I am starting my fieldwork. I am excited but also very nervous. I spent the last year in Durham reading and learning about the stories of disappearances in Mexico. And now I am in a big, gardened retreat house on the edges of Mexico City. Even though this house is within the borders of the city, its big gardens and the several rooms that comprise it make it ideal for my research purposes. This is one of the reasons I selected this place: it allowed me to be within the city limits ─ which is as far as the risk analysis carried out by the university allowed me to go ─ but its surrounding greenery, and large size allows you to feel far from the buzzing activities of the capital.
I am staying here for four days with sixteen relatives of disappeared persons who have been ferociously looking for their loved ones. They are not just any relatives. They are national leaders: mothers and fathers who are transforming the ways that we talk and think about disappearances in Mexico. My first interview of the day is with Norma. I am feeling uneasy and confused. As preparation for the interview I have been reading about
‘Justice for Our Daughters’ (Justicia para Nuestras Hijas) and ‘Bring Our Daughters Back Home’ (Nuestras Hijas de Regreso a Casa) two of the most important NGOs in Chihuahua, one of the Northern states of Mexico that supports families of disappeared persons in the region. But I am confused: the name of the founding member for both organisations is Norma. Both Normas were looking for their teenage daughters, who had worked in maquilas and disappeared in the early 2000’s.112 Tragically, both had found the bodies of their daughters’ weeks or months after their disappearances. Both had been
112 Maquiladoras are factories that are subsidiaries of foreign companies. They operate with imported raw materials, and re-export all their finished products to the country of origin. [Definition taken from the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights (IACHR) report on the petition of admissibility of the Case Paloma Angélica Escobar Ledezma Et Al.. Mexico, March 14, 2006. Available from:
http://cidh.org/annualrep/2006eng/Mexico.1175.03eng.htm#_ftn2, (Accessed July 2016) See also Chapter 4, page 6, footnote 6.
195 maquiladora. A married woman, with two children. Average, you know, in what you can consider an ordinary family. […] I worked in the maquiladora as a group leader from 6am to 4pm. My daughter... I had my sixteen year-old daughter [called] Paloma, who worked in the same maquiladora in 2002. Along with her work at the maquilas, she studied for her high school [diploma]
in the evenings…it was one of the opportunities that the maquila offered [to continue your studies after work] and on Saturdays she studied in a computing school. She was only sixteen years’ old. thousand girls disappeared, tortured, sexually assaulted and then murdered. According to Amnesty International (2005) the victims have been, in the majority, young girls between sixteen and twenty five years of age from low income households. Some of these girls worked in assembly plants —maquilas— and disappeared after leaving work. Others
196 were either students, or informal commerce employees, or women forced into a combination of prostitution and drug trafficking (Amnesty International, 2005; see also Chapter Four in this thesis).
She didn’t have a mobile phone, so we started searching for her. We went to her computing school but it was closed…we visited our former home…a flat where we used to live, and started asking around the neighbourhood in case someone had seen her…we spoke over the phone with my brothers, with Paloma’s friends…it was almost 2am and we didn’t know where Paloma was […] I immediately knew that something happened to her because she was a muchachita [‘little girl’], she was a girl, sixteen years’ old…she had never been away from home, she was never away from home after nine pm, so we knew that something had happened to her, we kept searching until dawn…Early the next morning we continued searching for her, [we thought] maybe she got lost while trying to get to our new home…but this idea was only something we told ourselves to avoid feeling the reality…(Interview with Norma Ledezma, September 2014).113
Norma and her family searched for Paloma in her friends’ houses, hospitals and at the police station. They visited the computing school again and talked to the school directors who confirmed that Paloma had attended her classes the day before, and had even applied for a change to her school programme because she wanted to attend classes on Saturday mornings. After sorting out these changes, she left the school unaccompanied. With this information, Norma went to report Paloma’s disappearance to the representative of the
113 ‘[B]ut this idea was only something we told ourselves to avoid feeling the reality’ in Spanish: “…un amparo que uno se hace para no .. para no sentir esa realidad…”
197 Public Prosecution Service (MP), who forwarded the case to the head of the Special Sexual and Family Crime Group of the Chihuahua State Judicial Police.
In that moment, Norma’s family faced what several Mexican families reported during my fieldwork as ‘re-victimisation’ through the actions of state authorities. ‘Re-victimisat io n’
can take several forms but, generally, consists of discriminatory treatment on gendered grounds, as expressed through the authorities’ actions. Authorities’ placed importance on hostile formalities that pointed toward the guilt of either the family itself, or of the “moral behaviour” of the missing girl, for instance: questioning the clothes she was wearing, her relationships with friends and boyfriends, etc.114 In Paloma’s case, the authorities asked the family to wait at least 72 hours to see if she returned home after spending time with her boyfriend:
At that time, in the state [of Chihuahua] a disappearance was not considered a crime: it was not part of the Criminal Code. Therefore, authorities would only create a [missing] report, but not a criminal report, so Police officers will start looking for the person after 72 hours had passed. […] [N]owadays things have changed with all the things we have done. But back then, we didn’t know anything about this…the first thing that the local authorities told me was to wait…‘Ma’am she must have run away with her boyfriend, you should wait 72 hours, okay?’ This happened on Sunday morning, but I knew I could not wait […] we were there and my family was in crisis, so we gathered together, and on that same day we started doing brigadas [search brigades] to look out for her…this was a great difference, I suppose, to what I know now from several cases in past years…cases I got to know later, but that happened in 2001 or 2000; in those cases there was not [an immediate search for the person]…so I empirically, I mean, not even empirically, it was my own drive, my maternal motivation to look for her…I know she is not well. She is not at her friends’, she is not at her boyfriends’, or at her ex-boyfriend’s, something has happened to her. If the authorities are not responding, we will have to look for her. (Interview with Norma Ledezma, September 2014, my emphasis.)
114Information taken from http://cidh.org/annualrep/2006eng/Mexico.1175.03eng.htm#_ftn (Accessed:
May 2016).
198 absence, and she referred to her daughter’s disappearance as a kidnapping: “Nowadays I know it wasn’t a kidnapping, at that time I said ‘she was kidnapped’; I couldn’t give another term [to her absence], she was not there, but I always knew that if she wasn’t there it had been against her will.” (Interview with Norma Ledezma, September 2014.)
On Monday, Norma reported Paloma’s absence to the maquiladora. Her employer offered her all the economic support that she might need in case her family received a ransom call. Her friends at the maquiladora supported her by distributing Paloma’s “Missing”
poster across the city. The maquiladora industry recruited people from all over the state;
distributing posters among workers was a way to raise greater awareness of Paloma’s absence. As Norma explains: “In that moment, the police had not yet started the search for Paloma, but we, as a society were already doing things.”116
Norma visited radio stations and contacted television shows and newspapers to inform them of Paloma’s disappearance. After Norma and her family had begun displaying Paloma’s “Missing” posters across the city, she started receiving calls from the mothers of other girls who disappeared in the same area in earlier years, and whose cases had not
115 Norma was employed by Safran, a company that has been operating in Mexico for over 20 years, primarily in the aerospace and security markets. Safran operates the largest aircraft wiring plant in the world in Chihuahua. When the plant was inaugurated in 1996, it was the first aerospace manufacturing plant in Mexico. The site designs and produces 95% of the wiring used on the Boeing 787 Dreamliner and produces 75% of the wiring on the Airbus A380, the world's biggest jetliner. It is Mexico’s largest aerospace employer. Nowadays the plant in Chihuahua has over 4,000 people who work in the largest cabling system manufacturing plant in the world. They have four plants in Mexico and work with other companies in the field of biometrics and security systems and the manufacture of smartcards. Information fro m http://www.safran-group.com/country/mexico.html (Accessed: May 2016).
116 Norma’s comments in Spanish: ‘Todavía la policía no se activaba, pero nosotros como sociedad, ya.’
(Interview with Norma Ledezma, September 2014.)