Montes de María: la expansión del paramilitarismo

I cannot remember the first time that I heard about disappearances in Mexico. But I clearly remember the first time that I heard about the efforts of families to locate their missing persons. This was four years ago, in February 2012, while I was living in Colombia. Somehow, being away made me more aware and more interested in the socio- political situation of my home country. I used to listen to Carmen Aristegui’s radio programme every morning, an influential Mexican anchor-woman, famous for her analytical and investigative journalism57_{. During her programme on the 15 February}

2012, Aristegui interviewed Mr. Castillo, the father of Carolina, a fifteen- year-old girl who disappeared in 2009 from the city centre of Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, while walking to school. After a dismissive response from their local authorities (who, it transpired, were negligent in their duties throughout), her family decided to start their own search. According to their investigations, Carolina may well have been abducted and taken 1,800 kilometres south to the State of Mexico, where she was sexually trafficked. In order to pay for his travel expenses to the State of Mexico, Mr Castillo started selling hamburgers in Ciudad Juárez city centre, in the same spot where his daughter was last seen. I could not believe that this kind of situation was even possible. How could a poor family be left with no choice but to gather money to search for their own daughter? I remember reading about femicides in Mexico quite a long time ago. There was even a

56 _{Tabulating missing persons and creating independent registries of civilian deaths, has established itself}

as a practice needed for accountability efforts. On the importance of independent records of civilian deaths see ‘Iraq Body Count’, a non-profit initiative to verify reported deaths in Iraq as a result of the violence of the occupation. The information collected relies on secondary sources from reputable media.

https://www.iraqbodycount.org/ (Accessed: 15 September, 2016). In the case of the former Yugoslavia, the increased focus on counting the Srebrenica victims, which some agencies have calculated at 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys, has led other ethno -national groups to compile their own (Smith and Wagner, 2007, p. 35).

57 _{On November 2016, Carmen Aristegui was chosen by the BBC as one of the most influential Mexican}

journalists in history who has put some of the most powerful people in her country on the spot. M ore Information available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-38012048 (Accessed: December 2016).

103 Hollywood movie starring Jennifer Lopez, playing the role of a journalist who investigated the femicides. But they seemed to be happening ‘over there’, in the socially and economically deprived areas near the border with the United States, and far away from my comfortable middle class neighbourhood in Mexico City. All of a sudden, listening to Mr. Castillo made everything feel more real: closer.

Two months later, in April 2012, I volunteered for an independent counting exercise called Fewer Days Here (Menos Dias Aquí)58_{. Initially, the task appeared to be relative l y}

straightforward: for seven days I visited the webpages of several newspapers located across the country in order to collage information from homicide reports or news of violent killings that had taken place in that week, and I gathered as much information as possible regarding the victims. The data collected included age, gender, the clothes they were wearing at the time, and identifying characteristics such as moles, tattoos, etc. During my seven days carrying out this project, I counted more than 280 individuals who had been violently killed. There were cases of crossfires between police officers and gang members, dismembered bodies appearing inside plastic bags in city centres, children who were killed outside their houses while playing football, and drug related incidents that involved the murder of young boys, with their bodies found along highways.

During my participation on this project, my mentor at Menos Dias Aquí sent me regular emails monitoring my wellbeing. She knew that this would be an emotionally draining experience and wanted to know how I was coping with its pressures. But, aside from feeling a little disconcerted by the material that I was reading (usually near midnight, when I had the time to invest two to three hours to collect the data), I initially remained composed. I was surprised, though, to find that I was only able to gather limited

58 _{This project is organised by the association ‘Our Apparent Surrender’ (Nuestra Aparente Rendición), and}

it is intended as a way of remembering and honouring the victims of the violence in the country, whilst at the same time creating the possibility of generating statistical insights into violence patterns (Ruse, 2015). For more information visit: http://nuestraaparenterendicion.com/index.php/estamos -haciendo/menos -dias- aqui (Accessed: 17 September, 2016).

104 information on each victim, with articles containing few details that might aid their identification. Each description read almost identically: “Male, early 20s, dark skinned, brown hair and eyes, wearing jeans, short sleeved t-shirt and trainers”. With such descriptions, the victim could have been anyone: my brother, my friends from univers it y, or my cousins.

A couple of weeks after I finished my participation with Menos Dias Aquí, I started feeling depressed: I was sad and lacking in energy, for no apparent reason. Then I cried for days, two or three, it seemed. I could not find the reason for my sadness. Until I realised that I was crying for them, for the 285 persons whose deaths I had been counting59_.

105

Chapter Four: Disappearances and