Calderon's Indifference for the 'Desaparecidos'

 Marcela Turati  Proceso November 10, 2012

Translated by un vato for Borderland Beat

Among the answers and actions that Calderon still owes are the painful complaints about disappeared persons. Mutilated families, especially mothers, have searched for their children among threats by organized crime and the garbage dump that is (Mexico's) system of justice. Because it was all in vain, they took refuge in the inflexible laws of their love, which do not allow them to abandon their struggle merely because government officials change.

Mexico, D.F. (Proceso).-- With stiff bodies under the layer of blankets, the women try in vain to drive away the cold that has settled in their bones. Another day begins in front of the Ministry of the Interior (Secretaria de Gobernacion), sleeping on a platform right on the pavement, in a tent that they covered with photographs of their children and dozens of other "desaparecidos" (disappeared persons.) The noise of the horns from the cars that pass right beside them force them to use up precious energy to make themselves heard.

It's 9:00 a.m. on the fourth day of their hunger strike. Margarita Lopez, Malu Garcia and Julia Alonso are refusing to eat until the government does what it has failed to do throughout this six-year term.

"It has been five years since I filed a complaint because of my son's disappearance and they did not even include my complaint in the file; there is no investigation, they are not looking for him, they have not summoned anybody to give a statement. All this time I thought there were people investigating, I believed in justice. So then, what's the use in waiting any longer? Today, I'm going all out and, if I have to fall in this struggle, I'll stay here," says Julia Alonso without altering her expression, even though she's talking about dying.



Margarita on left, has been a strong  advocate since her 19 year old daughter
 disappeared a year ago in Oaxaca -poster of her daughter Yahaira below

 

Her health is the worst. The day before, her glucose (blood sugar) level was 40, less than half of normal. She fainted. A paramedic predicted that during the night she could become unconscious due to hypoglycemia and he requested the authorities to keep an ambulance close by. The Ministry of Interior did not call for one, but the president of the House of Representatives, Jesus Murillo Karam, sent one.

At the entrance to the tent, there is a smiling photograph of her first-born Julio, her Julio. Julio Alberto Josue Lopez Alonso disappeared with three friends on January 12, 2008, after he had gone surfing in the La Boca reservoir, in Santiago, Nuevo Leon. Afterwards, it was learned that they were picked up by municipal police officers employed by drug traffickers.

La Boca, Santiago, where Julio Alberto Josue Lopez was taken by police working for narcos

Margarita Lopez, from Michoacan, who grieves for her daughter Yahaira Guadalupe Bahena, 19 years old, presumably tortured and murdered by the Zetas in Oaxaca, adds: "We will not leave here until we get a resolution to our petitions or we go out dead.  What else is left for us if we are at risk of getting murdered for raising our voices? What can be better than dying for an act of justice for our children? We are here and we're not moving."

Fasting in solidarity with them is Malu Garcia, human rights defender from Juarez, displaced after several attacks against her and the murder of a relative. On the street, outside the tent, other mothers pray for their health, victims of the torture of not knowing where their children are.

Time lies heavy on these women, it's their enemy. Not just because of the havoc it wreaks on their bodies, not just because of the vomiting, headaches, ups and downs in their blood pressure and other health problems it causes: every day that passes reduces the possibility of finding their children.

Their measure of time is different from that of Secretary Alejandro Poire, who, when he finally agreed to meet with them the night before, told them to focus on defining "their priorities" because the Calderon officials have only 16 working days left in their terms. And you can bet that bureaucrats measure time differently than a mother who doesn't stop searching on weekends.

"For us, they're all priorities; we're not asking for much nor for anything unreasonable," Margarita Lopez says she responded.

What she's asking for, for example, is for them to give her an official letter so that the FBI will give her the DNA results they obtained from the decapitated body that the authorities want her to accept, blindly, as her daughter's, and to allow the Argentine Team of Forensic Anthropology to compare the information.

Thursday night the Secretary asked them to lift the sit-in protest and to go home to rest. The women said "No";  they have sat around too many dialogue tables from which they leave full of always unfulfilled promises.

"They insist that they are worried about our health. It's fake; they should have worried before," -- says Julia Alonso--. "A mother deserves to be told what happened to her son."

"I want to tell you..."


From Chihuahua their children vanished

The sit-in was born in a fit of desperation, like those common with families with disappeared persons. The women played around with the idea for eight months, but they were always talked out of it by their friends in the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity. During the last march outside the PGR, on October 10, with barren results, they could not stand it any more.

November 6 dawned with three women sitting on the bare ground outside the Palacio de Covian. As the story spread, supporters began bringing them tents, blankets, jugs of water, chairs, honey. Mothers from the capital and from around the state also came and put up photographs of their own children on the walls.

"When Julia told me she had made up her mind, I traveled from Lazaro Cardenas. And that's how we saw the sunrise. We began by sitting on the floor, freezing with cold. We didn't have a tent or anything, we didn't know we had to drink honey and water," relates Margarita Lopez.

She was "picked up" last year and warned that she should stop looking for her daughter and stop pointing a finger at the Army in her statements. She's the same person who uncovered networks who were trafficking in young girls; she disguised herself and used wigs to go into illegal businesses and paid millions of pesos to informants (police agents and military personnel, as well as drug traffickers) for information. 

Piedras Negras-The man above says both of his brothers were kidnapped



Protesting, desperate for promised answers

They tolerated the first day without too many cramps. The second day, their stomachs were growling and hurting from hunger. The third day, in addition to hunger they had a severe headache because they did not know that they were supposed to take honey and water every 20 minutes. That was a day of dizziness, vomiting, weakness, blood pressure highs and lows and, at night, Julia's fainting spell.

On orders from Deputy Secretary Obdulio Avila, they were denied electricity, which condemned them to suffering from the cold at night, even though they had a heater.

"It gets easier now; the body gets used to not eating," says Julia Alonso, smiling, with half of her body between the blankets.

(Extracted from a report that appears in Proceso No. 1880, now in circulation.) 

Source: http://www.proceso.com.mx/?p=324918