The video of a half-naked mother on the esplanade of the Zócalo, in Mexico City, carrying a banner written in which she calls for justice for the disappearance and death of a child, makes Mother’s Day, anchored in Mexican tradition and celebrated every 10th of May, take on a dimension that reflects the pain suffered by thousands of families who ineffectively search for their missing among the more than 90,000 cases that have accumulated since 2006, as undersecretary Alejandro Encinas recently reported.
The call for groups of mothers with missing sons and daughters to make this date a day for dignity and against the inability of the three levels of government to solve the problem filled the country’s main squares and avenues.
From Chiapas to Baja California, many cities in the country have been the scene of protests by tens of thousands of citizens who do not accept the reality that their children have suffered, much less stop demanding justice from the rulers.
Rosario Ibarra de Piedra recently passed away, perhaps the most emblematic figure of this demand that began in the 1970s with the Dirty War, when hundreds of young people who fought with weapons in their hands for a more democratic Mexico were arrested and many of them disappeared forever.
Jesús Piedra, his son, never appeared, nor his mortal remains, which probably lie in one of the clandestine graves that populate the national landscape or in the waters of one of our seas.
But Rosário never abandoned the search for her son, and her leadership in the fight for the disappeared was such that she was a candidate for the presidency in 1982 and 1988 for the Revolutionary Workers Party, and was even nominated on four occasions for the Nobel Prize in Peace.
Rosario Ibarra de Piedra has always sought to place the issue of the disappeared during the so-called Dirty War at the center of the public agenda. She even became a senator of the Republic and, later, when she received the Belisario Domínguez medal in 1989, her daughter sent a message and this symbolic recognition remained in the custody of President López Obrador as a gesture of her unswerving struggle.
Today, little is said about those who disappeared. In addition to the fact that some of these fighters are now part of the government, including Rosario Ibarra’s own daughter, there is a new generation of disappeared, not because of the fight against neoliberalism, as President López Obrador often pontificates, but because of the role increasingly prominent role of organized crime, which managed to subdue governments and security services.
And there, as a result, are the images of this week of subjugation and shameful persecution of the military by criminal groups, while the number of disappeared and intentional murders multiply in all corners of the country.
Meanwhile, the president decided not to show his face to the mothers of the disappeared sons and daughters, following the tactic “whom I neither see nor hear”, that Carlos Salinas applied at the time against his political opponents, especially those of the PRD.
Has the president created a parallel reality for himself? Salinas and other presidents have also done this and, as this type of representation has its fixations, codes, interlocutors and truths, everything that leaves this framework is ignored or is reduced to a routine message, like the one that Obrador sent on May 10. There he congratulated the mothers and “… those who suffer for their children, for their disappeared” and then immediately returned to the routine of his morning conferences, a paradoxical element of official journalism.
And it is this political propaganda that ends up compensating the workerist imagination and becomes an input of uncriticism, submission, fanaticism and lack of solidarity against all those who, like the mothers of missing children, touch sensitive points that affect their government.
And let’s be clear, good governments do what the law says and they know that their application is subject to accountability and, for that, they don’t need political incentives. But in cases where the idea that “don’t tell me that ‘the law is the law'” prevails, and this is ratified in social and political support, as polls of voting intentions proliferate today, which would force the government to change its course, including the lack of attention to victims? Anything.
There is a history of governments that have been forced to change their agendas in the face of reality. There is the 1968 movement that led to the liberalization of the political regime, the 1988 fraud that accelerated institutional electoral reforms causing the creation of the IFE (Federal Electoral Institute), or the Zapatista movement that led to the recognition of the rights of indigenous peoples.
However, movements such as that of mothers with missing children, which put governments under the persecution and control of organized crime in trouble, have failed to implement new public policies and budgets. These movements are not met by a democratic state that should avoid images such as that of the woman who, in an act of desperation, took off her clothes in the country’s main square to make her drama visible, the drama of the mothers of disappeared sons and daughters.
