Breathe
By Miriam Ramírez* By Miriam Ramírez* By Miriam Ramírez* By Miriam Ramírez
I write this out of hopelessness and boredom, without the right answers, nor the absolute truth.
On the night of January 5, 2023, two Culichi friends told me that hunger kept them awake, one begged for a soft drink, the other for any foodstuff. They had spent the whole day locked up, they could not even go out to the corner store, no one did, outside there was no guarantee of anything.
That simple act of going to sleep hungry, I found devastating. Unlike 2019 when thousands of us were trapped between bullets, on the streets, at work, seeking shelter with strangers, this time we were trapped in our homes, safe but trapped again.
That encirclement, that terrifying silence in which the city was kept the whole day, that impotence of knowing to be absolutely unprotected (again), today has been transformed into a deep despair.
This time there will be no "Culiacán Valiente", a massive march called by a group of young people in October 2019 with the intention of giving us a collective embrace and reaffirming that "there are more of us good guys".
That time the march was a success, thousands of people dressed in white and carrying banners with phrases alluding to peace. There was a cultural festival and we all gathered in a park to paint children's faces, listen to the music of El David Aguilar and reclaim our space.
Then there were forums, discussions, proposals were drafted, agreements were signed and without realizing it, we reached January 5, 2023 and nothing changed, the same monster devoured us again.
One of the organizers of "Culiacán Valiente" said that in recent days several people have complained to her and made memes making fun of the fact that despite the efforts of the citizens, a culiacanazo happened again. As if it were the responsibility of the activists to avoid the inevitable. Nonsense.
What is a reality is that today there is no mood to march, nor to say that there are more of us good guys. Nor are we in the mood to defend the fact that Sinaloa is more than just violence. "The aguachile, the beach and the joy of its people", sounds like a worn out and tasteless discourse that only rulers and politicians dare to keep repeating.
In order to write this text I spoke with several of my friends in Culachi, artists, activists, journalists, academics, people who have been working for decades in what they call peace building. And now what, I asked them. I was not surprised by their answers. To summarize, I would say that most of them shrugged angrily.
"The term resilience shits me, and now even more so," an artist friend who has dedicated the last years of his life to accompanying mothers searching for their missing children, offering them art techniques to channel the pain, told me bluntly.
And the thing about the involuntary resilience of the culichis is that yes, we learn to recover, to coexist and coexist with the monster, but also to deny it, to hide it under the bed and never name it again.
In 2020 I worked as project coordinator at Iniciativa Sinaloa, an organization that promotes anti-corruption issues, government transparency, freedom of expression, human rights, among others.
The first year after the culiacanazo of 2019, we launched the campaign "Jueves Negro, nunca más" (Black Thursday, never again), which aimed to build collective strategies for non-repetition. The campaign consisted of 3 axes, one of them was the production of a documentary that collects testimonies and reflections on the Culiacanazo "The day we lost the city", it is available on youtube.
In the second axis, we organized a discussion with activists, journalists, mothers of the disappeared and the local Secretary of Public Security, who at the end of the meeting signed an agreement with proposals from civil society. It is worth mentioning that to date none of them have been fulfilled.
And the last axis was the dissemination in social networks of phrases from artists, activists, academics, journalists, who spoke about narcoculture and its negative effects on our society. This part of the campaign aimed to generate conversation and provoke reflection among citizens.
I don't know whether to call it a failure, but it was a tremendous reality check. That last axis of the campaign had an absolute rejection. We received thousands of negative comments on social networks demanding that we stop talking about the Culiacanazo. "Don't talk about it anymore", "leave it alone", "it's over".
Last January 6, 2023, I heard a very similar phrase from the governor of Sinaloa, Rubén Rocha Moya: "that was yesterday, today there are already conditions to return to normality".
Once again, turn the page and repeat a lie many times until it becomes true: "we are more the good guys". And maybe we are, but our efforts will continue to be insufficient and tiny if we collectively continue to deny and reject our reality.
* Miriam Ramírez is a Sinaloan journalist who for more than a decade has covered issues related to corruption, politics, drug trafficking and human rights in Sinaloa. She is currently a member of the Investigation and Data Unit of El Universal.
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of Opinion 51.
More than 150 opinions from 100 columnists await you for less than one book a month. Subscribe to Opinion 51.
Comments ()