Diego Enrique Osorno's aunt listened for years to the stories of her nephew, then a reporter in Monterrey, about the disappeared that terrified northern Mexico during the harshest period of President Felipe Calderón's war against drugs (2006-2012).
"She is a very dear and very sensitive aunt, with whom I had a very good relationship," says the journalist, now a documentary director, in a café in Coyoacán.
“But it wasn't until she saw
Noise
that she seemed to understand.
And she cried as if suddenly, after so many years, she had understood the seriousness of the problem, ”says Osorno.
Literature, cinema, and art on disappearances in Mexico have grown in recent years, in the face of an audience that is less and less elusive about the problem.
Films such as
Noise
(2022), by Natalia Beristáin,
The thickness of dust
(2022), by Jonathan Hernández,
Sin señas particulares
(2020), by Fernanda Valadez, or
La civil
(2021), by Teodora Mihai, have marked a before and an after in the vision that Mexico had of its own disappeared.
"Until not long ago, people continued to think that if there were disappearances it was because the person had done something wrong, they were involved in something," explains Osorno, who co-wrote Noise
and
directed
La evaluación.
, about the 43 missing students from Ayotzinapa.
A frame from the film 'Sin señas particulares', by the Mexican director Fernanda Valadez. Corpulenta Producciones
Before the movies and documentaries, they were the news of the day, the chronicles about the first relatives who dared to raise their voices, the books in which several journalists got together to try to condense a tragedy that then went almost unnoticed.
Meanwhile, the numbers kept rising.
17,000 disappeared in the time of Felipe Calderón, 35,000 during the presidency of Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018).
Until, in May 2022, Mexico had to count 100,000 disappeared, a figure that exceeds the disappearances registered by any other Latin American government, including the bloodiest periods in countries such as Colombia, Argentina or Guatemala.
In 2022, 39 people disappeared a day in Mexico, according to figures from the Ministry of the Interior.
Noé Zavaleta is the author of
Las buscadoras
(2023, from the HarperCollins publishing house), a compendium of stories of mothers who put their lives on hold to search for their missing children.
For many years, Zavaleta told those stories as a reporter in Veracruz.
“I couldn't imagine covering disappearances and human rights violations.
I wanted to do sports journalism, carnival chronicles and things like that, ”he confesses.
But then the drug war began, from which no one was spared.
"Before, it was thought that all the disappeared were for a reason, because they had done something bad to end up like this, but then the environment of all Mexicans began to fill up with the disappeared," he recalls.
Until some cases began to flood the media.
People could no longer look away.
One of those cases was the murder of Javier Sicilia's son and five other people who were with him.
He put poetry aside — “I can't write any more poetry… poetry no longer exists in me” — and founded the Movement for Peace, which gave a voice to thousands of relatives of those murdered and disappeared by the war between the State and the narco in marches thousands of kilometers that forced the entire world to see the dark side of Mexico.
In 2016 he also ended his life as a novelist with
The uninhabited
, where he recounts those horrible days.
The writer Noé Zavaleta poses for a portrait with a copy of his book 'Las buscadoras'.Courtesy
Then others arrived, such as the 43 disappeared students from Ayotzinapa, or the case of Miriam Rodríguez, a mother searching for her daughter's murderers.
Since 2014, she single-handedly tracked down and jailed most of those who had participated in her daughter's disappearance and subsequent murder.
She single-handedly stalked criminals, befriended her relatives, and pursued them to the darkest corner of the country.
She then turned them over to the authorities with all the necessary evidence to imprison them.
She caught 10 people in the three years that the search lasted, but her case received a lot of attention and that put her in the crosshairs of the drug trafficker.
She was shot dead on May 10, 2017, Mother's Day, outside her front door.
Teodora Mihai told her story in
La civil
, a film that made it to the Cannes film festival in 2021, where it was applauded.
Giovanna Zacarías, who played Alma, the searching mother around whom the film
The Thickness of Dust revolves
(2022), used this opportunity to try to capture the pain of those who remain when someone disappears.
“I don't know anyone who hasn't had someone disappeared or murdered, and there is no better way to exorcise pain than through art.
It demonstrates the capacity of society to remember and build our identity through art.
The film is our grain of sand, a cry of desperation that tries to show what the mothers of all the disappeared go through," says the actress.
The film's director, Jonathan Hernández, says that the title was no coincidence.
“It refers to the things that, like the mother seekers who have been trapped in that tragedy while the world continues to revolve around them, get dusty and we, as a society, let them get dusty, we are consigning them to oblivion.
Eduardo Ruiz Sosa wrote the novel
The Book of Our Absences
, a story about disappearances in Mexico, drug violence, and clandestine graves set in the north of the country.
The author has been working on it since he left Culiacán, in Sinaloa, and went to live in Barcelona, Spain, in 2006.
In the process of writing he discovered truths that had been buried within his subconscious for years, through the process of listening to his characters.
"Absence leaves everything suspended, nothing ends, nothing can start again," he reflects.
The Mexican writer Eduardo Ruiz Sosa.Karla Madriz
Natalia Beristáin, director of
Ruido
, available on Netflix, felt as if she had thrown herself into the abyss when she made the decision to make that film.
It was in 2018 when she decided to attend to "that drive, that need, that intuition" to attack the problem as she knew how, by making a film.
“I had been thinking about it for a long time, I was waiting for the problem to vanish, but no, the missing people continued to number in the thousands every year, and suddenly I said, now, the time has come, this is not going anywhere ", account.
The film that portrays a mother looking for her daughter has been a success on the Netflix platform.
It was the most viewed in the world for more than six days.
Have we reached a tipping point?
"Perhaps, although there is still a long way to go."
I remember that in one of the presentations of the film that I was in, a girl told me that she grew up her whole life with her cousin.
They were very close, but a few years ago they had separated.
The cousin had become a nun and she had studied civil rights and it was very difficult for them to connect.
'Because I march, I break, I scream', the girl told me.
'But then my cousin saw
Noise
without my suggesting it and then she came and she told me I got it, I got why you're so angry,' she told me.
A still from the film 'Ruido', by Natalia Beristáin.
Courtesy of Netflix ©2022
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