Tessy Schlosser in The Ideas Letter:
On September 26 of this year, the streets of Mexico City once again filled with the faces and the voices of Ayotzinapa. Eleven years after the disappearance of forty-three students, the annual march has become part of a ritual calendar of protest: Names are spoken, banners are carried, justice is invoked. One demand is made—if the students were taken alive, they must be returned alive. “Vivos se los llevaron, vivos los queremos.” To say “they were taken alive” is to insist they might still be alive, suspended in a space where truth has yet to land. Investigations attempt to find that truth, often without resolution. A commission for “truth and access to justice” was established in December 2018 by presidential decree, exclusively dedicated to the Ayotzinapa case. The same demand is repeated. For most, September 26 has become a metronome of remembrance, a rhythm by which a nation counts its failures and measures its inability to face the disappearance not only of those forty-three students, but of the hundreds of thousands of others—most without marches, investigations, or commissions—who have been killed or who have gone missing over the past two decades.
Earlier that month, a UN independent commission—and Mexico’s own president—had called Israel’s campaign in Gaza a genocide. The calendar of the law, local or international, is procedural: It moves through hearings and rulings, through words that aim to gel events into crimes—“enforced disappearance,” “crimes against humanity,” “genocide.” These nouns aspire to tame violence by naming it. The law’s grammar seeks finality, the closure of history. Its aspiration is almost eschatological, with its promise that once a harm is labeled, the world might forever hold still. The law wants to stop time momentarily to address what has been done and prevent the past from repeating itself in the future. Sometimes a ruling brings relief, but even then, its language keeps moving under the surface: searching, yearning, raging, hurting, assessing, doubting.
More here.
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