Debanhi. I keep looking at the last picture someone took of you. The last, perhaps. Standing by the side of a road, in your white blouse and black ankle boots, arms crossed, waiting, vulnerable. I look at you and I think you dress like my daughter, and in these days when we don’t know where you are, I have adopted you. Hour after hour I check social networks to know something about you. I pray to all the goddesses that they find you, that we find you. I think of your mother, armed between anguish and uncertainty and a skin of hope. The same thing I would suffer if my Julia disappeared. I think of your family, stepping on the crackling earth of a dry river, searching the bushes, calling out your name, looking for you. I think of so many families like this and I want to scream and flee from life and from the living because my country embarrasses me. Because we failed you. To you and so many more. The institutions failed you, the governors like Samuel García, President López Obrador, the police, the prosecutors, the men.
Misogyny stalks the women of Mexico, producing absences and seeking mothers, in state after state. Young people are disappearing by action or omission or indolence. They are disappearing because society still discusses whether it was their fault, for going out alone and at dawn. That morally petty society that blames them for being free. This aberrant society that criticizes them for going to a bar, having fun, dancing, living, as my daughter has done so many nights, educated to be a person and not a thing or object. Educated to own herself like Debanhi and María Fernanda and Alison and Jaqueline and Karen and Paulina and Yolanda and thousands more who came across the reality of being a woman in this country, turned into a mass grave.
Get in a taxi and you can disappear. Go to a bar with friends and you can disappear. Take an Uber and you can disappear. Dance with strangers and you can disappear. Walk alone at night and you could become just another number on the list of nearly 100,000 missing persons, as just documented by the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances. To be a woman here is to survive in permanent fear of the possibility of the hand that strangles, the penis that rapes, the blow that kills. Perennial nudity because the law doesn’t protect you, the judges don’t believe you, the police don’t take care of you, society doesn’t protect you. Sexism and machismo turn your body into something that can disappear.
Faced with this normalized abnormality, I carry an unspeakable sadness. I am sad for Debanhi’s family, for the family of so many, for Mexico, but above all – at this precise moment – I am sad for what they have taken from them and from us. For the books they won’t read, the ideas they won’t share, the kisses they won’t give, the daughters they won’t conceive. I am sad because Debanhi’s story -singular and at the same time repetitive- portrays a cosmic injustice, a deep cruelty, a shared wound, a desire to burn doors and deface monuments.
I don’t know what to do because we have spent years calling on this government -and those before it- to fulfill their founding obligation to protect us. We have been demanding demilitarization for more than two six-year terms, which is only growing, with its toll of lethal violence. And nothing happens: they keep disappearing, disappearing. While men of power walk through the National Palace, making fun of us, laughing at us. The little that remains is marching, shouting that the police are not taking care of us but our friends, disseminating videos with tips for walking down the street without being raped or killed or disappeared. Find ways to deal with the seven missing a day, the three hundred murdered a month, the bones in the desert, what remains of a body when someone seeks to erase it.
I would like to promise that pretty Debanhi, that New Leonese Debanhi, that Debanhi of mine and everyone, that we will take responsibility for the ignominious men behind her disappearance; the men who will always find an excuse to get off the dock. I would like to assure you that we will preserve your voice and its truth, along with so many others. We will reject that the clamor for them is discredited as a “smear campaign” against the government in power. Because paraphrasing Rosario Ibarra de Piedra, there is no democracy with missing persons. Not with thousands of women in a mass grave.
PENTHOUSE
To be a woman in Mexico is to survive in permanent fear of the hand that strangles, the penis that rapes, the blow that kills, disappearance.
#Common #pit