The electoral roll left more than 100,000 people underground in Mexico

This is an installment of the weekly newsletter from Mexico, which you can follow for free at this link

This is not the time to sour the democratic celebration that millions of Mexicans are experiencing, but there are realities that knock on the door from the first minute the government changes, without delay. In Mexico there are, to give a rough estimate, 113,000 people who could not go to vote. They are underground. Mostly young people, the missing are victims, perpetrators or both, people engulfed by the violence that sweeps the country and in which they are sometimes trapped since they were children. Maybe they never got to vote. Would they have done it if they could? Who would they trust? Most of them left their homes in the last 28 years and did not return. From their nameless burial sites they will receive the sun and rain as governments pass.

Last Thursday, with the echoes of the closing of the campaign already muffled, a voice was raised again like a sledgehammer. Ceci Flores, the most famous of the searching mothers, located human bones on a hill in Iztapalapa, one of the most populous municipalities in the Mexican capital. There was no doubt this time, they were skulls. The Prosecutor’s Office, with some detachment, announced an investigation. The dead raised their hands, they wanted to participate in the political contest without caring if it was a day of reflection or not. The most notable failure of this Administration has been the failed fight against violence. More than 30,000 deaths a year. And in another box are the missing, the worst of violence, the one that leaves no room for flowers or mourning, the one that reaches into the kitchen like an obsession without tears. On what coffin to pour them? Entire families destroyed that abandon the routines of daily life: there are no more Sunday meals, no 15th birthday parties, no Christmases, no soccer games with carnitas dessert. Only the restlessness corroding the insides. Where are they? Today they would be 18 years old, 22, 35, and they have not gone to the polls.

The electoral ballots in Mexico include a blank box where you can vote for whoever you want, whether or not they have participated in the elections. Traditionally, names like Cantinflas or Mickey Mouse appear in those boxes, but they are also used seriously. Upon leaving the polling station, Claudia Sheinbaum announced that for the presidency, for which she was running and which she won, she had voted for Ifigenia Martínez, the nonagenarian politician who is a symbol for the Mexican left. Sheinbaum, the first woman to receive the presidential sash of Mexico, thus dedicated her particular tribute to Martínez. President López Obrador did something similar in past elections, voting for the writer Carlos Monsiváis, for example, or writing a “Long live Zapata!” on another occasion.

Leticia Hidalgo voted this Sunday for Roy Rivera Hidalgo, her son, who disappeared one day in 2011 in Monterrey. The police took it from his house when he was 18 and never returned it. Many other mothers have joined the proposal to mark on their ballots the names of those they search for with pick and shovel. From the gutters, the garbage dumps, hills and ravines, deserts, urban lots, more than 100,000 people have spoken in these elections and their cry is that of all of Mexico. The one who tells the candidate to be victorious, without looking at his color or his ideology, that there is an unavoidable priority in this country: stopping the violence on Mexican lands and letting those who wander lost two meters away speak once and for all. under ground.

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