Breathe
By Alicia de los Ríos Merino
My name is Alicia de los Ríos Merino. I am a historian and university professor from Chihuahua who for a couple of decades has been recording in interviews the memories of communist militants and relatives of disappeared persons in order to historicize their experiences and propose explanatory models about complex social processes of the recent history of our country.
My interest in insurgencies and counterinsurgency resulted from my own experience. I am the daughter of Enrique Guillermo Pérez Mora and Alicia de los Ríos Merino, two radical militants whose fate was death and forced disappearance. Political violence determined my trajectory: relentlessly asking for the unknown mother turned me into a seeker, and the absence of state investigation encouraged me to study law. Understanding my parents and their insurgent generation, as well as the counterinsurgency that fought them, pushed me towards history. From this interdisciplinary perspective, I search for findings and answers about my mother, her disappeared companions, as well as about the people who disappeared them.
I grew up as the sixth child of my maternal grandparents. They and the rest of the family hid the fact that my mother was a missing person. At my insistence, they justified her absence with supposed studies abroad. When I demanded to talk to her on the phone, send her letters or get a passport to go see her, new absurd pretexts appeared. To respond to other girls about my mother's absence, I would invent imaginary stories: secret passages from where we would leave each other letters full of kisses and pending cuddles.
I was a child who waited patiently and disciplined for her mother, as one waits for Santa Claus, the Three Wise Men or the tooth fairy. The secret was to behave well, offer something in return and wait for the reward at dawn. What a desire to tell that little girl Lichita that she was not to blame for her mother not arriving, that mischief or rudeness were not the cause that prevented her from getting to know her.
When the adults in the family accepted that they did not know where Mom was, I felt I fell into a black hole. For the first time, I experienced that desolation that comes with disappearance. I did not imagine that that afternoon of unveiling would shape my path, because whoever experiences absence regularly becomes a seeker.
My mother was arrested in a working class area of Mexico City at noon on January 5, 1978. After being wounded in the collarbone, in the middle of the chase she ran into a house, picked up the phone and called her family in Chihuahua. Her sister Martha answered, to whom she shouted: "I am Alicia, they are going to arrest me, look for me". The agents burst in. It was the Special Brigade, ordered to eliminate the militancy of the September 23rd Communist League. After subduing her, they immediately transferred her to Military Camp 1. According to testimonies, in those military installations she was seen in February 1978 by Cirilo Cota, Ramón Galaviz and Juan Manuel Hernández. Mario Álvaro Cartagena, "El Guaymas", saw her in April, and in May she shared cells with Alfredo Medina, Reyes Ignacio and Lorenzo Soto, young men from Juarez who had recently been arrested.
It was with these last three companions that she was transferred to the military air base of Pie de la Cuesta, a few kilometers from Acapulco, on the coast of Guerrero. From 1974 to 1979, night flights took off from there to drop the bodies of detained and executed insurgents into the open sea of the Pacific. When Mom arrived there, it was the first days of June 1978. Alfredo Medina and Reyes Ignacio managed to survive by being separated from the group that remained in the Pie de la Cuesta facilities. When in July of the same year they arrived at the Chihuahua Penitentiary, Alfredo testified that he was with his mother in two military facilities. It was the last time anyone saw her.
It is the words of the survivors that continue to shed light on the whereabouts of my mother and the perpetrators of her disappearance. If only today I would continue to write stories to save myself from the horror. I wish religious faith or the eternal slogan would have convinced me that Mom would knock on the door of that house where we waited for her. But I could not sit back and live with the uncertainty. In a sort of family relief, in June 2002 of that year I initiated litigation to find the perpetrators of her disappearance. Since then, I have been represented by the Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez Human Rights Center. It has been a road paved with patience, collective work and love. It is not possible to survive a strategic litigation for forced disappearance without love as a driving force. I was a child who grew up among collectives of relatives and grew up among human rights organizations. It is not strange to make their agenda my own, which is organic to me. Incongruent would be to join the denialism and the defense of the armed forces that refuse to clarify and justice.
In 2020 we made a strategic shift in the case at the FGR, focusing on finding the perpetrators and on the clandestine detention sites that were part of the circuit of forced disappearance in Mexico. Since then, the public prosecutors, the Prodh defense and myself have met with at least twelve witnesses, all of them former agents of the Federal Security Directorate, the Mexican Army and one from the Investigation and Crime Prevention Division (DIPD). All indications of Mom's disappearance lead us to Military Camp 1 and Pie de la Cuesta. Since 2002 we requested to enter the military installations, inspections that will take place next month, after 22 years.
Survivors, family members and the Truth Commission entered Military Camp 1 and other military installations three times without ministerial personnel. On those occasions, we listened to the testimonies of the survivors when they recognized the places where they were detained, together with our disappeared fathers or mothers. In April 2023, survivors of disappearance and relatives of victims entered Air Base number 7 in Pie de la Cuesta, Guerrero, the place where Mom was transferred to in the first days of June 1978. A week before entering the air base, I traveled to Pie de la Cuesta with Marcela Turati, who has been investigating Mom's case since 2001, when together we would get into her car at night in what was then Mexico City and drive aimlessly to look for a homeless woman who they said looked like Alicia, my mother.
We have always thought that the possibilities of a disappearance are infinite and, for the most part, complex to verify, but not impossible. That is why the urgency of not stopping. In the field and in the office, through interviews with possible perpetrators and interviews with survivors of the air base at the foot of the slope, we have dedicated ourselves to reconstructing the forms of systematic elimination such as the death flights, documented in the preliminary investigation of the Military Prosecutor's Office against Francisco Quiros Hermosillo, Mario Arturo Acosta Chaparro and Francisco Javier Barquin Alonso, initiated in the last years of the 1990s.
It is a work that has involved many people who have made the right to truth a reality: survivors, family members, defenders, researchers and civil servants, journalists and forensic architects. Just last Sunday, days after the report of the Historical Clarification Mechanism and the publication of the list of possible victims of the 1974 death flights, we learned about the Arava 2005 plane used by the Mexican army for that criminal purpose. The enormous metallic being, now olive green, that flew the skies of Guerrero and Oaxaca with our mothers and fathers inside, is a part of that puzzle that is still missing many pieces.
I understand that we are not prepared to face clues that confirm fatal destinies, despite the passage of decades without our families being found. What I have learned is that the search and the truth cannot be lived in an isolated or disjointed manner. I want to say to the families of yesterday and today, to those daughters and sons who are looking for their fathers and mothers, that if the red threads, those clues that we follow lead us to adverse destinies, it is not our fault. It is the State that by order, inaction or complicity allowed our mothers and fathers to be disappeared, not us. Let us not feel guilty for finding. Because if we reach the graves or the ocean, because if we identify those responsible civilians, military and criminals, it will be because we have not stopped or faltered in the attempt. To remain silent and hide revictimizes, to search and find repairs. When you know what happened to Mom, whose name means "she who speaks the truth", and her militant and peasant comrades like Leticia, Saúl, Francisco, José de Jesús, Rosendo, Rafael and Víctor, and hundreds more punished by structural, political and criminal violence, it will have been worth it not to succumb to contempt, denialism, impunity and official forgetfulness.
* Alicia de los Ríos Merino is a historian and lawyer who teaches at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the Autonomous University of Chihuahua. She is the daughter of Alicia de los Ríos Merino, who was disappeared on January 5 by the Special Brigade, for which she and Centro Prodh have been engaged in international and national litigation since 2002 to clarify her mother's whereabouts and responsibilities.
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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