Mexico’s “buscadoras,” or seekers, seek political support in the United States after finding little more than closed doors in their home country.
The term searchers refers to the often gruesome task of physically sifting through the dirt for human remains overlooked by Mexico’s professional forensic services.
The searchers are mainly mothers and sisters of the more than 100,000 missing people in Mexico – people who disappeared without a trace, alleged victims of criminal activities.
Forming collectives across the country, the searching relatives are doing work they say Mexican officials at the local, state and federal levels will not do, including President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, whose six-year term ends Oct. 1.
“The Mexican government is leaving. There will soon be elections and, in these six years, he has never had five minutes for the country’s victims. In his entire six-year term, he did not receive a single search engine in the country,” said Bibiana Mendoza, who contributed to the creation of Hasta Ficarte, “Until We Find You,” a search collective in the city of Irapuato in the central state of Guanajuato. .
According to the United Nations, 97 percent of the disappearances have occurred since 2006, when Mexico militarized its response to cartel violence. The homicide rate jumped from 4 per 100,000 inhabitants that year to 12 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2012.
The official homicide rate in Mexico is correlated with presidential administrations and their public security policies.
Former President Felipe Calderón, a traditional conservative who ordered the militarization of the country’s policing, oversaw the rise until 2012.
Calderón’s successor, Enrique Peña Nieto, governed as a centrist, but his administration became more associated with corruption than any specific policy, although under his government homicide rates fell to 8 per 100,000 inhabitants before rising again. rising to 12 per 100,000.
López Obrador, whose “hugs, not bullets” police strategy has long been criticized, oversaw an increase to 15 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants and a drop to 12 per 100,000 inhabitants.
Mexico’s dismal public safety records over the past two decades appear to be independent of party – the last three presidents had three distinct political affiliations – something Mendoza linked to the country’s fanatical partisanship.
“I see public officials in Mexico, from the moment they take on a government position, it seems that they lose their humanity and exchange it for the defense of a political party,” said Mendoza.
“Everyone there says: ‘My party did the right things. My party did this for the disappeared or my party is not to blame for the violence, that is the previous party’, and they want to insert social causes, the searches that women carry out in Mexico, into a political game that they use as a campaign, conveniently. And once we’re on the path, this new rhetoric comes along: ‘You’re either with me or against me,’ so the state stopped being an ally a long time ago.”
But López Obrador, who campaigned as a leftist, made sweeping promises to the families of missing individuals, including the families of 43 student activists who were kidnapped in the state of Guerrero in 2014 and are presumed dead.
Those promises included strengthening a national search commission and allowing independent investigations, but López Obrador’s perspective as an outside critic of Peña Nieto’s handling of the case and other disappearances changed when he came to power.
“There has been a certain level of attention and progress that has been possible for some time in the case of Ayotzinapa, particularly during this administration – there certainly hasn’t been that kind of dialogue, collaboration and attention given in general to the search collectives,” said Stephanie Brewer. , Mexico director of the Washington Office for Latin America (WOLA), a think tank focused on human rights.
“So that’s the context, but what has happened, especially in the last year or year and a half, is that the López Obrador government seems to have decided that it no longer wants to pay the political costs of facing this crisis.”
In November, López Obrador accused former officials of his own administration of inflating the number of disappearances to “affect” his government.
He called for a new census of disappearances, following complaints from Karla Quintana, who in August resigned as head of the National Search Commission, denouncing attempts to clean up the official numbers in favor of López Obrador.
With the federal government turning its back and frequently facing threats from criminal organizations eager to keep evidence of their crimes secret, the colectivos continued their search, but also sought attention abroad.
Earlier this month, Mendoza and Olimpia Montoya of Proyecto de Búsqueda — the search project — were recognized with the WOLA Human Rights Award at the group’s 50th anniversary gala in Washington.
The group also visited administration and congressional offices, seeking to increase visibility and oversight of forensic equipment provided to Mexico by the US.
“My heart goes out to the families who had a loved one forcibly disappeared in Guanajuato or other parts of Mexico, many of whom searched for the missing without many resources and with little or no support,” said Senator Tim Kaine (D-Va. ). .) told The Hill in an email.
“I am concerned about the alarming number of disappearances, the low number of convictions and the staggering impunity in Mexico. I urge the Mexican government to work with the United Nations Committee on Enforced Disappearances to strengthen its transparency mechanisms and methodology. I will continue to monitor this situation closely and work with key stakeholders to find effective ways to work together to resolve these serious issues.”
But US-Mexico relations are at a standstill, with federal elections taking place soon in both countries.
The elections in Mexico will be scheduled for June 2, with former mayor of Mexico City Claudia Sheinbaum being the big favorite, although opposition candidate Xóchitl Gálvez has reinvigorated her campaign a little during the final stretch.
Sheinbaum, López Obrador’s handpicked successor, is expected to continue his policies if he takes office on October 1, a month before the US elections.
This is the Biden administration’s current main interest in bilateral affairs, as López Obrador has effectively reduced migrant border crossings through law enforcement throughout Mexico, giving the Biden administration political breathing room on a critical issue.
“The United States praises the vitality of Mexico’s democracy, even amid very clear and worrying signs of democratic backsliding under the López Obrador administration. The United States is not being as vocal on some of the human rights issues in Mexico as we might see in another country,” Brewer said.
“Therefore, everything would indicate that what López Obrador receives in exchange for these migration enforcement actions on the Mexican side is largely the spoken or tacit agreement that certain other thorny issues will not be raised to criticize him or will not be used in the same way. form. in the bilateral relationship.”
Amid high diplomacy and politics, searchers say they will continue to try to find a solution for their missing relatives, who are often revictimized with allegations of criminality or racialized dehumanization.
Mendoza and Montoya said they remain without help in the search for their family members – in their specific cases, their brothers – shunned by a society that often sees victims as criminals unworthy of public resources.
“Unfortunately, we are asked to be perfect in a country where everyone is not given the tools to be equal. We are asked to have a way of being and behave like privileged people when we had no privileges at all,” Mendoza said.
This story originally appeared on thehill.com read the full story
