Tony Wood in Sidecar:
On 5 March, Mexican families searching for missing relatives made a grim discovery at a ranch in Teuchitlán, Jalisco: two hundred pairs of shoes, heaps of clothing and fragments of bone. The place had been raided by the National Guard last September and a handful of arrests made, but at the time the authorities had seemingly missed the horrors that lay just beneath the soil, which were quickly taken as evidence that the ranch had been used as a site for systematic slaughter.
The Teuchitlán case prompted renewed outrage in Mexico, both at the government’s handling of the investigation and at its inability to curb the rising toll of deaths and disappearances that has scarred Mexico since President Felipe Calderón launched his ‘war on drugs’ in 2006. Statistics can convey only a fraction of what this cataclysm has wrought, but they are staggering enough: over 400,000 homicides since 2006, the majority of them related to narco violence, and more than 127,000 people still missing, with many tens of thousands more internally displaced due to the violence. Two decades on, no end is in sight, and despite the dramatic political shifts occasioned by Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s victory in 2018 and that of his successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, in 2024, here at least there has been a monstrous continuity.
The consequences will be working their way through Mexican society for decades to come.
More here.
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