Every morning when I walk to the park in front of my apartment in Mexico City, I am reminded of an indescribable tragedy that has been plaguing my country for decades. A few steps from my front door sits a small plaque reminding passersby that the building next door to mine, now a government human rights office, was once the headquarters of the Mexican secret police, “a center of enforced disappearance and torture in the 1970s and “. 80s.”
During this period, as part of Mexico’s “dirty war,” the government arrested thousands of young dissidents who had taken up arms against a violent authoritarian regime. Researchers estimated that between 1964 and 1982, 3,000 people were imprisoned, 7,000 tortured And 3,000 more killed. Some 1,200 disappearedmany of whom were allegedly murdered by the state. While some were buried in clandestine graves, others were thrown from planes into the Pacific Ocean, as confirmed by a recent report of a government truth commission investigating the dirty war.
It was the beginning of a crime that turned into a national catastrophe: enforced disappearance. on a large scale. What was once a practice employed by the state has been updated and adapted by the country’s countless cartels, who not only commit murder by the thousands, but also ensure that the bodies are not found – by burying them In hidden gravesby dissolving them in vats of acid or burning them. As during the Dirty War, this practice sows terror in local communities and almost guarantees impunity: if there is no body, there is no crime to charge.
Andrés Manuel López Obradorwhose presidential term ended in September, will go down in history as having the the greatest number of disappearances recorded of any Mexican administration, with one person on average disappearing every hour. This is partly due to an increase in violence during his mandate and partly to the strengthening of the National Research Commission, which made it possible to better monitor disappearances. The most publicized case of disappearance in the country, that of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Normal School in 2014, remains unresolved 10 years later. Since 1952, more than 116,000 people disappeared in Mexico. For context, this is a population about the size of Berkeleydisappeared.
In a macabre memory, a few meters from the plaque in the park outside my house is a missing person poster. The name has become illegible, but some details are still visible: the man was 24 years old, thin, with bushy eyebrows and straight black hair; he was last seen wearing blue sneakers. This is one of millions of such posters that have appeared all over Mexicoon street corners, at bus stops, at gas stations. A roundabout on Mexico City’s iconic Paseo de la Reforma has been taken back by posters of the missing. Their faces populate my Instagram feed and giant banners float above. takencentral squares in cities from Mérida to Monterrey.
President Claudia Sheinbaum, who took office this monthhas a unique opportunity to address this crisis, one of the greatest human rights disasters on the continent. Symbolically, she can do this by meeting publicly and regularly with the mothers of the disappeared on the front lines of this crisis, which she my predecessor refused to do so towards the end of his term. This would send a powerful message that she takes their requests and their pain seriously.
But Sheinbaum can also take several practical steps. It can reorganize the National Research Commission, emptied in recent months of López Obrador’s mandate, ensuring that the country continues to count its missing and also has a strong network of officials determined to find them. She can keep her electoral promise to continue developing the country’s searchable national database missing persons, including deceased persons who have been identified but buried in national graves. It can also strengthen Mexico’s struggling forensic system and help identify more than 70,000 bodies languishing in morgues.
Among the Sheinbaums 100 promises because his presidency was to find the missing students of Ayotzinapa. His predecessor made a similar vow and, by order of a Mexican court, created a commission to handle the matter, but the remains of only two students were identified during his administration, and to date not a single conviction was obtained. Sheinbaum could relaunch the investigation and invite people to return to the country international investigators who made incursions but left after accusing the military to obstruct their investigation. Finding the students and bringing the guilty to justice would heal a festering national wound.
But Sheinbaum can go even further and pursue historical justice, building on the work of truth commission on the dirty war. With adequate public resources and the courage to take on an increasingly powerful military historically linked to these disappearances, his administration could find hundreds of young dissidents and poor rebel farmers missing. As happened in other countries that experienced similar atrocities in the second half of the 20th century (including Argentina, Chile And Guatemala), she could press for the perpetrators of the crimes who are still alive to be prosecuted and tried. This would finally begin to exhume the rotten seeds of impunity that have infected the Mexican security apparatus.
On Friday, Mexico will celebrate one of its most important traditions: Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead, where millions of people gather to remember their deceased loved ones. But for tens of thousands of people, such a celebration cannot take place, deprived of the simplest dignity: that of confirming the death of their loved one.
Sheinbaum, the country’s first female president, represents a new era in Mexico. This should include solving one of the country’s biggest current disasters.
Oscar Lopez is a Mexican author and journalist based in Mexico City who is working on a book about the origins of forced disappearances during Mexico’s Dirty War.