Although her family fears that in Mexico they will disappear it, Mary Martínez, a Honduran seeking mother, returns every time she can find her son Marco Antonio Amador Martínez, -disappeared in 2013-, while loading with the triple day of being a search engine, in addition to caregiver and supplier of her home, in front of the abandonment of the State.
“They are afraid of what happens here in Mexico (…) that disappear to mothers and that spreads everywhere,” said Martínez, a member of the Love and Faith Committee Collective.
Like her, many women assume the work that corresponds to the state of looking for their missing relatives, while dealing with the responsibility of caring for and sustaining their home, according to the report “Disappear again: violence and affectations faced by women seeking in Mexico”, of Amnesty International (AI).
Nine out of 10 people looking for their missing relatives in Mexico are women, according to AI, who since 2011 registered the disappearance of at least five and the murder of 16 search engines in the country.
On his last visit to Mexico, Martínez shared that it was difficult for her to leave her granddaughter already in Tegucigalpa, with whom she lives and were worried about the risks of her trip, in addition to her taking care of the girls so that her daughter can work.
“But daughter, I say, I can’t stop doing it because if you were the one you were missing, I would do it (…) and I need my son and I will keep looking for him,” said Mary, who from the death of her husband three years ago, stays alone and holds her home selling traps to hunt mice.
Each that Mary returns to Mexico, she also loads with the photographs of other Central American missing people to spread them and “be the voice of all those mothers who are waiting for their son’s news” and cannot move to the country.
“Because that uncertainty, to us mothers, to families that we have a missing child, is killing us (…) is bringing us many diseases such as hypertension, sugar (diabetes), oblivion in our mind,” Mary said.
AI warned that 97% of 661 women sought after violence and physical, emotional, social and economic effects, within the framework of their search work, ranging from chronic diseases to impoverishment and forced displacement, among others.
Read more: women seekers in Mexico suffer violence for their work: Amnesty International
Migrants and indigenous communities are also part of the search for missing
In addition, AI identified that the search engines of migrants and belonging to indigenous peoples face structural and intersectional discrimination that hinders their access to authorities and services, due to barriers such as language, nationality and migratory requirements, which aggravates the violation of their human rights.
Beatriz Zapotec, founder of the collective “Looking for justice for ours”, which groups more than 20 indigenous women of the state of Guerrero, recapitulated that the inaction of the authorities was so much after the disappearance of her husband Santiago Tixteco Cosme in 2016, who decided to study law on his own to understand the justice system.
“My life changed a lot. I was very dedicated to my family, my home, my children (…) and now I have double work and sometimes even triple because we have to find it anywhere,” Zapotec said.
He also pointed out that, as indigenous women, the search is complicated “in all areas”, especially because of the remoteness of their communities with the capital, Chilpancingo, where they must make complaints and procedures.
Martínez stressed that for the relatives of missing migrants the obstacles intensify themselves by not being able to move to Mexico, and recalled that there was a time when the authorities repatriated land or clothing bags, so now “mothers open the coffins to verify if the body goes there.”
Mexico accumulates more than 130,000 missing persons, according to data from the National Registry of missing and not located (RNPDNO), which counts the disappearances since the 1950s.
However, official figures only report 267 missing migrants in Mexico, so Amnesty International warned of an “important sub -registration.”
With EFE information
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