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Walking over the dead: the women who dig into the land of drug traffickers

2020-08-15T19:07:00.346Z


The documentary 'I named you in silence' collects the most intimate facet of the Rastreadoras de El Fuerte, a group of women who have been searching since 2014 for the remains of their missing relatives in Sinaloa


Still from the documentary 'I named you in silence', about the El Fuerte Trackers.

The Rastreadoras go out every Wednesday and Sunday to search for their dead. Only interrupted by the pandemic, this group of unwavering women has been traveling the desert lands of Sinaloa for six years to bring back the disappeared. They are digging the earth in front of a hellish sun, the vipers, the drug traffickers and the Government - also the Government. Since the so-called war on drugs began in 2006, instigated by former President Felipe Calderón (2006-2012), more than 60,000 people in Mexico are officially listed as missing. The State is not looking for them, only their families.

"Here we found his hand, in this tree, here they left it." The one who points out is Mirna Medina, the founder of the Rastreadoras de El Fuerte, and mother of Roberto Corrales, who disappeared at the age of 21 on July 14, 2014, when he was picked up at the gas station where he worked. Medina found him three years later in a place in Ocolome, a municipality near El Fuerte. "It was body 93 that we found," he details in its entirety and also broken in the documentary I named you in silence, a feature film that covers the search for these clawed women.

Mirna tells in those 90 minutes of film that she always wears heels, even during the searches, that she began with this when the police assured her that they were not looking for missing persons, and that she said goodbye to the altar of her son and her cat every time you walk out the door in case you won't be allowed back. In front of the camera directed by José María Espinosa de los Monteros (Culiacán, 1989), Mirna sings, cries, breaks and remakes; Also in front of the camera she orders the “fucking old women” of her groupmates, who are her family, to be silenced and hugs and comforts them, and above all, in front of and behind the camera, Mirna continues to live. The Sinaloan and his team spent two and a half months with the trackers to complete a deep and complex portrait. "We enter rights into their lives, but instead of focusing only on pain, which of course is there, you can also see the impetus they have towards life, you can see that glow of hope, which is there," says the director.

That intimacy, difficult to capture in the few paragraphs of an article, stems from a mutual trust between the team and the trackers, says Espinosa: “The work in this documentary is supportive, respectful. If you are going to ask these women to tell you how they took their son or daughter, and that is a leap into the void for them, you have to be there to catch them ”.

The project, which began four and a half years ago, has managed to raise the 150,000 pesos (about $ 6,700) that it needed to see the light of day on a crowdfunding platform in recent weeks. Espinosa de los Monteros, who studied Marketing and defines himself as self-taught - "a son of YouTube" - admits that he never thought that he could have such an important issue in his hands: "And have freed it, come out clean. Get things done right, that the pieces have been accommodated. I couldn't be happier with what we created with the trackers, with the film that we created.

Currently, the Rastreadoras de El Fuerte act in coordination with the Attorney General's Office of the State (FGJE) and the Attorney General's Office (PGR). They have provided them with training in anthropology and archeology, but they do not help them to search, criticizes Medina: "Government to Government is the same shit: they are not going to get us out of trouble." She also says that before “the Government did not even want to acknowledge that there were disappearances. It was not good that there were women digging the earth ”.

Thus, this group of women, who risk their lives with each search, live constantly harassed and threatened by drug traffickers. “I am always afraid. Always always. Legally I have everything ready. I'm just waiting for them to do it, ”Medina reveals on the tape. During the filming of the documentary, while they were filming in a property on the outskirts of El Mochis (northwest of Sinaloa), in an area where there was a lot of vegetation, they were surrounded by bullets. “We were unperturbed, people continued to do their job, they searching and we recording, that's what we all went to. We did not find any remains and we left, ”reveals Espinosa de los Monteros, who tells how during the recording they have been watched and persecuted in each ranchería, observed from the hills by men perched with rifles. “If we lived that during the months we were there, what do they experience? They are the brave ones and the ones who raffle it ”.

The trackers receive whistles (tip-offs) with information on where they can find buried bodies. Sometimes they are fooled with fake locations, and many of them, before joining the group, were extorted. They asked for money to keep their children alive or to reveal their alleged whereabouts. They all prefer to believe that their son is working exhausted in the marijuana fields than under the ground they walk. Mirna, the leader of the group, forces them to keep a cool head: "As long as we don't find them, we have hope, but I want us to keep our feet on the ground."

"How do you look for your husband?"

-Dead.

-Dead. It is the sad reality, but how many have we found alive?

Another objective of this young director was to name those who are not there: to get away from cold numbers. “They are no longer numbers, they are Roberto Corrales Medina, son of Mirna Medina, it is Zumiko Félix Ortega, daughter of Lizbeth Ortega, it is Juan Francisco Angulo Lugo, son of Maqui Lugo. They are people who left, who had longings and dreams and we have to name them, ”says Espinosa de los Monteros, who in the documentary shows small family videos where these young people play with their children, dance or joke with their mothers.

The most exciting moment of the recording, says the director, who also considers it one of the most beautiful and painful of his life, occurred in 2018 when the team accompanied Mirna Medina to look for Roberto's remains - whose name has not yet appeared. full body - on the hill where they left it. While they were saying a few sentences, the team's driver found two of the young man's fingers. “At that moment you want to die there, it is an absolute sadness. Then we went to the pantheon, Roberto's corrido was sung, they talked about him and little by little, the atmosphere began to change and it ended up being a party of life and death. A celebration for the life of Roberto and also for that of the trackers ”.






Source: elparis

All news articles on 2020-08-15

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