Breathe
By Sandra Romandía
There is always a dichotomy between the impulse to do and the need to stop and think about whether what is going to be done is going to be done well. The ethical dilemma is installed in the throat of the journalist just when the opportunity to witness the horror from the front line presents itself. Is it to inform or to invade? To testify or to desecrate?
Last Wednesday, when the Attorney General of the Republic, Alejandro Gertz Manero, announced that he would open the gates of Rancho Izaguirre in Jalisco - a place indicated as an extermination camp by search collectives - and that he would allow access to the media the following day, my natural impulse was to say: "I want to go". I wrote to the Social Communication department and looked for the nearest flight from Mexico City. I am no stranger to that professional reflex of being where it matters, even if that urgency sometimes stumbles over dark areas of our responsibility.
Already in Guadalajara, upon arriving at the State Prosecutor's Office - the meeting point for the media - it was not the heat, nor the improvised logistics that hit me first, it was a stench: a metaphorical stench, putrefaction in a figurative sense. It was a stench: a metaphorical bad smell, putrefaction in a figurative sense. What were we going to do? Maybe just watch from the outside? Maybe enter one by one, guided by an expert? Or attend a carefully rehearsed staging? Would we be accomplices of an institutional desecration disguised as transparency?
Many colleagues were around me: journalists from national, international and local media. We shared our doubts, our expectations, our contradictions. We were all there out of conviction and profession, but also because of that impulse that does not always distinguish between the informative and the morbid. Journalism, like the scalpel, cuts to heal, but it can also wound if not used with care.
They put us on trucks -- three, maybe more -- that left for the ejido of La Estanzuela, where the Izaguirre ranch is located. We passed through Tala, another name marked by violence: there, in 2017, a recruitment camp of the Jalisco Cartel - New Generation was discovered. The road was a physical and symbolic journey towards the repetition of horror.
Arriving at the ejido, we descended in 41-degree heat, with no shade, no water, no awnings, no care. We walked a kilometer under the sun. I, who could hardly stand the sweat and discomfort, thought how ridiculous my suffering was compared to that of those who were tortured, burned and buried there. The pain of others has an impossible scale.
The first thing that greeted me was not an authority, nor an explanation, nor a protocol. It was crying. A woman, Mrs. Mary, cried, "They lied to us. I thought I would find something of my son, but now there is nothing." Mothers had come from other cities, some from other states, hoping to find some clue, some object, some piece of clothing. But the ranch was swept. The scene had already been cleaned by the Prosecutor's Office: the backpacks, the shoes, the shirts, the underwear, everything had been collected -we were told- by experts and sent for forensic analysis.
But what was left? The pits were left. The ashes were left. There was the smell of death that no official version can dispel. And there were also more obvious remains: a half-buried toothbrush, underwear, socks, spoons. Oneneeded only to move the earth a little to find personal items of potential forensic value. And why were they there? Why had no one collected them? Who is responsible for what was left behind?
What disturbed me most was not what I saw, but what we were not allowed to understand. There was not a single official who could explain what the yellow flags, the cordoned-off areas, the markings on the hills were. To anyone you asked, they would answer: "I don't know anything". And who does know? "We don't know". A crime scene without context, a museum of horror without curatorship. And in the background, mothers crying. And among all of us, the journalists stepping on human remains while we asked if it was a grave or a shadow.
The tour was chaotic. We were moved from one point to another without explanation. They told us what we could and could not see, but without technical or ethical reasons. And in the midst of this improvisation, the victims were re-victimized. Again and again. Because it is not only about the initial crime, but all the forms of negligence that follow: cleaning the ranch before the relatives arrive, preventing important objects from being registered, opening without protocol a site with human remains, and, the most outrageous, doing it without anyone who can name what we are seeing.
I, like many colleagues, left with more questions than notes. Why did we go, what did we do there, was it valid, did we help document or were we just in the way? In a country where barbarism has become institutionalized, even journalism must ask itself if it is late, wrong or unnecessary.
The Izaguirre ranch is an open wound. But the way in which the State manages that wound -with clumsiness, with arrogance, with silence- infects it even more. The ashes are no longer evidence, they are witnesses of abandonment. And we, the journalists, are sometimes not witnesses, but part of the noise that prevents us from hearing what the earth is really shouting.
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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