DRAW A STRAIGHT LINE
AND FOLLOW IT
“A little show,
an innocent self-deception,
is sleeping in houses,
in solid beds,
under a safe roof,
stretched out or cowering.”
OSCAR OLIVA, Allanamiento.
My partner at the time and I were on a highway on the outskirts of Mexico City shooting an experimental film when a group of armed men approached us. Our mistake: using a camera in the wrong place, at the wrong time.
We were abducted near Parres, a town where poverty and corruption have created a haven for criminal gangs. The men took us to a cliff, where we were tortured and sexually abused, all while our families heard us scream in pain and beg for our lives from the other end of the phone line.
Fourteen hours later, after our families paid a $1,500 ransom, we were released.
Once home, I became a prisoner again — this time of my own fears. I became paranoid that the armed men might return to take us or our families. To get my life back, I needed to understand what had happened to me and why.
I searched for answers in the stories of those who were also taken but, unlike me, never returned. I turned to the families of the missing people of Mexico.
Antonia. Her father, Abelardo, has been missing since she was 2 years old in 1974. Atoyac, Gro.
A touchstone in my country’s history: In 1965, a group of rural teachers and farmers attacked a military barracks in Ciudad Madera, a small city in the state of Chihuahua. Demanding the fair distribution of farmland — the great unfulfilled promise of the Mexican Revolution — the protesters-turned-guerrillas were killed. “They want land, so give them soil until they can’t take it anymore,” Chihuahua’s governor, Práxedes Giner Durán, said when he gave orders to bury the bodies in a mass grave.
This story was repeated in the decade that followed, when farmers from the mountains of Atoyac de Álvarez, led by a teacher, Lucio Cabañas, took up arms, once again asking for equality. The response:about 500 people were taken from Atoyac and its surroundings by the army and the Mexican national security services. Their relatives continue searching for them in the jungles of Guerrero.
In the years that followed, savage acts of counterinsurgency and government-sponsored abuse left thousands of families and communities scarred and incomplete.
In the northern city of Ciudad Juarez, on the Texas border, hundreds of women were raped, killed or disappeared between 1993 and 2003, many at the hands of drug smugglers. The brutalization of these women — known as las muertas de Juárez, the dead women of Juárez — was a turning point for Mexico. Soon after, in 2006, the new president, Felipe Calderón, declared a war on drugs, a military-led campaign supposedly intended to eradicate violence. Instead, it resulted in a huge increase in disappearances and killings. Massacres ensued; tortured corpses surfaced all over the country.
The violence continued to grow. At the end of President Calderón's term in 2012 there were over 25,000 missing people; today, the official number has crossed 116,000. But many disappearances are never reported. The true number may be as high as 500,000.
Bartola. She was illegally detained and taken to the Military Camp No. 1 despite being physically and mentally impaired. Her family has more than 150 missing members. Mexico City.
In the months after I was kidnapped I joined the National Search Brigade for the Disappeared, a group that bridges the hundreds of search collectives scattered throughout Mexico. In 2021 that work took me to the state of Veracruz, on the Gulf of Mexico.
For more than 10 years, Veracruz has been besieged by violence among rival cartels. A group of families looking for their missing loved ones there discovered sites where cartels take their victims to be “cooked.” During one of the searches, I found what seemed to be small black rocks in the soil that crumbled to the touch; what I was holding were actually charred human remains.
Residents described regularly seeing fires burning through the night as the cartels incinerated corpses. Without fail, they said to us, the following morning the navy would come to clean up the scene. No bodies, no evidence, no crime. (The Mexican government did not respond to these allegations, nor to others accusing the military forces or the police of participating in forced disappearances.)
The “cooking” sites of Veracruz are one in a long list of initiatives allegedly sponsored by the government to cover up cartel crimes. Across the country, criminal groups set strict curfews and threaten to murder or kidnap anyone who breaks them, which local law enforcement silently blesses. Dozens of people are killed on average every day by paramilitary and criminal groups, with mutilated corpses found inside freezers, buried in mass graves or left in broad daylight in plazas and parks.
In 2014, 43 students from Ayotzinapa disappeared at the hands of a local cartel in collusion with the police and the army. An inquiry into their whereabouts by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights ended with investigators complaining of repeated lies and obstruction by the armed forces.
A former defense minister who was indicted in the U.S. for allegedly taking bribes to protect cartel leaders was released to Mexico, reportedly after pressure from the current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. (Upon his return, the former minister was cleared after Mexico’s attorney general found no evidence of wrongdoing.)
President López Obrador, who was elected on the promise of bringing an end to state-sponsored violence, has instead greatly expanded military control, and has presided over the highest homicide rates in Mexico’s recent history.
Our own land keeps the secrets.
Gloria. Her son has been missing since 2018. Queretaro, Qro.
Goya. Her 12 year old son has been missing since 2007. Pachuca, Hgo.
On Aug. 19, 2023, three years after I was kidnapped, my uncle Fernando Bayo was taken by four armed men in Acapulco. Seven hours later he was found strangled by a wire. I felt relieved that the body was found. At the very least, thanks to the efforts of members of the National Search Brigade, we knew what had happened to him.
Mexico is a society that has been taught to keep moving, not to remember. Yet some of us continue to resist, each in our own way: defending our own territories against the gangs, tracking down clandestine graves, reporting on the many stories of the shattered families and communities.
In 2022, some families of the missing renamed a traffic circle in Mexico City as the Glorieta de las y los Desaparecidos, or Roundabout of the Disappeared, in an attempt to turn the space, a dead tree at its center, into a memorial. In response, the government fenced off the area with metal barricades, which the families then painted and covered with the faces of their missing loved ones. The roundabout stands today as a constant reminder that the missing existed.
We need to reclaim what the current of violence has dragged away from us, however far we must look for it.
Dionisia. Her son David has been missing since 2017. Ecatepec, Edo. Mex.
Sometimes, I am convinced that being dead is easier than having to live with the pain that people touched by violence bear — whether they were the victims, witnesses or perpetrators themselves. Every time I see someone digging in jungles and vacant lots in the hope of finding their children, and closure, I think how violence has turned them into the harvesters of Mexico: They glean pain and death. What else can a country reap when all it sows are corpses?
Essay first published in the NEW YORK TIMES on 05/08/24.
Edited by MEETA AGRAWAL & ROSE ADAMS.