Reportage • Dawn Marie Paley • May 16, 2024 • Leer en castellano

Every year Luisa María Muñoz González and Fernando Romo take a day-long bus ride from their home in Chihuahua to Mexico City. They always arrive to march on May 10, when there is a Mother’s Day march in Mexico.

Their son, Luis Antonio Romo Muñoz, was disappeared together with seven others, including Muñoz González’s brother and nephews, while the men celebrated Father’s Day together in June of 2011. Authorities haven’t made any progress in their investigation of the events, which took place three years after the launch of Joint Operation Chihuahua, a military-police occupation of the state that continues to this day. 

Muñoz González’s shirt bears passport-style portraits of the eight men with the words “ENFORCED DISAPPEARANCE” in across the top. “Our son has been disappeared for 14 years and they haven’t moved a muscle to find him and they never will,” said Romo. “But as long as God gives us life and health, as long as we can, we’re going to keep searching.”

Muñoz González and Romo are part of a group of family members of the disappeared in the state of Chihuahua associated with the Center for Women’s Human Rights. Forty-two people from their group—as many as their bus would hold—traveled to Mexico City for the march.

I asked Muñoz González and Romo how they feel about the fact that this year’s march is happening less than a month before Mexico’s presidential elections. “I want them to listen to us,” said Muñoz González.

Romo, who is 74 years old, says he’s heard the same promises during political campaigns for as long as he can remember.  “I don’t believe any of the politicians anymore,” he said. “It’s all just broken promises.”

The couple joined thousands of parents and family members from around the country whose loved ones have been disappeared to march along Mexico City’s most important boulevard to the National Palace, the President’s office overlooking the city’s massive central square. 

Tears, chants and photos and banners with the faces of some of the more than 116,000 people who are disappeared or missing in Mexico peppered the National march of searching mothers toward a process of unification (disappeareances are classed as such when there is suspicion of criminal activity, when someone is missing, they cannot be located). Smaller marches also took place in other cities across the country.

Mothers on the move

Starting early in the morning, groups of family members of the disappeared from different states began to stream into the park in front of the Monument to the Mother, an art deco sculpture in a small square near Reforma Avenue.

All of the groups carried photos of their loved ones. Some groups had matching t-shirts or hats, others held distinctive banners. They arrived from all over the country: from Tamaulipas, a state that borders Texas; from Quintana Roo in the southeast; from Quéretaro, Colima and Guanajuato; from Mexico State, Mexico City proper, and elsewhere.

It was Lucina Reyes Carrasco’s first time participating in a Mother’s Day march in Mexico City. Her son Alexandro Nava Reyes was disappeared nine years ago to the day in the city of Chilapa, Guerrero. “We had lunch and he gave me a hug, a hug for May 10, and he told me that he loved me,” she said through sobs. “He went out that night and never came back.” 

Nava Reyes is one of dozens of men disappeared when a so-called self-defense group took over Chilapa for five days in 2015. Authorities have no leads in the disappearance of her son or in any of the other disappearances that took place in the city nine years ago, according to Reyes Carrasco.

“Five or six thousand men entered Chilapa between May 9 and May 14, and they took my son,” said Carmen Abarca, who is also from Chilapa. Two of her sons have been disappeared: her eldest son, Héctor Jaime Abarca, was disappeared in March of 2015, and her youngest, Jorge Jaime Zabala Abarca was disappeared in May of 2015. Neither have been seen since.

Abarca and Reyes Carrasco belong to the Siempre Vivos [Still Alive] search collective in Chilapa. Both asked me not to photograph their faces, as Chilapa continues to experience extreme violence: an attack by 150 armed men took place in March. They expressed disappointment in the current administration and said that they don’t expect anything to change on June 2, when local, federal, and presidential elections occur. 

“Andrés Manuel López Obrador said that he would prioritize the disappeared, and now he’s leaving and there’s nothing, no results,” said Reyes Carrasco. “He didn’t do anything for us. He didn’t even meet with us.”

Disappearing the disappeared

Bringing justice to victims and locating the disappeared were key campaign promises during López Obrador’s 2018 election campaign, but more than 50,000 people have been disappeared or gone missing since he took office and remain unaccounted for. Over his six year term, disappearances have spiked in Jalisco, Mexico City, Mexico State, Michoacán, Tamaulipas and Zacatecas. 

During his campaign and throughout his administration, AMLO often spoke of the importance of the search for the 43 students from the Ayotzinapa teachers training college. The young men were disappeared in September 2014 in the city of Iguala, Guerrero.

Today the families of the 43 students are increasingly divided and stigmatized in the press. Guerrero state police killed another Ayotzinapa student in March. After years of research and investigations, international experts threw up their hands and left the country last year as the military continued to stonewall the investigation of the events. The students remain missing and many of the circumstances of the case are still unclear.

Instead of acknowledging his administration’s shortcomings, López Obrador has gone on the offensive, suggesting that families of the 43 are being manipulated by their lawyer and that forces hostile to his administration have infiltrated activists for the cause.

Year round the families of the 43 receive a great deal of attention, but they were conspicuously absent from the Mother’s Day protest in Mexico City.

Discourse aside, relatives of the disappeared have criticized AMLO’s government for seeking to minimize the issue of the disappeared, including by reducing the overall count of the disappeared and cutting the budget of the National Search Commission.

“Every year I march in the Comarca Lagunera with my community, but we can’t this year,” said Silvia Ortíz, who is the leader of the Grupo VI.D.A. search collective in Torreón, Coahuila. “The federal government is set against us… We need them to listen, especially [the President], we’ve had enough of his mockery.”

Disappeared defenders

Many don’t know why their family members were disappeared. Unlike in previous conflicts, neoliberal disappearance has been depoliticized and victims are chosen based on a combination of geography (which is tightly bound with race and class, on which there is little government data), gender and age.

But in some cases the motives for a disappearance are unmistakable. According to the Mexican Center for Environmental Law, 19 land defenders were disappeared in Mexico last year.

Among them are Ricardo Lagunes Gasca and Antonio Díaz, who were disappeared in January of last year.

“Ricardo has been a human rights defender for many years, he’s primarily worked in communities in the southeast of the country, and he’s an expert in agrarian law,” said Ana Lucia Lagunes Gasca, his sister. She was marching with a small group holding banners demanding Antonio and Ricardo’s safe return. 

“My brother is a key person within the reality of our country in terms of land defense, and for campesinos to have access to justice,” said Lagunes Gasca. “Antonio is a teacher and he was very committed to making sure his community was recognized and had the right to negotiate, and that the Ternium mining company would respect communal authority.” 

Following the disappearance of Ricardo and Antonio on January 15, 2023, other community members were disappeared, but their bodies were recovered shortly after. 

“That’s a message that is still active, the fact that they haven’t given them back to us, that we don’t know what happened. It’s a message and it’s a kind of torture,” she said. “The current social order is at the root of all of this pain.”

Lagunes Gasca sees unity among the disappeared as the key to increasing political pressure. “There are thousands of us and they can’t ignore all of us when we’re together. They have to listen to us all and hopefully they’ll really listen,” she said.

The National Search Brigade, which brings together at least 160 search collectives, carried out a national unity campaign and hosted a gathering in Mexico State from May 9–11. As family members gathered around photographs of their loved ones in front of the National Palace, collective members who participated in the unity gathering read a statement. 

“Far from strengthening institutions for the search for our loved ones, [the government] has worked to dismantle and undo the work that we have proposed and carried forward,” sounded the voice of a collective member over the speakers set up in the square. “We are sad to see how the government refuses to listen to the voices of family members.” 

The statement went on to recognize that the disappearance of non-Mexican migrants is an issue that urgently needs attention and to call for an end to the war in Gaza. “Our struggle is international,” it said. 

“Palestine is painful for all of us. No mother should have to hold her baby’s body in her arms while the world stands by and watches cruelty toward and the disappearance of a people. The genocide and invasion must end.”