MEXICO CITY (CN) — Many had to force their chants through tears and voices that cracked with the pain of their loss, the toil of their struggle: “Because they took them alive, we want them back alive!”
Some, like Jorge Verástegui González, have been searching for over a decade. Others lost loved ones more recently. But no matter how much time has lapsed since a family member was disappeared without a trace, their absence is ever-present in the lives of those who continue to look for them.
Verástegui said his brother Antonio and nephew Antonio Jesús were disappeared by police in Parras, Coahuila, in January 2009.
“I’ve been looking for them ever since,” he said as others in the same situation gathered at the Roundabout of Women Who Fight, an anti-monument installed by feminist activists on Mexico City’s Paseo de la Reforma Avenue in September 2021.
Their march and other activities on Tuesday commemorated the United Nations’ International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances. The families chanted as they walked to the Roundabout of the Disappeared, an anti-monument a couple blocks down the avenue installed by families of disappeared people in May.
Mexico’s National Registry of Disappeared and Missing Persons topped 100,000 people that month. It is now over 105,000 names long.
As the extreme violence of Mexico’s drug war intensifies and rampant impunity allows state corruption to go on unchecked, more and more families are finding themselves in the powerless position of looking for help in a government that is unwilling to provide it.
“I have proof that my son was stopped by state and municipal police, but up to now, authorities have told me nothing,” said Flor de Lis Torres García, holding an enlarged picture of her son.
“Today is very painful for us,” said Torres. It is the second such commemorative day since her son José Eduardo went missing on July 22, 2021, in Comalcalco, Tabasco. He was 19 years old. “He turned 20 in January.”
She also had a photo of the patrol cars that she said stopped her son on the day he was forcibly disappeared.
In spite of the pain caused by Tuesday’s march, the day also brings Torres “hope that through one of these collectives we can find at least one person who can help us find out what happened to him, where they took him, where they have him or what they did to him.”
It’s a hope that more and more people in her situation have turned to in recent years. In the face of a government that flatly refuses to own up to its atrocities, families of the forcibly disappeared look to each other for support and to find strength in numbers.
“Families are sick of the government not looking for their loved ones, because the authorities don’t look for them,” said María Eugenia Arriaga Salomón, an activist with the Fray Juan de Larios Center for Human Rights in Saltillo, Coahuila. She came to the capital from that state that borders Texas to attend Tuesday’s march.
“They find strength in these collectives, because it’s the only way the authorities will pay any attention to them,” said Arriaga. “It’s company, it’s understanding. What you’re going through, I’m going through too.”
Enforced disappearances have spiked sharply during the term of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, which began in December 2018. And this organization among citizens could be one reason why, according to security analyst David Saucedo.
While organized criminal groups have both intensified the levels of violence they carry out and broadened their portfolios to include crimes such as human trafficking and widespread extortion, families of the victims of enforced disappearances also feel more comfortable reporting such crimes when they have each other’s support.
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