin had become a nun and studied civil rights and it was very difficult for her to connect. “Because I’m marching, I’m breaking, I’m screaming,” the girl told me. “But then my cousin saw Noise without me suggesting it, and then she came up to me and said I get it, I get why you’re so angry,” she told me.
A still from the film “Ruido” by Natalia Beristáin. Courtesy of Netflix ©2022
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