Call the Mothers: Searching for Mexico’s Disappeared in the War on Drugs, Shaylih Muehlmann, 2024, University of California Press
There is no better example of a state’s callous disregard for its citizens than Mexico where, if a loved one disappears, you are quite literally on your own.
Not only is the scale of this problem almost beyond belief, the brazen nature of kidnapping and forced abductions in the country is a metaphor for an absent state that, nonetheless, cynically pretends to its citizens that it is present.
As Shaylih Muehlmann points out with candour, not only do the families of the “disappeared” have to undertake the most basic functions of paid public officials—from searching for those lost, to actually digging up their bodies if they ever find them—those very officials are often implicated in this most heinous of crimes.
This criminal justice role reversal is a distinctive—perhaps even unique—aspect of contemporary Mexican governance that reflects, as the author suggests, the toxic underlying cocktail of factors fuelling the violence that has become a defining trait of the era.
Nonetheless, a technical understanding of the reasons for such high levels of bloodshed in the country—militarisation of drug policies, neoliberalism and democratisation—is of little comfort to the families of the disappeared whose pain is unimaginable.
The problem of disappearances in Mexico is breathtakingly serious and the lack of progress addressing unresolved cases—as well as the large numbers of new cases every year—underscores a heartbreaking reality: few, if any, of the people who inexplicably drop off the radar will ever be found, let alone found alive.
The International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) states that according to Mexico’s own National Registry of Missing Persons, as of 21 September 2023, 111,521 people were reported as disappeared as a result of crime.
But as ICMP points out, widespread under-reporting and a lack of comprehensive nationwide statistics mean that, bad as they are, such numbers are likely to underestimate the scale of the problem.
In short, day-to-day disappearances are a fact of life in Mexico. It has become, as Muehlmann points out, “a country of the disappeared”.
And things are only getting worse: the author notes that between 2022 and 2023 the record of disappearances reached its highest yet: the national registry recorded 10,064—amounting to the disappearance of 27 people per day.
Things escalated after 2006 when the then president Felipe Calderón launched the disastrous “war on drugs” at the behest of the US, whereby drug interdiction policies in Mexico became heavily militarised and armed violence spiralled out of control. Already corrupt, the security forces took their new orders as carte blanche to lay waste to human rights and the rule of law.
While this book is not an exploration of this badly misguided, imported policy failure, there is little doubt that its catastrophic impact on Mexican society is at the root of the vast scale of disappearances in the country.
Nonetheless, Muehlmann points out that the beast has fed on other sociopolitical and economic nutrients, many of which were also imported—the intersecting processes of drug war policies, neoliberalisation of the economy, and a “democratic” transition.
Muehlmann writes: “This confluence created deep connections between criminal organisations and the state, the most glaring evidence of which is almost total impunity for cases of deaths and disappearances.”
Impunity is at the heart of the matter, because state officials are a major part of the problem, a stark reality that is concealed with great effectiveness by the federal government’s wilful failure to collect, aggregate and supply data.
Cases involving the complicity or direct involvement of state security forces are referred to as “enforced disappearances” and human rights organisations generally concur that, in Latin America, Mexico tops the league table for this form of state terrorism.
Muehlmann writes: “It is difficult to estimate how many disappearances directly involve state agents because prosecutors and police routinely neglect to take basic investigative steps to identify those responsible. Sometimes the involvement of the state is obvious: soldiers or police in official uniforms and vehicles detain people either in public … or from their homes in front of their families. These detentions are arbitrary, with no reasons or explanations given, and when the victims’ relatives inquire about their detained family members whereabouts … they are often told the arrests never took place.”
A study by the Observatory on Disappearances and Impunity in Mexico that analysed 548 cases in the state of Nuevo León found that, from 2005 to 2015, 46.76 per cent of reported disappearances were carried out by state agents.
Even high-profile cases with direct evidence of army or police involvement that receive ample media coverage remain shrouded in mystery by official institutions. A report in 2022 by the United Nations Committee against Enforced Disappearances stated that impunity for these crimes in Mexico is near “absolute”, with a conviction rate of no more than 6 per cent.
But as Muehlmann’s book makes clear, many of those affected refuse to suffer in silence and have become energetic activists seeking to locate the disappeared, seek justice, and challenge a cynical state’s utter disregard for their plight.
As the UN human rights body OHCHR notes, the trauma and pain bequeathed by this problem combined with the state’s singular failure to acknowledge its gravity and address its consequences, has galvanised civil society to aggregate and organise like never before.
Organisations such as the Movimiento por Nuestros Desaparecidos en México (MNDM) bring together local collectives dedicated to the search for the disappeared.
Since 2015, some progress has been made: in 2017 the national movement for the disappeared and civil society groups were able to advance the adoption of the General Law on Enforced Disappearances which largely brought the country in line with international standards and, among other things, established a National Search Commission (NSC) to coordinate the search for victims at the federal level.
Nonetheless, these institutions and mechanisms are flawed and weak, often lacking resources, poor at coordinating, and having to confront separate military jurisdiction that can limit compliance with the law.
There is a strongly gendered character to this noble civil society quest for resolution, justice and closure, because it is overwhelmingly led by women, particularly the mothers of missing people.
There are good reasons for this: despite the acute problem of femicide in Mexico, the deaths and disappearances created by drug violence are overwhelmingly those of young men, a result of which has been that tens of thousands of women have been left widowed or searching for information on missing or murdered children, siblings or spouses.
Muehlmann’s book is dedicated to some of these remarkable women who took the search for their loved ones into their own hands.
Call the Mothers follows the lives of activists who have simultaneously searched without respite for loved ones while creating national self-help networks that put Mexico’s disinterested state to shame.
Starting from scratch and driven by fearsome maternal instincts, these women have become highly effective investigators who organise and coordinate field searches for mass graves, and forensic experts able to identify soil types, humidity, and smells.
Theirs are almost always stories without happy endings—yet at the same time their courage and determination offer real hope for the little people trampled upon by corrupt elites.
As Muehlmann writes: “The book shows how citizens, especially women, are increasingly taking on the roles of the state in investigating what happened to their loved ones.
“In the face of government corruption and negligence, it is women who carry out most of the functions involved with dealing with missing persons, kidnapping, and extortion cases and who have become the network to which other mothers of the missing turn.”
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Categories: Mexico, North America