MEXICO CITY, May 11 (NNN-EFE) — Thousands of women walked Tuesday in Mexico City, where Mother’s Day is celebrated on this date, to demand that Mexican authorities expand efforts to search for and prevent disappearances, at a time when the country approaches 100,000 people gone missing.
“May 10 is a very important day for us, we have nothing to celebrate, it’s a day to demand,” Mirna Medina Quinones, founder of the group Las Rastreadores de El Fuerte and protagonist of the documentary “Te nombre en silencio,” which premieres Thursday in Mexico.
After gathering at Mexico City’s Mother’s Monument, the demonstrators made their way along the emblematic Paseo de la Reforma avenue to the capital’s iconic Angel of Independence victory column.
Daniel, Francisco, Roy, Brenda, Antonio and Juan were among the names seen on posters with accompanying photos, just some of the more than 35,000 people missing and unaccounted for nationwide, according to official figures.
Mexico has been rocked by brutal organized crime-related violence in recent years.
New York-based Human Rights Watch, meanwhile, says in its latest World Report that “during the administration of President Enrique Peña Nieto, which began in 2012, security forces have been implicated in repeated, serious human rights violations during efforts to combat organized crime – including extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances and torture.”
The signs during the protest gave a sense of a struggle that spans decades.
While one woman held up a sign with the photo of a young girl who has not been seen for 96 days, another group of mothers held a poster that showed the images of dozens of people who went missing in the 1970s.
“We have nothing to celebrate,” said one of the marchers, Elba Hernandez, whose son, Brian Jesus, disappeared along with six other young people in April 2016 while en route to an apparent job interview.
Authorities have made no major breakthroughs in the case after two years.
One person who had passed out flyers inviting people to the job interview has been arrested, but “he says they hired him, gave him 500 pesos ($25.92) to hand them out and that’s all he knows,” Hernandez said.
As the marchers passed by the headquarters of Mexico’s Attorney General’s Office, one of the women stopped briefly and said, “they’re the guilty ones.”
Signs placed outside that building recalled a group of students from Ayotzinapa Normal School, a rural all-male teacher training college known for its leftist activism, who were attacked on Sept. 26, 2014, in Iguala, Guerrero state, after they had commandeered buses to travel to Mexico City for a protest.
Six people – including three students – were killed, 25 were injured and 43 students were abducted.
The Mexican government says the students were killed by a local drug gang after being abducted by municipal cops acting on the orders of Iguala’s corrupt mayor, and that their bodies were incinerated at a waste dump in the nearby town of Cocula.
But Mexican and international experts have shredded almost every element of the official account.
Besides the march in Mexico City, women also demonstrated in other parts of the country, including several cities in the violence-racked Gulf coast state of Veracruz. — NNN-EFE
