”The world is like that,” he revealed. ”A multitude of people, a sea of little fires. Each person shines with their own light among all the others. No two fires are the same. There are big fires and small fires, and fires of all colors.”
Eduardo Galeano. ‘’The Book of Embraces’’
The country is in turmoil, and it’s no wonder: Trump and his tariffs, the disappearances across the country, the opposition and the hegemonic party and their poor debate in the public space. People are no strangers to this, although the virulence of the debate on social media seems to divide us into two poles, nothing like the reality, which is much more complex.
It seems that society is late to the problem that is growing and no one can stop, and mothers are searching everywhere—hundreds of thousands of them!—for the people who were deceived, kidnapped, abducted, and murdered. Where was the State? Where are the institutions that prevent, protect, and deliver justice?
In the last century, the Mexican State disappeared indigenous people, campesinos from Guerrero who sympathized with the 1970s guerrillas of Lucio and Genaro. They were cruel to those of the Partido de los Pobres (Party of the Poor). They threw them into the sea! These are crimes like those of ’68 and ’71. But there were victims in Chiapas, Nuevo León, Jalisco, Puebla, Veracruz. Where in PRI-led Mexico were there no victims?
Mexico goes unpunished; death is not permitted, moreso if it’s an opponent’s. They called it the dirty war, and many of us repeat it: dirty? Torture, disappearance? But let’s not dwell on that, they’ll say, those are things of the past.
Of course, in the 1980s, narcos took a big step forward; they continued to corrupt soldiers and police, but those who wielded power as vile foremen were missing: the governors. They received part of the growing economic wealth from selling marijuana to US citizens, which gave them an luxurious life. Together, drug traffickers and politicians are the perfect alliance; the arms market grew alongside narcopolitics. The PRI regime, which now boasts that they knew how to govern, forgets the wealth they produced, the product of the blatant theft of public finances—oil, a revenue from which only they benefited—of the sale of public spaces, of corruption in public agencies, if they knew how to do it: steal and allow abuse of the people.
The corrupt regime allowed business to be done for the benefit of a few, which is why, during the structural adjustment policies of the 1980s, what caused the crisis was the regime. It tried to sell us the idea that we were modern. However, the alliance with drug traffickers gradually began to surface.
We went from turf wars between drug traffickers to beheadings and open war over public spaces. It’s already the 21st century, it’s already the regime of the democratic transition. There’s a gruesome story attributed to the Arellano Félix cartel: they hired someone who seduces the wife of the El Guero Palma, then head of the Sinaloa cartel, and they murder her, decapitate her, and throw her two young children into a ravine. The cartels’ savagery is on the rise; rivalries are expressed by dismembering people, putting them in drums of acid, riddling them with bullets, and hanging their victims from bridges. The horror resulting from revenge for control of turfs is very strong in Sinaloa and Tamaulipas, and extends to Jalisco, Veracruz, among other states. Where is justice?
Drug traffickers sell weapons and drugs, but they also engage in human trafficking, kidnapping, and extortion. First, they control prisons, and never leave politicians alone, especially municipal officials and council members. They launder money (do we like political narco-economy?). In the 1980s, drug trafficking was very strong, obviously the Mexican drug trade. It no longer only produced “seedless” marijuana, but also introduced Colombian cocaine, which gave it tremendous power and allowed it to do whatever it wanted with the political class. Its relationships were intense and extensive, a marriage of the end of the century, and Mexican society now identified the cartels: Guadalajara, Tijuana, El Golfo, Ciudad Juárez, Pacífico. The victims began to appear, the always invisible, the most vulnerable.
The Eureka Committee is a group of searching mothers; their struggle of more than 40 years has continued unabated. Many of them have passed away without knowing where they are, or how a child or a relative disappeared. The tragedy is vast and growing. Did anyone imagine the country would be one mass grave? Now we know that the armed men and women threw political dissidents into the sea, the so-called death flights. Moving from the sea, they are now pits, ovens like the children of Ayotzinapa, at least that’s the presumption, but where is the certainty? If they were young before, they are the same today. Being a woman and being young is the greatest danger, whether from patriarchy or narcos, as Touraine, the French sociologist, asks: can we live together?
Now these are daughters, granddaughters of that struggle, but as if it were a new cycle, the mothers, grandmothers, daughters, sisters, cousins, nieces, are a living part of a country that is grateful for their existence, but they shouldn’t be searching, but rather be proud of their relatives because their lives have been taken, they have been made to disappear without forgetting that, through mourning and memory, we also struggle.
The example of the searching mothers is the example of the women in Veracruz, of the indigenous women in Acteal and Polhó, and the Zapatista women of Oventik, La Garrucha, and La Realidad. Today, searching mothers should always be heard by the political authorities, yet they wander alone searching for graves, looking for the slightest clue that leads them to their living relatives, or even to know if they left any trace.
The most difficult thing to explain is the inhumanity of drug traffickers, masters and lords of the lives of people who have nothing to do with their lives of murder and atrocities. Sometimes the stories are so horrific that it’s hard to talk about them.
The struggle of the searching mothers is an example of dignity, of a world that seems to have become dehumanized. Reading people on social media with hatred in their words, in their reflections; Some supporting, others criticizing, no one is spared, but almost no one considers that there are thousands of victims, whose list is even longer, as families are victims of absence, of loss, of what has been called “living death.”
In this century, there are more than 500,000 missing persons, and I remember the lyrics of a song: “Prepare me dinner. Time isn’t worth anything, but memories are. Seconds aren’t counted, stories are told. Patience is what is harvested. My calendar has no date’’ (song by Calle 13, 2010).
Mexico is a mass grave, it is an indescribable pain, and this doesn’t stop, and at least in the short term, there’s no chance that it will. The power that narcos have today can only be stopped with a State that prevents and acts, that listens and accompanies. It’s not too much to ask.
Original article by Gerardo González Figueroa, Chiapas Paralelo, March 30th, 2025.
Translated by Schools for Chiapas.