Reforma: Jesús Silva-Herzog Márquez*
Translated by Amanda Coe
To the horror of the violence throughout the last ten years we must add the horror of ignorance about it. The chances of knowing what happened the night in Iguala [police attack on and disappearance of Ayotzinapa normal school students] have been squandered by politicians and experts who are discrediting each other and throwing accusations [See MV Note below]. I don’t know who has committed the worst mistakes. I don’t intend to take one side and blame the other side. What I want to point out here is that we have insisted on ignoring what happened, destroying the path to the truth, and thus, preventing the process of understanding. Not only in Iguala.
To the horror of the violence throughout the last ten years we must add the horror of ignorance about it. The chances of knowing what happened the night in Iguala [police attack on and disappearance of Ayotzinapa normal school students] have been squandered by politicians and experts who are discrediting each other and throwing accusations [See MV Note below]. I don’t know who has committed the worst mistakes. I don’t intend to take one side and blame the other side. What I want to point out here is that we have insisted on ignoring what happened, destroying the path to the truth, and thus, preventing the process of understanding. Not only in Iguala.
I fear that ignorance is one of the characteristic features of our transition to barbarism. We have taken no notice of the violence that has erupted throughout the country since 2008. Yes, we have numbers. We also have pictures and stories. Measuring violence has become an industry. The media fills the breakfast table with homicide reports.
Today we killed 8% lower than yesterday. But last week we went up 12%. The macabre account invites us to familiarize ourselves with death, to rank it as ordinary a phenomenon as rain, winds, traffic. It is true that records, maps of violence, data of those disappeared and displaced, have all risen, but we have hardly any names. The tragedy of this decade remains an ignored tragedy.
J. M. Coetzee paused on the word “ignore” in his speech given in Mexico to receive an honorary doctorate from the Iberoamerican University. ... In Spanish, ignorar has two meanings. On the one hand, it can mean ‘to not know’: I don’t know if the letter arrived on time. On the other hand, it can also mean ‘to overlook’, ‘to ignore’, ‘to pretend that something or someone does not exist’: Pepe will be at the party, ignore him. We know that he will be there, but we act like we don’t see him. In English, the South African novelist warns, ‘to ignore’ has only the latter meaning, to pretend that what we know exists doesn’t. “If you ignore someone, it means that the person is there but you behave as if they are not.” To ignore is to be aware that something or someone exists but act as if it does not exist.
Our ignorance has both meanings. First, genuine ignorance; second, dissimulation. When journalist Arcadi Espada came to Mexico a few years ago and was able to meet with national security officials, he asked simple questions: who has the full list of those killed in these years? Is it a public list? Who has access to it? The list does not exist. We do not have a reliable census of victims. In Mexico, Espada concludes, “you can die without being on a list of the dead,” (“Violence in the Media,” Letras Libres, July 2011). The State has not even been able to identify the victims. This intentional ignorance allows us to talk about The Violence as an abstraction, an illusion, rather than as a brutal reality that alters and ends the lives of many.
We also ignore in the second meaning: we pretend that what exists does not matter. Upon taking over the government, the Peña Nieto administration issued an invitation: we know that there is violence, but we suggest that we act as if there weren't. This was certainly was an effort to overcome the weariness that his predecessor’s police discourse caused [that of Felipe Calderón]. We will talk about reform and the future, about consensus, but not about crime. If we change the conversation, if we look the other way, if we agree not to talk about crime, it will stop imposing itself on us. The strategy, as we know, lasted as long as it lasted. [MV Note: The violence of Iguala/Ayotzinapa interrupted but didn't end it. It changed to "let's get past it".] The ignored violence continues here.
It is difficult to choose the most painful tragedy from the lengthy list of our horrors. The night that police, supporting criminals, kidnapped 43 students may be the most terrible, the most traumatic; not only for handing over public security forces to the worst barbarism, but also for the improbability of bringing closure to the tragedy with the truth. The Cocula [dump] crematorium is a horrible symbol of the Mexican tragedy: disappearances without a trace, bones without names, ashes without owners.
MV Note: The government continues to maintain that at least some of the Ayotzinapa students were, or could have been, incinerated in a garbage dump in Cocula, a town near Iguala, but two independent studies, by the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (IGIE) from the Inter-American Human Rights Commission and the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, question this. Remains of some bodies were found in the dump, but none have been identified. Two students were indentified from burned remains the government says were found in plastic bags in a river near the dump.Reforma only allows subscribers to access its articles online.
*Jesús Silva-Herzog Márquez, Mexican academic and essayist, is the son of noted economist Jesús Silva-Herzog Flores, and grandson of historian Jesús Silva Herzog. Born in 1965, he studied law at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and has an MA in political science from Columbia University. He is currently a professor in the School of Government of Monterrery Tech . He is a columnist for Reforma and host of "Between Three" on TV Azteca. @jshm00