Mothers without borders search for disappeared migrants

In October of last year, 38 Central American women gathered in Guatemala to look for their disappeared children. Bearing photos of their loved ones and lots of hope, they toured 14 states and 23 localities of Mexico with the single objective of finding them. Here are some moments of the “Freeing up Hope” Caravan.

José Luis González sj.

Teodora Ñaméndiz, one of the Nicaraguan mothers on the caravan, had not seen her son in 32 years. He left in 1980 and she had heard nothing from him since 1985. Although she is now 75, she did not shrink from the challenge we proposed from the Jesuit Service for Migrants, one of the institutions that organized the caravan. She fell three times during the trip, and mirroring Christ on the Stations of the Cross, she got up three times. I saw her fall the first time when we were crossing the Mexican border at El Ceibo, tripping on a step. Although we thought she had fractured a bone, she got up and continued onward, like someone with a clear mission, as if following some mysterious magnet. On October 27, her son was found, living in Veracruz. When they told him his mother was alive and looking for him, he began to cry. On October 29, mother and son were able to give each other the hoped-for embrace, and she saw her three grandchildren for the first time. There were five reencounters like this during the caravan.

Two women and one path

In The Odyssey, Penelope stays home, waiting for Ulysses. In Central America, tired of waiting for Ulysses to return, some mothers went in search of him, and by doing so experienced their own odyssey. These caravans first got underway in El Progresso, Honduras, in 1999, with two women united by having lost contact with their migrant children. Through Radio Progreso’s “Sin Fronteras” program, the two decided to join forces, organize the Committee of Relatives of Migrants from El Progreso (COFAMIPRO) and take to the road. In December of 2000 the first search caravan got as far as Tecún Umán City, in northwest Guatemala on the border with Mexico, and Tapachula, on the Mexican side of the border in the state of Chiapas. One of the founders, Edita Maldonado, managed to find her daughter in Mexico. She had been disappeared for five years, the victim of human trafficking and sexual abuse. She had seen the bodies of two friends dumped in a gully, had been infected with HIV and died shortly after reuniting with her mother. Today Edita at least knows where her daughter is buried and continues to encourage other mothers, organizing new caravans in 2002, 2005, 2006, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012. Last year’s caravan, in which a sizable group of Nicaraguan mothers participated, was the first one in which women from four different Central American countries—Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala—made the trip together.

There are many “Mother Courages”

During the preparation, one of the discussions was about whether this caravan should be opened to men’s participation. Why only women? Don’t fathers look for their children, or men for their siblings? We decided to open up the participation but only two men joined. What do mothers have that fathers don’t?

Our continent knows its history. There were no Grandfathers of the Plaza de Mayo, or at least none with the notoriety of the Grandmothers. There hasn’t been a National Committee of Widowers of Guatemala like the one Rosalina Tuyuc formed with the telluric force of the widows of CONAVIGUA. Nineth Montenegro challenged Guatemala’s military officers who took her husband, forming the Mutual Support Group (GAM) to pressure for the disappeared. The Bolivian woman Domitila Barrios of Chungara, forced dictator Hugo Banzer’s hand by going on a hunger strike after losing the baby she carried in her womb as a result of the torture she endured in the San Juan massacre. The Shining Path blew up Peruvian María Elena Moyano, dubbed “Mother Courage” by the Club of Mothers she directed in Villa El Salvador. We could go on a long time remembering other “Mother Courages.”

Why hasn’t there been a “Father Courage” to organize “Clubs of Fathers” concerned for their family, to seek the victims or at least honor their memory? There’s one exception in Mexico: poet Javier Sicilia, whose life was changed by the murder of his son. Today Sicilia struggles with great mystique to redirect his country toward peace with justice. Our caravan’s buses participated previously in Sicilia’s Peace Caravan, which curiously bore the motto, “¡Estamos hasta la madre!” (loosely translated as “We’re not taking any more!).

Women speak in “a different voice”

What happens when an unjust situation becomes that intolerable to women? One answer was offered years ago by Carol Gilligan, assistant to the celebrated psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg who studied the development of moral judgment. She was scandalized when Kohlberg argued that women don’t reach the same levels of moral consciousness as men, that they’re “less mature.” For him moral maturity resides specifically in the capacity to form rational, universal and impartial judgments.

In her 1982 book In a Different Voice, Gilligan, herself a psychologist, responded to Kohlberg that women are not morally immature, but that their judgments are more concrete, relational and narrative. She holds that women speak “in a different voice” than men when justice is at issue and care more for relations than men do. They pay more attention to the situation and less to generalities. They don’t speak the impersonal language of justice, but the personal language of caring. According to Gilligan, what moves women is concern for the concrete person.

But that care-givers’ sensibility is taken advantage of by “uncaring ones,” as Guadalupe Rivas from Chinandega can attest to. She ended up in charge of five grandchildren and suffers economic hardship trying to raise them. After eight years “disappeared,” her son was located in Chiapas as the 2011 caravan was wrapping up, but he had changed his name and didn’t want to know anything about his children. As a result, Lupe decided to file charges in Chiapas during this year’s caravan, demanding child support for the children he abandoned.

Situations like this one, however, must not make us forget the main causes of disappearances. Franciscan friar Tomás González, who runs the Tenosique Shelter and accompanied our caravan during its entire trip through Mexico, calls the enemy of migrants a “monster with many heads,” among them the Mexican authorities, the corruption of Mexico’s National Migration Institute, organized crime and the expelling states, which don’t guarantee the “right not to have to migrate.” “Uncaring” machismo is still another. This option for flight contrasts with the option to fight taken by the women in these caravans, who are determined to seek their children come what may. “That hole the child leaves in the mother can’t be filled by anything,” insists Carmen Lucía Cuarezma, a Nicaraguan living in Costa Rica, holding up the photo of the son she’s looking for.

Showing the face,
following the signs

The symbol of the search is the photo of the disappeared daughter or son. There’s nothing more concrete than a face to confirm what Carol Gilligan pointed out. Holding photos of their children, the mothers on the caravan held sit-ins in the parks of the cities they visited. They held up the photos; gave press conferences; met with police authorities and migration officials; and visited migrant shelters, jails, hospitals, brothels and morgues. They were provided lodging in some of the 60 Migrant Centers the Catholic Church has in Mexican territory.

These trips cause great physical and psychological hardship. More than a few people came up to one of them, looked at a photo then said: “Yes, it’s him; I saw him in such and such a place.” Or “that one fell off the train and was torn apart…” Showing the face, they follow the trail. And along the road the heart of these women receives the venous blood of anguish and pumps the arterial blood of hope.

The morning of October 15, on the banks of the Río San Pedro bordering Guatemala’s Petén jungle and Mexico, the director of the Fe y Alegría school where we had slept that night told us how the Central Americans cross, how some drown in the attempt, how the criminals in the mountains kill them off, how the narcs wait for them on the other bank, how they don’t leave witnesses, how the bodies rot in the jungle… It’s like Nicaraguan singer Ramón Mejía, known as “Perrozompopo,” sings: “They are rivers of people who cut the rivers/ they are men women witnesses of the sun/ they cross the jungle of the pavements/ and carry wounds in their heart.” That morning the mothers were at one of those rivers, listening to Fe y Alegría’s director, looking at the other bank in silence. A lengthy silence. When he finished talking, all you could hear was the murmur of the river and the beating of the women’s hearts.

The first embrace

A few hours after that gathering, our caravan was received on the Mexican side by the Meso-American Migrant Movement and Friar Tomás González. In Tenosique, one of the places in southeast Mexico in which the transit of migrants is growing, this Franciscan runs the shelter called “La 72.” It was given that name in homage to the 72 migrants—58 men and 14 women—massacred by the Zetas in San Fernando, Tamaulipas, in August 2010. Their unrecognizable bodies turned up with signs of torture and a bullet in the neck.

In “La 72” we had the first sign of hope that some “disappeared” migrants can be found. The Honduran Servelio Mateo was reunited with his parents Venancio and Silveria after nine years. In that case, investigations carried out beforehand by Rubén Figueroa had produced results. The news gave the women hope and they continued the caravan with the chant: “Alive they came, alive we want them!” Carmen Lucía Cuarezma told the Spanish newspaper El País: “I have to say he’s alive, because if he isn’t I’ll die too.”

Nonetheless, they all know there’s a chance that many of them are already dead. A few years ago the Salvadoran Lucy de Acevedo went looking for her brother only to discover he’d been tortured and killed in Tapachula. She continued the struggle by supporting other women and organizing the Committee of Relatives of Disappeared Migrants of El Salvador (COFAMIDE). Those women have identified some deceased migrants with support from the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF).

Tracing the DNA

The EAAF has now signed agreements with El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala and Chiapas, in which both civil society and the State are involved in identifying deceased migrants. And a Forensic Database of Unfound Migrants has been created, with DNA-based identification. When a common grave is found, DNA is extracted from the bones of the remains and compared with the DNA archive provided by families seeking their disappeared relatives.

In 2010, COFAMIDE had already analyzed 143 samples, which are kept in the US state of Arizona. In Pima, Arizona, alone the remains of 500 unidentified migrants have been found. The EAAF is trying to create one forensic data bank for all of Central America. Among the information kept in such data banks is the migrant’s departure date, the last communication with him or her, physical data (a tattoo or scar, for example), and medical, genetic, dental, bone and fingerprint data.

The biological microchip known as DNA isn’t just useful for clearing up illness, rape, murder and paternity. The EAAF began using it to identify the disappeared from the Argentine dictatorship, victims of the national security doctrine. Forensic anthropology has worked with DNA in many common graves from the eighties in Guatemala and El Salvador. Today that same genetic forensic examination is being used to identify migrants.

The massacres of yesterday and today

What common elements are there between the massacres of the eighties and the crimes committed today against migrants? One of the first things is the magnitude of the crime. Let’s look at the kidnapping data. The National Human Rights Commission of Mexico reported 214 kidnappings of migrants, some of them massive, between April and September 2010, for a total of 11,333 people in only those six months. In that terror-affected territory, few kidnappings are cleared up by the authorities. At the end of December 2012, Mexico’s National Defense Secretariat (SEDENA) reported having freed only 275 kidnapped people over the course of the year, including 130 Central Americans in transit through Mexico.

A second common element is the victims and the victimizers. The Guatemalan Army’s special operations forces known as kaibiles, created in that decade by US advisers, now form part of Mexico’s dreaded Zetas. The massacres are no longer in Cuarto Pueblo (Guatemala) or Sumpul (El Salvador), but in San Fernando (Mexico). The Zetas committed the Cadereyta massacre last May, on the 32nd anniversary of the Río Sumpul massacre. And from Chaletenango to Tamaulipas, from Ixcán to Nuevo León, the victims are still Central Americans, those who fled the Río Sumpul for the border to save their life and whose children continue crossing rivers and borders in search of a life today.

An “intelligent membrane”
on the Mexican border

One last common element connecting the common graves of then and now is that both are the result of a national security doctrine. The authorities are determined to treat migration as a security issue, criminalizing the migrants, obliging them to seek clandestine routes and pushing them into the hands of the mafias.

The best proof of this assertion is the appointments made by Mexico’s new President, Enrique Peña Nieto, to implement his migration policy. On January 6 he named Arnulfo Valdivia Machuca as his new director of the Institute of Mexicans Abroad. Last October, when Valdivia Machuca was coordinating migratory affairs in Peña Nieto’s transition team, he stated that the new government wanted to make the border an “intelligent membrane, that lets the good pass and stops the bad.”

And lest there remain any doubt that the membrane must be “intelligent,” on January 15 Ardelio Vargas Fosado was made the new commissioner of the National Migration Institute. Vargas Fosado has worked for more than 10 years in “intelligence” in the National Information and Security Center and was responsible for infamous repressive operations conducted by the Federal Preventive Police. His most recent post was public security secretary in Puebla.

The new PRI government in Mexico clearly considers Central American migration a security problem. “It’s a sign,” said Vargas Fosada, explaining his appointment. “I’m an old policeman and intelligence investigator.”

Membranes can be porous, as the Mexican migration officials of El Ceibo admitted when we asked where the groups of Hondurans seen along the highway had gotten through. “They get through there, where the valley ends, because they don’t have papers. Those with papers come through here.” The authorities have recorded 120 places where migrants cross from Guatemala into Mexico, only eight of which are legal. Perhaps that’s why the new Mexican government wants to replace that sieve-like membrane with a less porous one more similar to what the United States has erected on its border with Mexico.

From a sieve-like membrane
to a purging membrane

The key issue is to know who among the over 400,000 Central Americans who annually cross through Mexico will be seen as “good” and who as “bad.” A “purging” membrane will select, but a serious problem will remain: Mexico’s northern border is one of the 13 most dangerous borders in the world, with 40,000 murders in the first four years of former Mexican Felipe Calderón’s six-year term. Is that the model the new President wants to set up along the country’s southern border?

Everything suggests it is. The creation of new lookout posts on Mexico’s southern border has been announced, together with a border patrol similar to the one in the United States, which will have anywhere from 5,000 to 8,000 agents. “It is a national security issue; authority has to be exercised where there is none,” explains Valdivia Machuca. And should any doubts remain, Peña Nieto’s actions while governor of the state of Mexico dissipate them. Martha Sánchez, coordinator of the Meso-American Migrant Association, recalls that some migrant shelters were closed during his term and has charged that the police of that state were the most involved in extortion and that the kidnapping of migrants proliferated at that time. More watchtowers and more police are signs that the criminalization of Central American migrants will continue with Peña Nieto as President.

Hugs between Mexicans
and Central Americans

Our caravan received a lot of Mexican solidarity, for example in Coahuila, where the mothers met with the Forces United for Our Disappeared in Coahuila (FUNDEC). We experienced especially strong solidarity in a forum set up during the International Book Fair in the Zócalo square in Mexico’s capital, where the mothers were interviewed. The event was attended by priest Alejandro Solalinde, threatened by the Zetas for defending migrants, and by Mexican mothers of disappeared sons and daughters, showing that if the phenomenon is so huge, solidarity and unity among peoples must be bigger still. “They’re not alone! They’re not alone!” shouted the filled auditorium, while the photos of disappeared Mexicans mixed with those of the Central Americans. I recalled those verses of Daniel Viglietti’s tango, Milonga de andar lejos (Milonga of Traveling Far Away): How far is my land/ and yet how close/ or is there a territory/ where the bloods mix?/ We are not foreigners,/ the foreigners are the others./ They are the merchants/ and we the slaves.”

It is important that people not be put through any selection process that identifies some as good and others as bad based on nationality. The name of one of the collectives that runs the shelter for migrants in Huehuetoca expresses that very well: “You are we.”

The day a black Christ got off the train

One of the best known symbols of the Mexican solidarity our caravan received was the mothers of the community of La Patrona, in the municipality of Amatlán de los Reyes, Veracruz. The leader of this group, known as “Las Patronas” (patronesses, or protectresses) is Norma Romero, who since 1995 has been preparing food for the migrants who pass by on the train. She welcomed the caravan to La Patrona on October 17. Norma explains that they do this to serve God and tells how one day she saw a black Christ descend from the train. He was a black-skinned Central American migrant who had been stabbed seven times with a knife for defending his girlfriend from rape. They lowered him from the train with his arms spread out, looking for all the world like a crucified Christ. “I didn’t know the black Christ is venerated in Guatemala,” confessed Norma Romero. “After seeing that man I always give thanks to God because I had asked Him to tell me how to serve Him, and when He showed Himself that way I knew He chose us to do this service.”

Religious referents were present from the outset in the Caravan. The Nicaraguan mothers requested a Mass in the Church of Guadalupe of Chinandega, a preview of one that would be held days later in the actual Basilica of Guadalupe of Mexico. The prayers on the train tracks, the supplications in cemeteries and common graves and the Masses in shelters and parish churches expressed a sentiment not of resignation but of struggle and hope. It was the hope of being able to hug their children and of the disappeared being able to hear the phrase that Juan Diego, later canonized as the first indigenous American saint, reported hearing in Tepeyac on December 9, 1531, from the apparition he insisted was the Virgin Mary: “I am your merciful mother…” Only five mothers from this caravan saw their hope realized.

Where are they?

Between the ever more frequent common graves and intentional disappearances is an entire gamut of cases whose characterization can be seen in the investigations by the Committees of Relatives of Migrants. In its first 10 years of existence, COFAMIPRO recorded 656 people who “disappeared” in the search for the “American dream.” They classified them by causality: of those 656, 355 are still missing, 144 returned, another 50 are known to be in prison, 32 returned with amputations, 32 are in some hospital in Mexico, 20 were kidnapped by drug-trafficking bands like the Zetas, 18 died en route and 5 are victims of kidnapping for human trafficking.

The problem of the prisoners could easily be solved if the region’s governments would collaborate by sharing information. In a meeting with the caravan in Puebla, María Eugenia Baltodano, Nicaragua’s consul in Mexico, reported on 700 Nicaraguan prisoners in that country. Some had been unable to let their families know about their situation, as the women who participated in the 2011 caravan could attest to when they visited the jails and took on the mission of informing the families of some of the detained.

The problem that’s hardest to solve is the disappearance of victims of human trafficking, since unlike kidnapping, in which the objective is to communicate with the family to demand a ransom, they are held in clandestinity and isolation so their family can learn nothing of their whereabouts.

Forced recruitment by organized crime also has to be recognized as one of the causes of disappearance. In Saltillo, we were told by both Bishop Raúl Vera and Pedro Pantoja, the priest who directs the migrant shelter that received our caravan there, that this is a verified phenomenon. They have negotiated the release of four people found working for those armies of organized crime functionaries.

What are the caravans proposing?

One of the caravan’s activities in Mexico City was a press conference at the University of the Cloister of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, an event accompanied by the Migrations Program of the Ibero-American University and the five organizations running the Huehuetoca Shelter as the “You Are We” Collective. The proposals suggested in that and similar events can be divided into those that refer to people who have already disappeared and those aimed at prevention to ensure safe transit.

Institutional mechanisms and regional policies are required to resolve the cases of disappeared migrants—or “unlocated migrants” as some organizations prefer to say. They include the unification of databases; identification of all cadavers with a single protocol for all morgues; the creation of a specialized prosecutor’s office for crimes against migrants, particularly cases of disappeared migrants; and programs to search for migrants and provide attention to their relatives. It is also necessary to create an international forensic data bank for disappeared individuals and unidentified remains.

As for prevention aimed at ensuring there are no more “disappearances,” demands have been made on the government of Mexico to clear criminals from the migrant route and cleanse the National Migration Institute of corruption. Above all is the demand that the government stop viewing migration as a security issue.

The essential thing is
to give them documents

The most essential demand is that the undocumented be given documents. If the Central Americans could enter Mexico documented, organized crime would not find it so easy to extort and kidnap them, as they wouldn’t have to travel hanging from a train or hiding from the authorities. But obtaining a Mexican visa is nearly impossible for the average Central American, as it involves meeting requisites as impossible as proving economic solvency.

In a December communiqué, the Meso-American Migrant Movement again demanded that the Mexican government create “a sub-category of visitor’s visa in order to document the undocumented.” This type of transit visa would serve to register the person’s passage through Mexico and would be permitted by the Migration Law. But the executive branch has issued a regulation ignoring that disposition, which could mean a constitutional controversy between it and the legislative branch, as some argue that the executive regulation modifies the Migration Law. If such a visa doesn’t become possible, another proposal is to eliminate the need for visas for Central Americans in general, which the Organization of American States itself has asked the government of Mexico to consider. In fact, countries such as Chile, Uruguay, Argentina, Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica and Belize don’t need visas to enter Mexico.

Educate in “citizenship”

All these political and administrative demands are both important and urgent. But there’s no avoiding the fact that behind the phenomenon of disappeared migrants are also cultural causes that must be denounced and transformed. Behind the disappearances caused by human trafficking networks is a machista sexual culture that demands and sustains one of the major worldwide crime businesses. On the other hand, that same machista culture, when expressed in fleeing the responsibilities of caring, cheats children out of the presence of a father who should take responsibility for sharing those responsibilities with the mother. What is needed is an education that teaches “citizenship,” as Gioconda Belli proposes in her novel El país de las mujeres (The Women’s Country).

Migration is revealing that refusal of many men to assume tasks involved in looking after their families. A 2011 study by the International Organization for Migration and UNICEF in Guatemala revealed that 640 girls aged between 10 and 14 now head their family and are responsible for their younger siblings. In some cases there are older brothers, but the responsibility for taking care of the family usually falls to the oldest sister, the last link in the “global care chains” triggered by migration.

In the University of the Cloister of Sor Juana, located in the same convent of San Jerónimo where the 17th_century nun Sor Juana wrote against the machismo that caused the human trafficking of her times, we listened to women who continue suffering from this crime and the disappearance of their daughters, many of them the victims of networks of sexual exploitation.

The disappeared who reappear

The most high-profile achievement of these caravans is when a missing migrant is found and reunited with his or her parent. Sometimes, only half of that equation is met: the finding. The reuniting may be impossible for a number of reasons, including the migrant being deceased with the remains identified in a common grave, or being alive but in a personal situation that explains his or her disinterest in being found. While this latter reason isn’t very common, one of its causes is a failure to find work and make a new life. The Mexican song “Jacinto Cenobio” expresses it well, in which the failed migrant runs into his godson and asks him “not to tell anyone I’m here.” Successful migrants come back with gold chains while the failed ones don’t come back at all. Other causes are avoidance of responsibility for the children they left behind, flight from debts or threats, a change of identity, the formation of another family, or nothing more than the loss of an address or telephone number, as happened to the son involved in the final reuniting of our caravan, in Huehuetán.

Locating disappeared migrants is the first success these mothers achieve by joining together. Since its founding in 2006, COFAMIDE has succeeded in locating 50 Salvadorans who are still alive and 16 who died. In its first 10 years of existence in Honduras, COFAMIPRO had located 144 disappeared migrants.

Planting flowers along the train tracks

The most important achievement of these caravans is the hope raised by these women’s struggle. It gives hope not only to other mothers of migrants, but to all of Central American society, which feels helpless in the face of the States’ incompetence.

Our peoples have to be grateful for that struggle. One of the women died shortly after this caravan ended. After 20 years of knowing nothing about her daughter, Emeteria Martínez of Honduras looked for her and found her in 2010. She remained in COFAMIPRO accompanying other women and fighting for migrants’ rights. Despite her 74 years of age, she participated in this caravan, and died shortly afterward in January in El Progreso, diagnosed as having suffered a silent heart attack.

The phenomenon of disappeared migrants is itself like a silent heart attack. Emeteria and the women who organized to look for their children have seen to it that this phenomenon does not remain silent. They have put it on the Central American agenda, generating a hope that wouldn’t be possible without such organization that demands a response from the public powers. These women symbolize that hope when they plant flowers alongside the tracks of the train on which so many Central American migrants ride.

“Because they’re coming from hate”

These women have a strength as ancient as humanity. It is the strength of the poor, the strength of love in the face of hate, as Uruguayan poet Mario Benedetti says in “Desa¬parecidos” [written about those disappeared at the hands of the military governments of Uruguay and Argentina during the 1970s and 80s and translated here by Louise Popkin]: “They’re out there somewhere/ in the clouds or a grave/ they’re out there somewhere/ of that I’m certain/ in the dear southern reaches of my heart/ it may be they’ve lost their bearings/ and now they wander asking always asking/ where the fuck is the road to true love/ because they’re coming from so much hate.”

The son of Teodora Ñaméndiz, with whom we opened this narrative, fled the hatred between brothers in the war Nicaragua suffered through in the eighties. After 32 years of estrangement, 26 of them with no communication, Francisco Dionisio hugged his 75-year old mother in the Decanal Guadalupano Shelter.

What these mothers have done should teach us that all human beings form part of a single caravan. It is the caravan of the history of humanity, which advances toward a single family and erases borders with embraces. To continue making progress, we need to wake up to the fact that we are “hasta la madre” with so much hatred. And together with these women, we need to plant flowers alongside the train tracks.

José Luis González, sj, is a member of the Jesuit Service for Migrants.

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