Mexico, a country suffering the turmoil of a brutal drug war, cannot agree on how to honor the victims of a six-year assault on organized crime that has taken as many as 70,000 lives.
The Mexican government’s official monument was dedicated on Friday, four months after its completion, in a public event where relatives of the missing chased after the dignitaries in tears, pleading for help in finding their loved ones.
Only some victims’ rights groups recognize the monument, while others picked a different monument to place handkerchiefs painted with names and messages in protest of the official site, which does not bear a single victim’s name.
“Other organizations asked us for other space because they’re against this one,” Mexican Secretary of the Interior Miguel Angel Osorio Chong said at the official dedication of the government monument, which consists of steel panels bearing quotes from famous writers and thinkers. “What took us so long was trying to get agreement among the groups, and we failed.”
The memorial dispute arises from the fact that the Mexican government has yet to fully document cases of drug war dead and missing, despite constant pleas from rights groups, the public and orders from its own transparency agency.
The government of former Mexican president Felipe Calderon stopped counting drug war dead in September 2011 and the new government of Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto has only provided monthly statistics for December last year, and January and February of this year. The estimates of the dead range from 60,000 to more than 100,000, and the missing from 5,000 to 27,000.
Jose Merino, a political science professor at Mexico Autonomous Institute of Technology, said that only when the government documents every victim and acknowledges that the violence continues will people accept a memorial.
“We haven’t reached the point where we can agree on what is hurting us and why,” Merino said. “The job of the government is to study all these cases and not pile up stones for memorials.”
Calderon, who at first dismissed most of the drug-war dead as criminals, proposed the memorial last year after taking heat for his earlier remarks.
Javier Sicilia, a well-known poet whose son’s death sparked a nationwide movement for peace, immediately opposed the idea because it is built on a military installation and many Mexicans consider the military complicit in drug-war abuses and disappearances. Instead, Sicilia has organized the group that has taken over the recently built Pillar of Light, a tower designed to commemorate the country’s independence, but that became a symbol of corruption because of its high costs and construction delays.
The memorial is supported by two of Mexico’s largest victims’ rights groups. Sports magnate Alejandro Marti founded Mexico SOS after his teenage son was kidnapped and killed despite reportedly paying a ransom. He acknowledged at the ceremony that government still owes an official list of the victims.
It is also supported by Isabel Miranda de Wallace, who founded Stop the Kidnapping after her son disappeared, never to be heard from again. She ran unsuccessfully for mayor of Mexico City last year as a candidate for Calderon’s conservative National Action Party.
The land for the memorial belonged to the Defense Department but was given to a governmental body that helps victims and relatives. Over four reflective pools, a group of builders and architects working with three anti-crime groups erected 64 panels of steel that appear to be rusty. Quotes from Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Martin Luther King Jr are cut into some of the steel plates.
Most panels are blank so people can write in the names of their relatives, said Ricardo Lopez Martin, one of the architects who designed the memorial. Lopez Martin said it is not simple to make Mexico’s monument like the Vietnam or Holocaust memorials, because some relatives are still scared or feel they could be stigmatized by having family among the dead.
‘IN A DIFFERENT PLACE’: The envoy first visited Shanghai, where he attended a Chinese basketball playoff match, and is to meet top officials in Beijing tomorrow US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday arrived in China on his second visit in a year as the US ramps up pressure on its rival over its support for Russia while also seeking to manage tensions with Beijing. The US diplomat tomorrow is to meet China’s top brass in Beijing, where he is also expected to plead for restraint as Taiwan inaugurates president-elect William Lai (賴清德), and to raise US concerns on Chinese trade practices. However, Blinken is also seeking to stabilize ties, with tensions between the world’s two largest economies easing since his previous visit in June last year. At the
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese
RIVER TRAGEDY: Local fishers and residents helped rescue people after the vessel capsized, while motorbike taxis evacuated some of the injured At least 58 people going to a funeral died after their overloaded river boat capsized in the Central African Republic’s (CAR) capital, Bangui, the head of civil protection said on Saturday. “We were able to extract 58 lifeless bodies,” Thomas Djimasse told Radio Guira. “We don’t know the total number of people who are underwater. According to witnesses and videos on social media, the wooden boat was carrying more than 300 people — some standing and others perched on wooden structures — when it sank on the Mpoko River on Friday. The vessel was heading to the funeral of a village chief in