Mexico-Unclean Wounds

MEXICO

Unclean Wounds

Masked gunmen stormed a bus in northern Mexico in early March. Carrying a list of names, they abducted 19 passengers and disappeared. Mexican investigators still don’t know who the gunmen were, where they took the abductees or why they might have wanted passengers who appeared to be humble migrants heading to the US, CNN reported.

An estimated 40,000 people have fallen victim to enforced disappearances, torture, secret graves and other human rights violations in Mexico, according to UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet. Some are victims of drug cartel violence or other criminals. Some are dissidents who crossed the wrong corrupt politicians.

More than four years ago, 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College disappeared in southwestern Mexico. Their whereabouts are unknown. At a memorial ceremony for them last year, students and teachers lined up 43 chairs on a stage at the school, the New York Times reported.

An estimated 2,000 unmarked graves dot the countryside, too. Some families put up posters, like those who told NPR how their 71-year-old schoolteacher father disappeared without a trace. Other desperate Mexicans, tired of waiting for corrupt officials to do their jobs, assembled into “collectives” to find their lost loved ones.

“The collectives have relied on a simple technique to locate buried bodies,” wrote Human Rights Watch. “They hammer a metal rod into the ground at a suspected grave site. When the stench of death emerges, they know they have hit their mark.”

But often, after DNA testing, the families discover they’ve dug up someone else’s loved ones. Those remains number among some 26,000 unidentified bodies.

The crisis is emotional and political, argued Bachelet, a former president of Chile who was tortured under her country’s late dictator, Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Families can’t move on because they don’t know the fate of their loved ones. Without knowing their fate, they can’t seek justice.

“Wounds that are not clean will not heal,” Bachelet said at the conclusion of a recent visit to Mexico City. “The open wounds of the past, and those that persist in the present, demand truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of non-repetition.”

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a leftist who assumed office late last year, is trying to address the issue. He’s set up a Truth and Justice Commission to investigate the Ayotzinapa students’ disappearances. And he has been critical of the security services.

“There was a time in which the main violator of human rights was the state,” Lopez Obrador said recently, according to Reuters. “That’s over.”

One can’t blame Mexicans for not believing him until they know for sure.