Breathe
By Virginia Garay
We are Mothers who, faced with the PAIN and TORTURE of not knowing the whereabouts of a child, are forced to search tirelessly to find his/her whereabouts, which has caused us countless traumatic events, irreparable losses not only of the child we are looking for, but of our whole life.
When we are faced with the need to confront an authority that should take care of, protect and help in the search and location of our loved one, we only find re-victimization, stigmatization, finger-pointing, humiliation, judgments, violation of our rights, but more serious is the violation of the right to justice, truth for the disappearance of our son/daughter, We are being singled out saying that as mothers we did not know how to guide and educate our loved one, as mothers we overprotect them, as mothers we are exaggerating and our child will return after a few hours since he/she left because of rebellion, we are humiliated after an interrogation that points us out as guilty of the disappearance and for that reason we do not have the right to go to ask for help.
As Mothers, we have been victims of abuse and aggression by the authorities at all levels of government, the police who always tell us that they have a lot of work to do and that our loved one is not the only one missing and for that reason they have not been able to investigate, the public ministries who in a rude and annoying way when we insist on requesting information, deny copies of the file, deny information arguing that the investigation is still ongoing, We are assaulted by the search commissions when they limit our participation in the searches with arguments such as lack of resources or that the search is not our responsibility. We are assaulted by the Human Rights Commission, who should defend and enforce our rights, since the follow-up to our complaints or recommendations is not supervised and compliance with them is not demanded, acting as an ally of the authorities and leaving us adrift.
As Mothers we are called "The crazy ones with the shovels" after using them all the time and not stopping in inclement weather because we are more interested in locating all our missing, we are revictimized by the judges who after reviewing an injunction where we request the search for our loved one, without reviewing it thoroughly decline it with arguments such as:
a) - Request that the Disappeared must go to ratify,
b) - When filing it virtually, it is required to be signed, when there is a regulation that the signature is not necessary due to the type of crime,
c),- They ask us to mention names of authorities and if you mention them, they refuse, arguing that they are not in charge of the file or that they just took the file, this after having constant changes of public prosecutor, commanders, investigating police or each of the authorities in charge of the search, investigation and location of our loved one.
Not only have we suffered from the scourge, the torture of not knowing where and how our son or daughter is, and the aggressions of the authorities, but we have also lost our family by finding ourselves all the time in search in the field, search in life, coordination with authorities, that is to say our life is totally far from our family, losing our previous life cycle, causing a further dismemberment of our couple, children, social life, losing our jobs and our family life.
But even more we find ourselves with the loss of health, since this ordeal has led us to fall into diseases such as:
1.- Diabetes
2.- Hypertension
Bruxism (jaw pressure causing tooth loss or breakage of teeth, chronic jaw pain).
4.- Breaks of any part of our body due to falls in the searches.
5.- Herniated discs due to the effort in the searches
With all this we can add that we receive all the time intimidations of all kinds to make us stop searching for our children and many mothers have been murdered for not stopping these searches, making us doubt about the work of searching or losing our lives and not knowing the whereabouts of our child.
A MOTHER DOES NOT TIRE, IS NOT INTIMIDATED, DOES NOT STOP UNTIL SHE FINDS HER MISSING TREASURE.
*Virginia Garay is founder of the Guerreras Nayarit search collective and honorary member of the National Citizen Council of the National Search System.
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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