Borojas told me that her group would continue searching for the desaparecidos, despite the killing of one of its members. “We will continue the struggle,” she said. “We are redoubling security measures within the collective.” Members of the collective believe that it’s still important to search for people who have been missing for years. “It is to have the certainty that you can bring them here to the pueblo and leave them in holy ground,” said Cubillos. “To let them rest in peace [so] that they are not in the underworld or in limbo. Because I believe that anyone who is missing wants to be found. We do not want revenge, only justice and, more than anything, to find our families.”
My last interview with Juárez took place in a small room in the house that she’d recently moved into. She has moved five times since her son disappeared. “People here are afraid. People found out my situation and they said, ‘We do not want problems. Please move.’ People really do not have empathy.” Juárez had a series of low-paying jobs, including cleaning homes, but she no longer works. “Now that I am searching for my son, I do not work so I can dedicate myself to that,” she told me. “My son, he sustained us. Our family has crumbled. When he disappeared, my son was twenty-six. Now he is twenty-eight.” She still speaks about him in the present tense. “I believe now that they have already left me dead while alive. Yes, I have my daughter and granddaughters but I am missing another part. I am a single mother and for me, he was my man. They killed me. I am not afraid. They took what was my strength.”
Her son Rodrigo’s daughter is now four years old and troubled by his absence. “For her, he was everything. She always asks, ‘Where is daddy?’ and we tell her he is working, that he had to work far away and because of this he cannot come home. We have problems with her in school; she does not want to participate. His daughter needs to know where her father is. At minimum, if we find him dead, at least she can take him a flower. Because then we can cry. We look for him and I do not know what happened to him. We do not know if he is still alive, if he has something to eat, or, if they have killed him, where they left him.”
I interviewed Juárez on the second anniversary of her son’s disappearance. I asked her if she was going to do anything special to mark the day. She told me no. “I just want to remember what we talked about and what we did together, to keep him with me. I do not have anything more of him, nothing more than his memory. I have nothing more than those memories.”
And so she and members of the Voz de los Desaparecidos en Puebla and other collectives across Mexico continue their search. The CNB website lists 103,261 desaparecidos in Mexico and 1,816 in Puebla. But since many families are afraid the people who took their relatives could come after them, they don’t always report disappearances. That means there are many more lying buried somewhere. “The whole country is a clandestine grave,” said Cubillos. “The whole country.”
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