Opinion: Mexico’s new president should tackle the country’s festering human rights catastrophe
Every morning when I walk to the park across from my apartment in Mexico City, I am reminded of an unspeakable tragedy that has befallen my country for decades. Steps away from my front door is a small plaque reminding passersby that the building beside my own, now a government human rights office, was once the headquarters of the Mexican secret police, “a center for forced disappearance and torture in the ’70s and ’80s.”
In that 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 have estimated that between 1964 and 1982, 3,000 people were imprisoned, 7,000 tortured and another 3,000 killed. Some 1,200 vanished, with many believed to have been murdered by the state. While some were buried in clandestine graves, others were tossed out of airplanes into the Pacific Ocean, as confirmed by a recent report from a government truth commission investigating the Dirty War.
It was the beginning of a crime that has metastasized into a national catastrophe: forced disappearance on a mass scale. What was once a practice employed by the state has been updated and adapted by the country’s countless cartels, which not only commit murders by the thousands but also ensure the bodies cannot be found — by burying them in hidden graves, dissolving them in vats of acid or burning them. As it did during the Dirty War, this practice instills terror in local communities and almost guarantees impunity: If there is no body, there is no crime to charge.
Critics say the government of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is trying to downplay how people have disappeared in recent years.
Andrés Manuel López Obrador, whose term as president ended in September, will go down in history as having the highest number of recorded disappearances of any Mexican administration, with one person on average disappearing every hour. This is partly because of a surge in violence during his tenure and partly because he bolstered the National Search Commission, which enabled better tracking of disappearances. The country’s highest-profile disappearance case, the vanishing of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa teachers college in 2014, remains unsolved 10 years later. Since 1952, more than 116,000 people have vanished in Mexico. For context, that’s a population about the size of Berkeley, gone.
In a grisly reminder, just yards away from the plaque in the park in front of my home is a missing person poster. The name has faded to illegibility, 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. It is one of millions of such posters that have appeared all over Mexico, on street corners, bus stops, gas stations. A roundabout on Mexico City’s iconic Paseo de la Reforma has been taken over by posters of the disappeared. Their faces populate my Instagram feed, and giant banners sway above zócalos, central plazas in cities from Merida to Monterrey.
President Claudia Sheinbaum, who took office this month, has a unique opportunity to tackle this crisis, one of the greatest human rights catastrophes 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, something her predecessor refused to do toward the end of his administration. This would send a powerful message that she takes their demands, and their pain, seriously.
But Sheinbaum can also take several practical steps. She can revamp the National Search Commission, gutted in the latter months of López Obrador’s term, ensuring that the country continues to count its disappeared and also has a robust network of officials committed to finding them. She can fulfill her campaign promise to continue developing the country’s searchable national database of the disappeared, including deceased people who were identified but buried in state graves. She can also bolster Mexico’s beleaguered forensic system and help identify the more than 70,000 bodies languishing in morgues.
The first woman and first Jewish person to lead the country is also a protégé of outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known widely as AMLO.
Among Sheinbaum’s 100 promises for her presidency was to find the missing Ayotzinapa students. Her predecessor made a similar vow and, under orders of a Mexican tribunal, created a commission to tackle the case, but the remains of only two students were identified during his administration, and to date not a single conviction has been obtained. Sheinbaum could relaunch the investigation and invite back to the country international investigators who were making inroads but left after accusing the military of stonewalling their investigation. Finding the students, and bringing perpetrators to justice, would heal a festering national wound.
But Sheinbaum can go even further and pursue historical justice, building on the work of the truth commission on the Dirty War. With adequate state resources and the courage to take on the increasingly powerful military, which has historically been tied to these disappearances, her administration could locate hundreds of young dissident and poor rebel farmers who went missing. As has happened for other countries that experienced similar atrocities in the second half of the 20th century (including Argentina, Chile and Guatemala), she could push for prosecution and trials for perpetrators who are still alive. Doing so would at last begin to excavate the rotten seeds of impunity that have infected Mexico’s security apparatus.
On Friday, Mexico will celebrate one of its most important traditions: Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead, when millions gather to remember their deceased loved ones. But for tens of thousands of people there can be no such celebration, robbed as they have been of even the simplest dignity: confirming that their loved one has died.
Sheinbaum, the country’s first female president, represents a new era in Mexico. It should include resolution of one of the country’s greatest ongoing catastrophes.
Oscar Lopez is a Mexican author and journalist based in Mexico City working on a book about the origins of forced disappearance during Mexico’s Dirty War.
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