This is the web version of Americanas, the newsletter from EL PAÍS América that addresses news and ideas with a gender perspective. If you want to subscribe, you can do so in this link.
There are many ways in which the body receives and nests pain. And Mexican mothers — but also Argentine, Colombian, Chilean, and Dominican mothers, and a long etcetera that runs through Latin America — embody one of the most significant examples of resilience that recent human history has given us. This Sunday, my colleague Georgina Zerega and I published in EL PAÍS México the story of seven recruits of the National Guard who drowned in a hazing on the day they finished their military training.
Their mothers, aunts and wives fight every day to ensure that their names are not forgotten despite the Army’s attempts to close the case. Through their struggle, they have also become a point of reference for the defence of human rights in the country. Forced overnight to become activists who search for the bodies of their missing children, or who want justice for the murders of their daughters, or who demand that investigations into cases like these not be closed, as happens with 96% of the files in Mexico, according to the organisation México Evalúa.
Fabiola Lanfar and Rosario Salazar are the mother and aunt of Carlos Lanfar, one of the seven cadets who drowned in the sea off Ensenada, Baja California, a state bordering the United States, bathed by the turbulent and violent waters of the Pacific Ocean. They are cousins, but they seem to be more like very good friends, and although they have different personalities—the first is more expressive, the second has a calm temperament—there is a complicity between them that makes everything around them feel very familiar, even for those who are not part of their family. Rosario has been in charge of coordinating the mothers of the soldiers to demand justice. She is the one who greets them in the morning and writes a message so that they do not give up, so that they do not feel alone, so that they continue to demand what she considers fair.
She was also the woman who, days after the tragedy, stood outside the Municipal Palace of Ensenada, called the local media and with her hoarse, strong and determined voice began to denounce before the cameras all the abuses, the lack of information and the negligence that had been discovered after her children disappeared at sea. “I am here to raise my voice for everyone, not just for my family. We are determined not to leave this unpunished. They have been missing for several days and several hours and they have not told us anything,” she said without revealing her name, in a tone of revenge, and she assured at that moment that, as long as no authority gave her or the other mothers a face, she did not have to identify herself.
The official version of what happened on February 20, 2024, is that some 207 Army and National Guard recruits were doing one of their last training sessions before graduating, when, at the end of the session, a lieutenant colonel ordered them to enter the water and counted down in a loud and authoritative voice for them to do so immediately. They were all wearing their uniforms, boots, and some even still had their weapons strapped to their bodies. Most obeyed—because that is precisely what they are taught during their training—others, the more timid, or sick or affected by some physical ailment, preferred to stay out of the way. Not all of them knew how to swim.
Eloísa Gaxiola, the mother of Arturo Gaxiola, 29, one of the deceased that afternoon, still does not understand how such an order was given to hundreds of young people on a stormy afternoon like that one, when state authorities had issued a red alert for high tide that served as a warning for neither boats nor people to approach the sea.
Eloísa remembers the sensations her body experienced on the shore of that beach when more than 24 hours later, she and her son Jonathan had moved from Hermosillo, Sonora, to participate in the search for Arturo and his six companions.: “I tried to get into the sea and the water came up to my knees. My son and some soldiers who were there pulled me out and my feet became stiff because the water was so cold. I thought: if this happened to me just for getting into the shore, what must have happened to my son when he was in there?” she recalls.
Each of them feels guilty: because she encouraged him to pursue his dream of being a soldier; because she did not insist that he tell her more about the truth of what was happening inside the military garrison, or because she did not buy him a cake on his last birthday.
María Pérez, mother of 18-year-old Fernando Isaías, still looks at her mobile phone where she keeps her son’s voice notes. He was loving and caring with her, singing songs to her and sending them to her. But her son never told her what was really happening, like Fernando, Arturo or Michael Wilkinson, who preferred not to worry their family. The worst thing they could do, as their own mothers and brothers have recalled, was to drop out; to abandon something that had cost them a lot of personal and family effort to achieve. None of the seven, no matter how hurt or tired they felt, was going to stop training.
These women have been joined by dozens of other mothers of deserting soldiers, or female recruits who left the military institution after being mistreated, extorted, violated to the limit, after being raped or harassed. The testimonies that have always been provided on request of anonymity, agree that these young men and women who left training on their own two feet sank into or are still suffering from a serious depression. Those who have spoken about what happened have taken months to do so, many did nothing during the first weeks after their desertion except eat and sleep. And many others have still not been able to tell anything.
The father of one of the cadets swept away by the waves on February 20 in Ensenada —a military surgeon, now retired— said that he believed that in the Army they are taught to build character and discipline to be able to face what exists out there. But he accepts that what happened to his son was negligence and should not happen again. For Rosario Salazar things are even more complex: “We have all focused on the lieutenant colonel who gave the order, but I think it was not just him, it is all the commanders, it is a group of people who unfortunately have lost their human quality and bring in inexperienced youngsters, some of whom manage to get out and those who do, come out corrupted, fighting with life, hurt.”
Not all mothers have the same way of coping with and managing a tragedy of this magnitude. Not only facing the death of their children, but also the uncertainty of an entire state apparatus that replicates forms of training that keep not only the bodies of its recruits at the limit, but also their spirits and their ways of seeing and dealing with the outside world, which is increasingly alien and distant. These mothers, like hundreds of thousands of others, have turned their pain into a kind of driving force that calls for justice, in a country accustomed to impunity.
They are all trying to survive one more day, hoping that whoever is responsible for the death of their children will not only be punished, but that people like him will not be in charge of groups of young people who come with real dreams of changing the world, but manage to do exactly the opposite with them. They do not forget them, and we should not forget them.
Kirchnerism expresses solidarity with former first lady Fabiola Yáñez, while the Government uses the scandal to attack feminist policies
Autopsy reveals that Lieutenant Pamela Ati was gang-sexually abused before dying of asphyxiation
Experts, lawyers and activists are calling on authorities to prioritise gender-based investigations and due diligence rather than creating a single criminal offence for the entire country
The Government took two years to sign the resolution that orders free access to menstrual health implements
The strategy of instrumentalizing the fight for women’s equality to promote racist policies is spreading in countries such as France, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain.
Many things have changed in recent years for the better for women’s sport in Spain, a progress that has gradually left behind so much past disdain.
Thank you very much for joining us and see you next Monday! (If you have been sent this newsletter and would like to subscribe to receive it in your email, You can do it here).
