La ciudadanía civil

Taking the position that what it means to be “absent” is contingent and mutable, what are the implications for those who are experiencing a specific absence? Alejandro’s mother explained to me how, at the very beginning of his absence, she and her family did not know how to define or explain what had happened:

[…] we did not know what might have happened to Alejandro. We knew he was going to visit his friend in Texas, and something or someone prevented him from doing so. When my younger son told us that Alejandro was not at his friend’s house, we worried a lot. The only thing my youngest son could tell us was: “Mum, Alejandro is not there, I think he was kidnapped.”⁹³

This sense of not knowing how to explain this kind of unexpected absence is continuo us ly experienced by the families of the disappeared. During my interviews and infor ma l conversations with these families in Mexico, the only certainty they had was that the absence of their loved ones was out of the ordinary, and certainly not the consequence of any personal decisions. Families’ fears over the well-being of their absent kin must be understood within the context of the violence and insecurity that currently exists in Mexico. However, in other places, such as in the U.K., the absence of an adult person

93 Paraphrases of informal conversations with Lucia, Alejandro’s Mother, in September 2014.

159 does not always immediately raises families’ concerns. In the U.K., “anyone who is eighteen or older and not detained, has the legal right to go missing” (Parr et.al., 2015, p.

203). The legal right to go missing allows individuals to separate from their families and close social networks to take “time out” (usually as part of a personal crisis event) or to absent themselves and start a new life somewhere else. As Payne explains:

Going missing is a social situation in which a person is absent from their accustomed network of social and personal relationships to the extent that people within that network define the absence as interfering with the performance by that person of expected social responsibilities, leading to a situation in which members of the network feel obliged to search for the missing person and may institute official procedures to identify the person as missing (1995, p. 335).

Thus, the term “missing” is often used by state institutions, NGOs and those left behind as a way to define a person’s absence. Therefore to be missing is a situation in that it is attributed and relational (Parr and Fyfe, 2013; Parr and Stevenson, 2013). It is an attributed category since it needs a third party—either family, close social networks, state institutions, and in some cases international organisations, to label the person as

“missing”. To be “missing” is relational since, as discussed above, absences have a relational ontology: they exist in relation to others things and persons.

However, placing the agency on those ‘left behind’ can mean the adult missing person is labelled as a “victim”, and, therefore, seen to possess little autonomy, or ability to make active “choices” (Biehal and Wade in Parr and Stevenson, 2013, p. 24). This is particularly important in cases of returned missing adults, who might feel that their agency has been denied by those who labelled them as “missing”. As Parr et al. argue:

“the act of going missing is entangled with wider meanings associated with the exercise of individual rights: the right to be in the city, free from interference by others, free from search” (Parr et al., 2015, p. 203 emphasis in the original). In a study carried out by Biehal

160 et al. (2003, p. 2) on returned missing adults, the conceptualisation of being missing was understood on a continuum: “from an intentional break in contact, deliberately chosen by the missing person, to an unintentional break in contact, which is not of their choosing and may have been imposed by others.” What is interesting about this research is that along this continuum “people may be considered missing by others, irrespective of whether they consider themselves to be missing” (Biehal et al., 2003, p. 3). In this sense, going missing is not a state-of-being, or an act of a person; it is a situation (Payne, 1995;

Parr and Fyfe, 2013; Parr and Stevenson, 2013).

In the U.K., geography scholars have devoted research to the study of returned missing adults in order to understand absence-making processes as manifestations of agency:

Adults reported missing are absent from their daily lives, but are still present in time and space, and this may account for why they do not identify with the label missing. Being redefined in their absence evoked in adults a sense of loss of control, whereas terms like taking “time-out”, “getting-away” and so on allows more scope for return and less biographical disruption. […] The experience of stigma and feelings of shame caused adults to feel distressed at being labelled as “missing”, while they themselves have a different perception of their circumstances. (Parr and Stevenson, 2013, p. 100-101, my emphasis).

As Parr and Stevenson suggest here, missing adults are present in time and space and, thus, they do not experience their own absence. This is important in terms of how these adults develop their “missing journey”: that is, how they decide to avoid, for example, security infrastructure, such as CCTV cameras or card payments as a way to remain out of sight. Therefore, even though it might be argued that labelling someone as “missing”

places the agency on those left behind, an analysis of these different “missing journeys”, as experienced in the U.K., highlights how agency can also be exercised by those who are reported as missing, for instance: by rejecting the label “missing” and preferring to enga ge

161 with terms such as taking a “time-out” or “getting-away” (Parr et al., 2015; Parr and Stevenson, 2013).

The ways in which absences are experienced and recorded have consequences in search strategies. If a person is reported to the police as “missing”, this might trigger police procedures to try and find the absent person, which may be not necessary in cases where the absent person has decided to “take some time out” from their close social networks.

Taking into account the different geographies of absence and absence-making processes in the U.K. and Scotland, Hester Parr’s work has been crucial to the development of new definitions of being “missing” and “absent”. As a result of national, non-mandatory guidance, police forces in England and Wales have started to draw a distinction between the cases that they categorise as “missing” and those labelled as “absent”. The differe nces between these categories rely on the level of risks that are involved for each particular case. Thus, an “absent” person is defined as “a person who is not at a place where they are expected, or required, to be”, and in these cases officers “will not be deployed initia lly and the incident is monitored remotely” (ACPO, 2015, p. 5). The rationale behind this distinction is to reduce “unnecessary bureaucracy in the police service, and promote the use of professional judgement and a more proportionate approach to the management of risk” (Bayliss and Quinton, 2013, p. 8). A “missing person” is now defined as “anyone whose whereabouts cannot be established, and where the circumstances are out of character, or the context suggests the person may be subject to crime or at risk of harm to themselves or another” (ACPO, 2015, p. 5). In these cases, police officers will be immediately deployed to carry out search and investigation processes.

The different degrees of risk that mediate an absence respond to a spatial-tempo ra l understanding of the situation of each disappearance. Examining spaces where absences occur open up possibilities for analysing the ways in which the relational ontology of absence transforms not only families’ responses to absence, but also changes to the

162 identity of the absent person themselves. Being absent in the U.K., where 90% of missing persons cases are resolved within a week (Tarling and Burrows, 2004; Parr and Stevenson, 2013), does not entail the same risks as being absent in Mexico, where statistics and data on absent or “not located” persons is limited, lacks credibility, or is non-existent.⁹⁴ The responsibility for collecting statistics on missing persons resides within state institutions, either the local police or other federal institution that have the capacity to deploy search strategies. However, there are instances where the recording of such “absent events” is not a priority for the state, since it may highlight high levels of violence in an area or failed police interventions.

In the case of Mexico, the high levels of “missing” or “non-located” person’s reports were noticed by non-governmental organisations, prompting, once more, a visit from the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in 2015. After his visit, the commissioner confirmed the rising levels of violence and generalised state of impunit y, and, in his report, described a country where 98% of all crimes remain unsolved, with the great majority never properly investigated (UN, 2015):

For a country that is not engaged in a conflict, the estimated figures are simply staggering: 151,233 people killed between December 2006 and August 2015, including thousands of transiting migrants. There are at least 26,000 people missing, many believed to be a result of enforced disappearances since 2007. Thousands of women and girls are sexually assaulted, or become victims of the crime of femicide. And hardly anyone is convicted for the above crimes. […] Many enforced disappearances, acts of torture and extra-judicial killings are alleged to have been carried out by federal, state and municipal authorities, including the police and some segments of the army, either acting in their own interests or in collusion with organized criminal groups […].

94 According to Hester’s Parr research “the majority (54%) of adults returned or were located within forty -eight hours, and 24% were missing between forty --eight hours and seven days, with only a minority outstanding for several weeks”(Parr et.al., 2015, p. 201).

163 The High Commissioner’s description illustrates why there is generalised lack of trust in the police and the criminal justice system. It shows a country where, if you are the victim of a crime, the last people you would call for support are the police (UN, 2015). Moreover, criminalisation or victim blaming is a common occurrence in Mexico. Not only does this cast aspersions on the victims and their families, but it also reduces the likelihood of investigations into these cases being taken seriously (Ruse, 2015). The criminalisation of absence also creates a scenario in which many people in Mexico consider themselves to be distanced from the insecurity and violence since “it only occurs amongst ‘lower-class criminals’” (Ruse, 2015, p. 8).

As explained by Lucia:

[…] Look, they are innocent, they are innocent victims…It is not what they have explained to us, that those who were disappearing or being killed were only criminals. […] before this tragedy country…and that is the way all us Mexicans are—those that have not lived my tragedy. As a matter of fact, we suffer the criminalisation; even our own friends start to distance themselves from us due to fear…our bad luck could be contagious. We live like ostriches (Interview with Lucia, August 2014).⁹⁵

In Mexico family members have been asked to wait at least 72 hours to report someone as “lost” or “not located”. This is not the case for missing children: under the age of eighteen there is a search protocol, the ‘Amber Alert’ that is implemented immediately in order to locate the missing child. However, even in high-risk cases, authorities have failed

95 ‘Like ostriches that bury their head in the sand’. This is a common metaphor used when “people are refusing to acknowledge advice or in denial about their situation, hoping that by denying the existence of a problem, it will go away.”

164 to provide adequate responses to child disappearances, especially in cases involving missing teenage-girls.⁹⁶

As the days passed without information of his whereabouts, Alejandro’s family suspected he must have been the victim of a kidnapping. Alejandro’s family took a 1 hour and 45 minute flight to Nuevo Leon, in the northern part of Mexico, to reach the location where Alejandro’s last call to the family home was made. When they reported Alejandro’s absence to the local police station, the officers repeatedly told them ‘Don’t worry ma’am, they will give you your son back in three months. As for the vehicle [he was driving], you’ll find it later on one of the nearby ranchos’. (Interview with Lucia, August 2014).

Listening to these comments from the local authorities gave Lucia and Don Alfonso⁹⁷ hope that Alejandro might return home soon. But days and weeks passed, and no one called. Without a ransom call or any kind of rescue negotiation between the family and the kidnappers, authorities would not start a criminal investigation. Alejandro’s family realised that the decentralized nature of search and location processes in Mexico, the apparent collusion between organised crime and local authorities, as well as the lack of security and state control in some spaces, would make it impossible for local and federal authorities to account for their son’s absence. Thus, the family decided that they needed to start their own search for Alejandro.

96 For an example on this see the Inter-American Court on Human Rights ’ resolution on the ‘Cotton field’

case, where the Mexican government was found responsible for the crime through their lack of protection of civilians and their lack of due diligence in the investigation of the homicide of three female victims (two of whom were minors) who were found in a cotton field in Ciudad Juárez on November 6, 2001.

http://www.corteidh.or.cr/docs/casos/articulos/seriec_205_ing.pdf (Accessed: January 2016).

97 The word Don is a prefix used in Spanish to denote respect to a male forename. That was the way I always addressed Don Alfonso during the multiple conversations I had with him.

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