Mexico's Disappeared: A Mother Speaks

Maria Elena Herrera speaking during Movement for Peace Caravan to the South of Mexico, Sept. 2011
Photo: Mexico Voices

La Jornada:  Part 2 of a two-part report

Sanjuana Martínez

Maria Elena Herrera Magdaleno heard the presentation by Rainer Huhle in the forum on the disappeared, but says she is not convinced by the discourse of either Mexican or foreign officials. She has four sons who are missing. Jesus and Raul disappeared with five companions on August 28, 2008, in Atoyac de Alvarez, Guerrero.

"From that day our life changed. We began a relentless search. For two years we tried to find them, paying lawyers, hiring people who told us they were detectives. There were those who abused us, saying they were going to get us mobile networks so that we might know where they had made this or that call. We were swindled and we started handing out money that we didn't have. We're out of resources."

Two years later, her sons Gustavo and Luis Armando left to work in Veracruz and disappeared in Poza Rica on August 21, 2010.

"The torture, the torment that we are living through cannot be compared to anything. Now we're without resources or the means to search."

Maria Elena has been gradually wasting away. She had 11 children, of whom eight lived, but she can't stop thinking about those who are no longer with her:

"They have snatched four from me. I keep looking for them. I am at all the events. I go when they invite me and when they don't invite me. I join all the associations or groups of people who are in search of their loved ones. I don't stop fighting."

Hopelessness is reflected in her eyes and her words convey anguish:

"The system of government is not serving us. Within institutions we have found good people who want to do the right thing, but the same system of government has already determined certain things. That's what hurts. They speak very nicely, but I don't see actions."

Maria Elena was invited to the dialogue that members of the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity held with Felipe Calderon, where she declared to him that his war had failed:

"I was very confident that before Calderón left he was going to move my problem forward, but he did nothing. To date, I don't have my children with me. Now, I don't know what to think. I'm afraid to talk, to hurt feelings, but the truth is, our pain is so great that we are no longer looking for who did it, but for who is going to pay us. We are very tired. Peña Nieto showed us his face when he approved the Victims Law, but then nothing. Here we are, just like in the beginning, and we will continue ... walking on our calluses."

She can't hold back the tears.

Ricardo Garcia Cervantes, Deputy Attorney General for Human Rights [and responsible for the recently created United Search for Disappeared Persons], passes by and acknowledges in an interview that the relatives are also victims of the Mexican justice system.

"The most diligent and serious investigations are in the notebooks, the folders of moms, dads and other family members. Part of the problem is that the Public Ministry [investigative police and prosecutors, under the direction of the Attorney General] has a sensitivity different from that required to focus its work on the search for missing persons in order to find them alive."

La Jornada: How long will you stay in office if there are no results? You are part of the machinery that allows impunity and is inoperative.

"I don't have a deadline, but if there is no honesty and sincerity in the proposals and implementation, then I have nothing to do there. The indicator that I'll wait for in the short term, at most a couple of years, are indictments and convictions.

La Jornada: What if there aren't any?

"One of two things: either it was a simulation or Mexico has to tell the world outright that its institutions don't work."

La Jornada: Would you be part of a state simulation?

"No."

Spanish original: Parts 1 and 2.
Part 1 in English