Text and photos by Francisco De Parres Gómez*
In Mexico, thousands of families continue to search for their daughters, sons, sisters, fathers, mothers, and friends. To search is to resist silence, impunity, and the absence of justice on the part of the State. The presence of families in public squares breaks the strategy of oblivion that seeks to ensure that crimes go unpunished. The collective Buscando a Nuestros Desaparecidos y Desaparecidas Veracruz (Searching for Our Missing People in Veracruz) also took part in the day of struggle on August 30, the International Day of the Victims of Forced Disappearance. It is imperative to accompany their pain, which is also ours. Because forced disappearance is an open wound that cuts across bodies, territories, and memories.
Mothers and their unyielding gazes. Steps that insist on walking, hands that lift the faces of those who were taken from them. Let no one become accustomed to this violence. Let no one remain silent. Forced disappearances seek to tear away not only lives, but also memories. But every mother, father, and family member who stands up shows that absence can become an uncomfortable presence, a cry that echoes, a truth that breaks through indifference. To accompany is to look straight ahead, to make visible what those in power want to hide. The actions of families are witnesses, denunciations, seeds of memory that will not stop growing.
Forced disappearance is not an accident, nor is it an isolated incident: it is a systematic practice sustained by impunity. In Mexico, every missing person is a portrait of a State that does not search because doing so would mean finding itself. The families have made it clear: all disappearances are forced. Because there are no “voluntary absences” when fear is sown, when the police and authorities are part of the machinery that allows their own citizens to disappear.
In the face of official indifference, families continue to organize, to shout, to create memory through art and dignity. Let no one say they did not know. As long as one person is missing, this country’s debt will remain outstanding. And in the streets, we remember that disappearance is a crime of the State, and that justice is not begged for: it is demanded and exercised.
But we must also point out the obvious: disappearances are not only the responsibility of a corrupt or negligent State; they are part of the architecture of contemporary capitalism. This system demands hollowed-out territories in order to extract their wealth; it needs broken communities in order to impose its megaprojects; it needs disposable bodies in order to maintain its logic of accumulation. Forced disappearance is one of its most brutal expressions: a message of terror that says who can live and who can be erased.
Necropolitics, that power to decide on life and death, is not exercised in the abstract. It is embodied in police who fabricate guilty parties, in military personnel around the world who patrol with a license to kill, in judges who protect the powerful, in governments that measure in statistics what families experience firsthand. Capitalism turns life into a commodity and, when it is no longer useful, into waste. That is why forced disappearances are on the rise: because they serve an economic and political model that advances at the expense of the blood and memory of the people.
From the perspective of social justice, this crime constitutes a systematic practice that seeks to sow fear, dismantle communities, and fracture the fabric of society in order to advance capital and its necropolitics. In Mexico, talking about more than 134,000 disappeared persons is not a neutral statistic: it is an X-ray of a State that is incapable—and often complicit—in stopping the violence that plagues it. Disappearance cannot be explained as an isolated phenomenon, but rather as part of a policy of control that has found fertile ground in impunity.
In the face of this, collectives of relatives have produced not only political resistance, but also knowledge, pedagogies of memory, and forms of community organization that challenge society as a whole. Each public action not only denounces the government’s inaction, but also builds a living archive of truth: performance, music, poetry, photography, and words become tools of memory that transcend the official markers pointing toward oblivion and impunity.
Forced disappearance requires us to understand that there is no neutrality: either we stand with those who seek justice, or we reproduce the silence that perpetuates violence. Remembering, accompanying, and denouncing is a collective responsibility. But so is confronting the system that sustains this machinery of death. To name capitalism and necropolitics is to name the common enemy.
And it is not just a problem of Mexico: it is global. What we call forced disappearance here coexists with other forms of death management that sustain the same machinery. In Palestine, permanent occupation and war seek not only to murder, but to erase entire peoples, their right to land, their memory, and their archives; for decades, bombings, sieges, and displacement have attempted to turn Palestinian life into manageable waste. In South Africa, the scars of apartheid did not heal with the transition: police violence, urban expulsions, and extractive dispossession continue to manage who can live with dignity and who must be pushed into the slow death of structural poverty; the logic of capital rewrote the map of racism in terms of profitability. In Congo, Kurdistan, Yemen, Ukraine, and so many other territories, geopolitical conflicts and the war economy render entire populations expendable, bodies counted as collateral damage, entire communities reduced to statistics.
This journey through global necropolitics also echoes the political violence of the Brazilian far right, whose supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro recently took to the streets, carrying American flags and demanding impunity before the Supreme Court, in an exercise of authoritarian intimidation based on hatred, the delegitimization of institutions, and the promotion of xenophobia as legitimate political discourse. These mobilizations are not mere acts of protest: they are acts of symbolic warfare against democracy and diversity, the cornerstone of a global strategy by the far right to sabotage public life and cloak it in terror. Their rhetoric, fueled by fake news and ideological affinities with politicians such as Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, invokes a direct attack on the community, deepens social divisions, and reinforces the necropolitics that determines which lives deserve to be heard—and which are condemned to silence.
The disappearances in Mexico and the massacres in Palestine, the repression in South Africa and the war in other territories, are different expressions of the same machinery: global capitalism that manages life and death according to its needs for accumulation, and States that coordinate this administration with permanent emergency measures, with security forces turned into internal armies and with judicial systems that shelve the truth. Necropolitics is not an excess: it is a method. War is not an anomaly: it is a form of government.
The war against Zapatista communities in Chiapas is part of this same pattern of violence. For years, the peoples organized around the EZLN have faced military, paramilitary, and governmental harassment aimed at dispossessing them of their territories and destroying their experience of autonomy. The disappearances, repression, and armed attacks against Zapatista support bases are not isolated incidents, but part of the same machinery that operates throughout the country and the world: the alliance between capital and states to control territories, destroy communities, and neutralize any alternative that proposes communal life and dignity over profit. What is happening in Chiapas is not so different from what is happening in other territories at war: they are localized expressions of the same global necropolitics that administers fear and death to sustain accumulation and dispossession.
That is why the struggle of the searching mothers in Veracruz is deeply linked to the resistance of Palestinian mothers who hold up photographs under the rubble, to South African families who demand justice in the face of state repression, to communities in the Global South who organize against extractivism and forced displacement. When a mother writes her son’s name on a piece of cardboard and another holds up a photo of her daughter in a refugee camp, they are writing the same grammar of dignity: the one that turns grief into denunciation, memory into a tool, the street into a living archive.
Let no one say that this is happening far away. Let no one believe that they can look the other way. Forced disappearance, genocide, wars of capital, are all part of the same map of violence that cuts across us all. Resisting, then, is not just about searching in Mexico: it is about forging alliances, building internationalist memory, uniting knowledge and practices of care, recognizing in the other the continuity of our own struggle.
In this context, accompanying is not a gesture of charity: it is a political practice that challenges the state and capital. It involves demanding truth and justice, yes, but also dismantling the mechanisms that make disappearances possible: the militarization of everyday life, the privatization of territories, the criminalization of protest, and the racism and classism that enable dehumanization. It means defending life as the organizing principle of society and law.
Because memory is not the past: it is the present that calls us to action. Every search brigade, every improvised offering, every mural, every raised scarf is a form of popular education that teaches us to name the unnameable and to draw maps of hope in the midst of terror.
To name capitalism and necropolitics is to name the common enemy. Only from there, from the recognition of this structural root, can the horizon of true justice be opened: one that not only finds the disappeared, but also prevents disappearances from continuing to be the unwritten policy of the powerful.
*Francisco De Parres Gómez (Francisco Lion), anthropologist, communications specialist, and photographer.
Author of Poetics of Resistance: Zapatista Art, Aesthetics, and Decoloniality. Coordinator of Critical Internationalism and Struggles for Life. Towards the construction of future horizons from resistance and autonomy.
Original text and photos by Francisco de Parres Gómez published in Avispa Midia on September 9th, 2025.
To see more photos, we encourage you to visit the original text.
Translated by Schools for Chiapas.