Torn from the World

by John Gibler

  I always said to myself: “I won’t give up until I find him, or they give him back, at least his body, until they tell me what they did to him, where he is.” Because I felt that he was still alive, that he hadn’t left. I always said to myself: “If I were born again, raised again, I wouldn’t change, I would still be here. I would do the same thing.” It is the same as when you have to decide. They ask you: “Are you in or out? There’s no problem if you leave. It is your right.” You respond: “I can’t. If I leave, I surrender. He wouldn’t like that. No. I have to fight.”

  I always felt that one day I would find him. But I also thought at times about death: “If you are dead, I can’t leave, I’ll stay here. I’ll know how to survive it all. To survive this. But I know that you are alive and you’ll be back. I’ll find you. I don’t know how many years it will take.”

  Sometimes books say: “He was disappeared and reappeared so many years later” or “they had him in such and such a place, they tortured him, he broke out and escaped.” I felt that he was alive. The pain is so strong. It is inexplicable. No. I don’t know how to say it . . . What else can I say?

  Tzompaxtle: How did the organization address the issue of your children? I suppose that the children didn’t understand an explanation. What was it like with them?

  Nube: Sad. I didn’t know what to tell them. At times they’d say to me: “And dad?” And I would tell them, dad is alive and he’ll be back any time now. That he would be . . . that we’d have to see him again and hug him and feel him and . . . I always said to myself: “He is very strong, it doesn’t matter how they have him, it doesn’t matter, he’ll make it through.” And to him: “You are strong. I don’t know how you are, nor where you are. You have to endure. You have to resist. It sounds cruel, but it doesn’t matter if they torture you, you have to endure. You can’t let us down.”

  I never believed he was dead. Only once did I tell myself: “If he is dead I want his body. I want them to give me his body and then I’ll rest. I wouldn’t have to look for him, I’d know that they killed him.” But I felt that it wasn’t so. On the news, Ángel Aguirre said that he . . . that they had him, that the Army had him. They couldn’t kill him because . . . they had him. Although I think Aguirre said that he made a mistake, that he didn’t know. But he did, he did know. They all know what they do.

  That spirit, that feeling that he was alive—“I don’t know how or when or at what time, but one day I’ll see him again”—that hope never died. I’d tell my children: “I don’t know when, in how many years, I don’t know, ten, fifteen, but you will see your dad again.” I think that children always understand what you tell them, what you transmit to them. I remember that my daughter would tell me: “Dad’s coming; he’s coming back.” So I think that in all that we weren’t wrong. Here we are, and that is what counts: our family.

  Tzompaxtle: And what feeling hit you when you found out or when they told you that he had appeared, that he had returned? How did you imagine he’d be? The same? Worse? Did you ever think that he would change and betray his ideals?

  Nube: Never! Knowing him, never. He can’t betray his ideals. Never.

  Tzompaxtle: But he was being tortured.

  Nube: It doesn’t matter. When you know someone well enough, no . . .

  Tzompaxtle: What are his traits?

  Nube: His nobility, his lack of vanity, his humbleness. His feelings. I don’t think that could have changed. What could he have done? Sold out? I don’t think so. Because there were comments to that effect, that if they had him alive, that could have happened. He could have betrayed us. But I always said no, with absolute certainty. Before falling into betrayal he would have preferred to die. But not betray. He wasn’t born to be a traitor. On the contrary, in that case none of what we believe, what we do, what he has always been would make any sense.

  Tzompaxtle: What feelings remain after all that, on finding out that he has returned? What is the first thing you think, or the first thing you tell him?

  Nube: To see him, hold him, and tell him that I missed him so much.

  Tzompaxtle: What shape was he in when you saw him? What did they tell you at first?

  Nube: They told me that he was in really bad shape, that the Army had done nearly everything to him. And that there was some risk that he could have betrayed. Being here was a really big risk, the compañeros said. They weren’t certain that he had remained a man faithful Commander to the struggle. Faithful to what we do and what we love. I always told them that he would always remain loyal to the struggle. But they said it was possible that the Army had let him out.

  I understood that it would have taken a lot of imagination to invent what he told, for what he said had happened to him; that’s why he was thin, too thin. The only thing he did was cry. He had a feeling . . . he never denied the struggle. But he did feel pain, I don’t know how to explain it. Just remembering it is . . . going back. What they did to him is despicable, it is . . . I think it is inhuman. When someone falls into their hands . . . it is outrageous. As a human being it is offensive to see a person taken to that point. But you say: “He is alive, he is here.” That is what you value most. That is what matters. What happened, it happened. It is irremediable. They already tortured him. We can’t turn back the clock. We just have to struggle so that it doesn’t happened to him again nor to anyone else ever. It doesn’t matter who they may be. It doesn’t matter what race they may be or where they may be from. People should have feelings, they should become outraged by what happens to people. And I’m not inventing anything. You see it in the news, hear it on the radio, see it on television, or in the newspaper. It shouldn’t happen to anyone. Anyone.

  When they captured him they should have openly acknowledged it, not tortured him. Because, in the end, we are all . . . we are all equal. I don’t know what becomes of the ones who torture, I don’t even know why they do it. They really are slaves to a system, no? That’s what I think. We are free, we want to be free. But they won’t let us be free. And our freedom is the struggle, so that we can all be equals.

  Tzompaxtle: Why do you think they doubted? What led them to doubt, or what was the main idea of the doubt the compañeros had concerning him? What did they base their doubt in?

  Nube: Well, I don’t know. If they doubted, it could be because . . . many things went through their heads. I don’t know. I won’t answer that. I don’t want to answer. I don’t want to.

  [Someone turns off the voice recorder.]

  * Fields combining corn, beans, and other vegetables such as chilies or squash.

  ** A usually rectangular stone mortar.

  *** Mixture of ground corn, water, and lime used in making tortillas.

  THE DISAPPEARED

  ON THURSDAY, MAY 10, 2012, the mothers marched through the streets of Mexico City.1 Their children were disappeared and the authorities—or at least that’s what they call them—have done nothing to look for them. Many of the mothers, and also sisters, daughters, and nieces, carried signs with the names and photographs of the disappeared. Some of the signs also showed the dates, times, and places of the abductions. On many of these signs could be read the name of the police or military unit that disappeared their children. How did the mothers know who took their children? Because they witnessed the abductions, or because they themselves investigated. There they went, floating in the air, advancing along Reforma Avenue, from the Monument to the Revolution to the Angel of Independence, the absent children, their absent case files, their absent investigations. The names, faces, and brief details of the horror that took them, all printed on poster board and held aloft by the women who marched that day. One can count the names. One can measure the distance they walked. One can view the photographs and the videos reporters and activists took. One can hear the recordings of their chants. But the pain . . .

  When I realized that all these disappearances were not enmeshed in some irremediable uncertainty, when I understood that there were solid investigations, that the abs
ent case files were held up there for all to see, I approached a woman near me in the march. I read the sign she carried and wrote down what it said in my notebook: “Juan Manuel Bustamante Morales; thirty-four years old; from Ciudad Juárez; forcibly disappeared; culprit: Federal Police; place: Veracruz Port.” María Luisa, from Chihuahua, told me that she filed charges against the police, but the authorities treated her with indifference. When she went back to review the case file, the investigation was stalled. When the people suffering the horror “are everyday people,” she said, the government “doesn’t do a thing.”

  I thanked her for speaking with me and stood for a moment, watching the march advance. I looked at all the absences in the air. I noticed that a number of the signs all had the same last name. I started walking again, and wrote down in my notebook the information on another of the signs: “Guadalupe Muñoz Veleta; thirty-six years old; forcibly disappeared; culprit: Municipal Police and Federal Police; June 19, 2011; Anáhuac, Chihuahua.” I approached the young woman carrying the sign and asked her name and age: Diana, sixteen. I asked about the sign she was carrying, and she said: “On Father’s Day they were having a family gathering and federal and municipal police busted into the house and took Guadalupe along with seven other members of the family.”

  The woman who walked beside Diana, the wife of one of the disappeared men, told me: “It is very clear that the authorities don’t want to help. Despite the fact that our family has given them evidence and information for the investigation, there aren’t doing anything. We have identified the police officers responsible, and they are all still on the job. Basically, we’re destroyed. Eight members of the same family disappeared. Pretty much just us women are left. We are struggling to raise our children. Without a death certificate we can’t request economic support. My daughters ask me, ‘Where’s my dad?’ and I don’t know what to tell them.” One of her daughters, six years old, was there that night and saw everything. “My four-year-old asks me, ‘Where’s my dad? I miss him so much,’ and I don’t know what to tell him,” she said, and wept. I closed my notebook. I offered her my hand, she offered hers; I held it for a moment, a clumsy attempt to offer and give a gentle hug while marching, and then kept walking with them.

  Some time later, a journalist from Chihuahua who had interviewed members of the family told me this: The family was in their house, celebrating Father’s Day. Outside, a group of men were bothering them. The family, after trying to speak with the men, called the police. Officers were slow to arrive, and when they did, they simply went to talk and hang out with the men who were bothering the family. One of the young men in the house jumped inside the police patrol car, which had the keys still in the ignition. The young man revved the engine, drove a few meters and stopped. He then got out of the car and screamed at the cops to leave: “You cops are fucking worthless” (“no sirven para ni madres”). The police, furious, made a phone call. An armed convoy arrived and together with the police they abducted eight men from the family. They are all still disappeared.

  The statistics hurt. The numbers cut and burn. Subtle violence that razes what it seeks to convey. You pronounce the number—25,276—and it is an even surface. The pain is compressed and removed from sight. But it is not extinguished. It remains, and it boils there, beneath the surface. The statistic buries you. No number can face the pain of not knowing where the person you love is, the pain of finding machines of impunity operating in every public office, every telephone, every newspaper, every street corner.

  But there is no exit. The statistic wounds, but you still pronounce the number: 25,276. At least 25,276 people were forcibly disappeared between December 2006 and July 2012.2 This number is an official statistic from office of the Federal Attorney General (PGR) and the state prosecutors from all thirty-one states and the Federal District.3 It is an impossible number. It cannot sustain the weight of the pain it carries and conceals. It is a number that must itself cause pain, its very impossibility and violence must break the comfort with which one can pronounce it. Rage. It should provoke rage. Between January 1995 and December 1996 two human rights organizations counted thirty-eight cases of forced disappearance in Mexico.4 From thirty-eight in two years to 25,276 cases in five and a half years. From an “average” of nineteen a year to one of 4,595 cases a year. Not cases. They are not cases. They are people. The numbers, if they are to be useful at all, must hurt.

  As part of his 2000 presidential campaign, Vicente Fox of the National Action Party (PAN) said that, if elected, he would form a “truth commission” to investigate the massacres of October 2, 1968, and June 10, 1971, as well as other “state crimes” of the 1970s and 1980s. He did not include in his promise the massacres of June 28, 1995, December 22, 1997, or June 7, 1998, nor other “state crimes” of the 1990s. Fox won the 2000 elections and became the first non-PRI president to take office in seventy-one years. In January 2002, Fox established the Special Prosecutor for Social and Political Movements of the Past. On December 15, 2005, the Special Prosecutor delivered its report to the PGR. The report was titled: “Report: May It Never Happen Again!” (Informe: ¡Qué no vuelva a suceder!).5 Eleven months later, the PGR posted online a modified version of the report titled: “Historic Report to Mexican Society 2006” (Informe histórico a la sociedad Mexicana 2006). This version lacked chapter fourteen of the original report, titled: “Conclusions and recommendations.” Carlos Montemayor, in his essay “The Special Prosecutor,” notes:

  [Chapter 14 is] where they analyzed the reasons the motivated rebellions and the structural violence that the rebellions responded to; where they described the unnecessary, excessive, and criminal use of force by the State and the seriousness of the fact that the State itself had committed crimes against humanity; and where they discussed the need to revise and change the institutional structure of the Army, for example the DN-II and the military code, that enable the Army’s deployment in public security and police tasks; the chapter also proposed the imperative need for the State to reveal the fate of the people disappeared while in State custody and the State’s obligation to in whatever way possible repair the damage done to the victims.6

  Montemayor describes other omissions from the PGR’s published version of the report:

  They suppressed parts of other chapters and they changed the names of various crimes against humanity to qualify and minimize the Army’s responsibility for the crimes committed by soldiers and officers. “Forced disappearance” was reclassified as “illegal deprivation of freedom.”7

  I asked José Gil Olmos from Proceso magazine if he thought there was a relation between Tzompaxtle’s forced disappearance and the eruption of forced disappearances occurring across Mexico from 2007 up to the present. This was his response:

  There is something gravely serious with these types of testimonies. What we were able to show was that the same strategy used in the 1970s to eliminate the guerrillas is now used to benefit organized crime. It is as if what they learned in training they now apply differently and with completely different goals. But it is exactly the same thing. I mean, they are soldiers and police who at some point received training in that school, were taught to combat rebels, but after the rebels no longer posed the same threat, well, those soldiers and police now participate in organized crime and use what they learned in school for their illegal business. That is, the practices are the same, but the objectives are different.

  But I do not doubt that the people carrying out forced disappearances are soldiers and police. An example of this—and something related that can shed a bit of light on this—is that before, the people who charged you protection money were the Secretary of Commerce or the Tax Agency. They would show up to your business and charge you money in order to let you work. This happened to my father. That is, the tax collector showed up in person and said: “You’re missing these documents; if you don’t want us to shut you down, pay up.”

  Well, that same practice is now perpetrated by organized crime. They say something l
ike, if you want to keep working, you want to keep your business, you’ll have to pay us a cut. It is the same thing exactly, just with different people. With forced disappearance it is the same practice, but with different intentions. In the 1970s, it was the State attempting to suppress protest and rebellion, and in recent years it’s the same State agents, but for personal benefit.

  And that’s why Rafael’s case is so emblematic, because despite the suspicion around his escape and all that, what it showed you was that the same practices were still in use; they hadn’t stopped. They were still in use against the guerrillas and now they are even more in use with organized crime. The thing is that in the “Dirty War,” there were 1,500 disappeared people. Now we are talking about 26,000 or 27,000 officially. We’re talking about the population of a town.

  You know what? It’s as if forced disappearance remained as a kind of traditional rite of the Mexican State.

  After escaping, more than anything, Tzompaxtle wanted people to listen to him. It would seem as if very few people have. In his testimony, with all its silences and uncertainties and ruptures, we find the warning that was not heard, the knowledge that was never acknowledged.

  We also find, staring into the mouth of hell, the will to escape.

  ENDNOTES

  THE JOURNALISTS

  1. The repression continued. Within five years 42 more men had been murdered in relation to the Aguas Blanca Massacre. See, Carlos Montemayor’s 2010 book La violencia de Estado en México. Antes y después de 1968 (Mexico City: Debate, 2010), p. 192. For background on the formation of the EPR in Guerrero, see my profile of Gloria Arenas in Mexico Unconquered: Chronicles of Power and Revolt (San Francisco: City Lights, 2009), pp. 231–265.

  2. See “Acuerdo del Tribunal Pleno de la Suprema Corte de Justicia de la Nación correspondiente al expediente 3/96,” April, 23 1996; Maribel Gutiérrez, Violencia en Guerrero (Mexico City: La Jornada Ediciones, 1998), pp. 119–131; Gloria Leticia Díaz, “Cinco años de la matanza. Aguas Blancas: la pesadilla no termina,” in Proceso, June 24, 2000; and for information on the Aguas Blancas massacre in English, see the Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights December 1995 report, “Massacre in Mexico: Killings and Cover-Up in the State of Guerrero.”