On October 21, 2019, a group of searching mothers arrived in Puerto Peñasco, Sonora. An anonymous complaint had indicated to them a point that was littered with clandestine graves.
When they began to dig they found ten, “with who knows how many bodies.” At the head of the group was Ceci Patricia Flores Armenta: she was looking for two children missing due to organized crime. No one, only staff from the state prosecutor’s office, knew she was there. The authorities accompanying them left the place after the discovery with some pretext (that some patrol cars had broken down on the road).
Minutes later, several members of a criminal group arrived, armed and hooded. They asked about her. “It’s me,” Flores said. “Get on the ground,” they ordered them.
“If you are going to kill me, I will remain standing, because I don’t owe you anything. “I am here because I have two missing children and I want to find them.”
They asked them who had sent them. By whose orders they were there. The leader of the group told them that scum of society were buried there: criminals, kidnappers, murderers. “Everyone who is here is because they deserve it,” he told them.
Flores responded: “Yes, but we mothers don’t deserve our children to be there.”
The criminal boss took away their phones. Flores replied: “There you will find pure memories, which is what I have left.”
Flores began his search in 2015, when Alejandro, one of his sons, was “lifted up” in Sinaloa, at the doors of an Oxxo. That day they told him that his truck was on the side of the road, with its doors open. She never heard from him again. The criminal group had gone after Alejandro’s boss, who worked at a fertilizer plant, but was involved in dark affairs. Along the way, they took him away.
In a dramatic story, at times overwhelming, and full of chiaroscuros, “Seeking Mother. Chronicle of Despair” (Fondo Blanco Editorial, 2023), Flores narrates how, faced with the inaction of the authorities, she began to ask in the streets and in the neighborhoods about the whereabouts of her son. She sometimes posed as a candy seller in order to navigate dangerous territories.
Since the days immediately after Alejandro’s disappearance, Flores had joined a group of searchers. In the three years since then she had learned “to observe the terrain to find clandestine graves; I learned to use the ‘seer’ – the famous rod with which we guide ourselves to know if the earth has been recently disturbed –, I learned to sharpen my sight and smell to track a decomposing body; I learned to dig graves,” she says.
One day he received a call in which they told him that for 120 thousand pesos they could tell him where Alejandro was. Flores showed up at the address where he was supposedly going to deliver the money. But he didn’t have any money. He only carried the desperation of him.
With that disappearance she managed to get the caller, a young man with addiction problems, to take her to San Miguel Zapotitlán. “I delivered it here. They went there… I know that your son is from here to there,” she told him. “Yes,” Flores writes, “but the journey from here to there had no end to the road.”
The searchers excavated there for a year. They never found anything. Alfonso “N”, the man who handed Alejandro over, was reported missing shortly after: another ghost that vanished.
The second loss occurred in 2019, in Bahía de Kino, Sonora. Flores’ other son disappeared in that place: Marco Antonio. A criminal group had taken him with another of his brothers, Jesús Adrián. Flores received a call on May 10: “We are going to give you your Mother’s Day gift.” The gift was that only Jesús Adrián returned.
“Let’s form a collective because my son is not coming back,” Flores said. With six women, who soon became hundreds, she formed the Madres Buscadoras de Sonora collective, one of the 234 that exist today in the country.
The book that collects her experience as a seeker is heartbreaking in many ways. She herself reached those who took Alexander and Mark Antony, but she has not been able to find them.
In those pages appear the mothers who died, diminished and destroyed inside, without having managed to find their loved ones. There are the mothers and wives who were murdered by the cartels to stop their search. There are the threatening calls and messages, and also the calls and messages that reveal the location of clandestine graves and crematoriums. There are the abandoned houses, and the empty subdivisions and the vacant lots full of dead people. There are the dark corners of a country of addicts, of poverty, of drug sellers, of machine gun bursts at midnight – and at any time of the day.
A country has become a tomb, in which a single group, the Searching Mothers of Sonora, has located more than two thousand bodies in graves.
But above all, there is a country without a State. Or rather, a country in which the State exists only in speeches. A chronicle of despair.
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2024-02-29 13:32:10
#Chronicle #Despair #universal
