Breathe
By Luciana Wainer
This week an investigation published by El País and signed by journalist Pablo Ferri once again showed a possible extrajudicial execution committed at the hands of the Army: in a video of just over two minutes you can see the moment in which at least 18 members of the Mexican Army disarm, kick, place against a wall and shoot five men. Then, with their olive green uniforms and rifles at the ready, the soldiers alter the crime scene and place weapons on the bodies that lie prone. Here is a detail that for some is important, but for others decisive: some of the men - of the civilians - were armed with what, at first glance, would appear to be high caliber weapons.
When I shared the note on social networks, a mob of angry men and women responded to me almost in unison: "They are organized crime! Are you defending them? They are dead!". That with the proper variations of anger, aggravation and level of discussion that abounds in the networks. First of all, I must say that I am used to insults; I am a woman, a feminist and sometimes I dare to publish texts in inclusive language. That is to say, I am used to twitter offenses, dear readers. However, beyond the forms -which generally end up being irrelevant to the substance-, there is a necessary discussion, a legitimate approach: it is impossible to question the unleashed fury of millions of Mexicans whose land, friends, homes, families and even their lives have been taken away by organized crime. It would be cruel and absurd to judge the mother whose child was taken from her by a drug cartel or the woman who was enslaved by it when they celebrate the murder of one of their victimizers, be it at the hands of whomever.
There is, however, a false dichotomy installed in the collective imagination that materialized in one of the comments: "sure, better hugs and not bullets," ironized an indignant user. It all made sense to me. We have been led to believe, by dint of repeated speeches and viral images, that the options are reduced to these two concepts: either impunity reigns or criminals are destroyed in any way. And we, tired of enduring abuses and living in fear, have been embracing, to a greater or lesser extent, these only ways to combat violence, becoming accomplices of the authorities who, without any embarrassment, publicly say that they are inept to perform their tasks and that we should be satisfied with what we have. We see it with the poorly integrated investigation files, the altered crime scenes, the reports that falsify date, place and time, the torture and, also, the extrajudicial executions.
Then, the third option -which is never presented to us, as if it were an unattainable aspiration- becomes the only way out of the spiral of atrocities: justice. Without justice, hugs and bullets end in the same form of impunity; like the one that ended with the release of one hundred and twenty alleged suspects implicated in the Ayotzinapa case for having been tortured. Neither hugs nor bullets guarantee the victims reparation of damages, guarantee of non-repetition, nor justice. Neither hugs nor bullets would have made possible the Nuremberg trials, the trials of the Juntas of the Argentine military dictatorship or the International Tribunal for Rwanda. Neither embraces nor bullets will set a precedent for future cases, nor will they allow victims to leave a courtroom with the feeling that the system, at least for once, was a guarantor of their rights.
I do not know who the five men allegedly killed by the army were. I don't know what their lives were like, what they did for a living, or whether or not they were indeed perpetrators of the violence that is doing so much damage to the country. What I do know is that if those men had been arrested according to the law instead of bleeding to death on the side of a road, we would know. Maybe one of those mothers would have been able to find out what happened to her son. Maybe justice would have been served.
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of Opinion 51.
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