Breathe
By Daniela Sáenz
At the beginning, everything was a simple news item in the newspaper about a well-known person who had been extradited to the United States, it was like one of those other news items, where it doesn't touch us, where we didn't see the seriousness and the consequences of everything that followed.
The next day I woke up my partner with a coffee and the news that Cuen, the deputy and former rector of the UAS, had been killed. That's when I knew it was not a coincidence and nothing began to be a coincidence in the days that followed and that continue to happen.
We thought it would be like the two previous culiacanazos, that it would last a day or two and after the chaos we would return to our lives, to life, but that did not happen. We did not calculate that it would last days, weeks and now months, now we think it will never end, we do not see the end of it.
The first few weeks there was news of businesses that could not sustain the loneliness of the streets, the deserted downtown. Then came the restaurants, national chains changing their hours.
Now you see waiters and band musicians at the crossroads, doing "their job" and asking for money to bring sustenance for their families. The concerts, the courses, have been cancelled, everyone is afraid to come and now it is even scary to leave because the highways are taken over every day, blockades, cars set on fire, tire punches.
At the beginning it was only the accesses to the city, now it is not only murders, now it is daily kidnappings, car thefts, fires at businesses that refuse to pay for their existence. The official versions told us that the cars set on fire in the city were due to short circuits, that the train that blocked the city for hours was due to technical failures while we all saw the photos of the shot cabin. The official versions lie, minimize, make us gaslight, while we are afraid, anxious and condemned to stay in our homes, to move as little as possible.
One goes out only for what is necessary, for food, water, medicine, everything as long as the sun does not go down, there is an unwritten rule, an unspoken curfew. We want to believe that they will leave us in peace as long as the sunlight can be seen.
I count and not the days, because sometimes there are those who remember how long we have been in this and at the same time I want to believe that it will no longer be necessary to make marks on the calendar. But we have to keep going, go to work, pay the electricity and water.
We have become accustomed to meeting during the day to celebrate friends' birthdays or simply to see them.
The fear is constant and understandable, one goes out to the supermarket or wherever and seeing the military, National Guard, State Police hooded with high caliber weapons instead of making us feel safe, makes us feel that we should not be living any of this.
You leave with paranoia, you suspect everyone, all you want to do is go home. You have learned to calculate the distance and whether it's a single shot or a shooting, it's all in the rhythm, in the dialogue, in the response.
There are beautiful parks and green places that are now deserted, I bought a treadmill to exercise and now to do it outdoors is the possibility of suffering a terror, an incident, a robbery, a something.
It is a contrast to the happy spirit of the Sinaloan, dancing, cheerful and eager to make friends. Now there is silence, the corridos are no longer heard. As if it were a checklist, now we all have a death in the neighborhood, a robbery of someone at work, a fire near a house of a relative or friend, this is catching up with all of us.
We have everything, fear, anger and Stockholm syndrome, because sometimes, we are even grateful to get home in one piece and be able to continue working to pay the rent of the place where we spend our confinement.
There is despair, there are changes of plans, there are Christmases that will be outside. People who can are eager to leave, to go out, to feel that they can celebrate what in other times it would be logical to celebrate, there is a desire to feel that life is different and remember what it is to go out to the street to do who knows what, but to go out without fear.
* Communicologist
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of the company. Opinion 51.
Comments ()