Breathe
MPBy Brenda Lugo
All wars invent their own language. In ours we did the same.
When the war against drug trafficking began in Mexico, crime took many lives, took away our words and, in exchange, left us with a dictionary of horror. We were forced to redefine words that were once innocent and that, from one day to the next, became the ultimate expression of violence.
In our war we learned a language that can only be understood through pain.
Before the disaster, swallow me up was the absurd metaphor for shame. But in our war, the earth really swallows you and covers you until a group of mothers, with their shovels and picks, rescue you from the humidity and oblivion. From that pit dug by violence.
Disappear has abandoned its meaning of being lost or absent. Today it is the word that snatches peace from families, because, deep down, we all know that disappearing means torture, dismemberment or dissolution in acid. To disappear is, ultimately, to die in uncertainty.
Cooking became a criminal act; lifting, a condemnation; bagging, the final denial of the body; and pozole, a method of extermination. Words became a sentence.
And then came Teuchitlán. But this time there were no words to name it. Because even in a war that has modified our vocabulary, there are horrors that are not named.
The violence left us mute, unable to describe what the photographs taken at the Izaguirre ranch in Jalisco revealed. Horror overcame language.
There was such a lack of words that there were those who insisted on comparing it to the Auschwitz extermination camps in Nazi Germany. I do not know if out of morbid curiosity, impotence or because we have not yet found a way to name our own extermination.
So, tell me: in this new dictionary of horror, how do we name Teuchitlán? How do we name the pain of the mothers who dig the earth with their hands and find traces of the most merciless destiny their disappeared children could have had?
Again, we are speechless.
*Brenda Lugo:
I am from Querétaro and a graduate of the Carlos Septién García School of Journalism. My publications can be found in various local and national digital media.
I work in the swampy terrain of politics, sometimes from journalism, other times from its depths. I do political analysis and decipher the language of power.
I train new generations of journalists at the Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro, devour podcasts and never stop writing.
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of the company. Opinion 51.
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