Searching for Alicia | Marcela Turati, Will Noah

On the seashore in Pie de la Cuesta, a small trip city within the municipality of Acapulco, a soldier in a cream-colored desert camouflage uniform seems out of nowhere, blocking the best way. Simply past the tents providing coconut-oil massages and rows of palapas the place guests feast till sundown, he had been sheltering from the warmth behind a purple and white signal that claims STOP: NO ENTRY. One other, blue signal, its unique illustrations now sun-blurred like overexposed pictures, warns:

PROHIBIDO PASAR
CAMPO MILITAR N-27-F
NO TRASPASSING
MILITARY BASE

Just a few steps forward lies Army Air Base No. 7. Not a lot of the set up is seen from right here: a row of tall, leafy palm timber that rise between low, white, architecturally boring constructions; the tallest is a two-story rectangle. There’s no glimpse of the runway, the management tower, or the gasoline depot, only some dilapidated checkpoints with sheet-metal roofs, manned by troopers tasked with ensuring that no absent-minded vacationers or harmful drug traffickers enter.

This view of the navy base isn’t well-known. Extra well-known is the principle entrance, on Air Power Avenue, the place two vintage decommissioned struggle planes painted with shark mouths lie mounted on a concrete base, as if poised for takeoff. A plaque pays tribute to their pilots. Close by, behind the gate, troopers on guard responsibility watch the individuals who strategy to take selfies, ensuring they don’t get too shut. Behind them you possibly can see a stretch of the runway.

Within the final century, when Acapulco was on the peak of its splendor, that paved strip working alongside the coast was its official airport. The planes that landed there carried presidents and secretaries of state, magnates, millionaire vacationers, and divas and heartthrobs of Hollywood and golden-age Mexican cinema, who would then journey one other seven rocky and abandoned miles to succeed in the glamorous bay the place the evening was at all times younger. Among the many stars the showbiz chroniclers bear in mind passing by way of are Cary Grant, Frank Sinatra, Bette Davis, Rita Hayworth, John Wayne, Orson Welles, and the athlete Johnny Weissmuller, finest recognized for enjoying Tarzan. Within the Nineteen Forties the town was immortalized by Agustín Lara’s piano and seductive voice, crooning to the actress María Félix: “Remember those Acapulco nights, beautiful María, María of my soul.”

In 1984, when the town had gone out of favor and the airfield belonged to the Mexican Military, Pie de la Cuesta nonetheless lured Sylvester Stallone. He got here, nevertheless, to not tan his muscle tissues on the seashore or take a look at his power in opposition to the tough Pacific waves however to movie one of many Rambo films—the second—during which the US authorities sends him to the Vietnamese jungle on a patriotic mission to rescue POWs from the navy base the place they’re nonetheless being held after the tip of the struggle. The Pie de la Cuesta air base served as the situation for the movie’s epic battle, during which the shirtless veteran singlehandedly defeats a navy squadron and frees the emaciated, long-forgotten prisoners of struggle.

The locals nonetheless bear in mind his feats. However they endure from amnesia whenever you ask them concerning the airplanes loaded with actual political prisoners who, in 1979, 5 years earlier than that movie was shot, arrived right here hooded, immobilized, and tortured. They weren’t gringos. They weren’t preventing communism. They have been Mexicans, some very younger. Right here they have been tortured once more. And on the runway of Army Air Base No. 7 their final traces disappeared.

In her lodge room Alicia De los Ríos Merino examines the spot the place Air Power Avenue begins on Google Earth. She finds the doorway the place she posed subsequent to the ornamental airplanes to get a photograph of the amenities behind them with out calling consideration to herself. She enlarges the picture, taking a look at it from completely different angles, looking for what she, as a historian, is aware of occurred inside these fortifications.

She tries to match the architectural particulars with the data she reads in navy recordsdata. Flipping by way of these paperwork, she finds black-and-white pictures and a sketch drawn twenty years in the past by ex-soldiers who had been requested by the navy police to recreate the atrocities that have been dedicated there within the Nineteen Seventies—a part of an ill-fated try by the Vicente Fox administration to research and prosecute the crimes the state perpetrated throughout Mexico’s so-called Soiled Battle, when federal brokers and the Military doubled down on their efforts to exterminate political dissidents.

Trying on the display screen, Alicia tries to find out which bungalow may be the one which housed the White Brigade, the legal squadron made up of navy and secret state police members that hunted down younger communist guerrillas and political dissidents throughout the nation. They kidnapped, interrogated, and tortured their victims in secret prisons, killed a lot of them, and by no means returned the our bodies to their households. As an alternative, as additional punishment, they disappeared them.

“This is the old entrance,” she tells me. “Two cars would pull up here, a Brasilia and a van, they would radio or signal with their lights, and the chains would be lowered to let them in…. Two agents with long hair, in civilian clothes, would come in, they were called Carona and La Tripa, and they weren’t military police.”

The horror tales contained in these recordsdata are etched in Alicia’s reminiscence. As she acknowledges every place, she recollects what occurred there.

“[Officers Mario Arturo] Acosta Chaparro, [general director] of police and transit in Acapulco, and [Francisco] Quirós Hermosillo, who ran the military police, were the ones in charge…. The cars arrived at these buildings made of rocks and cement, by the palms, the bungalow was a stonework structure…. I don’t think we’ve found the path that leads to the bungalow in the sketch, it was an open patio with outhouses…. Here’s where Quirós’s people stood watch, although the battalion’s solders—maybe to protect themselves—later said that they didn’t see or know what happened there…. They took [the prisoners] to the bungalow, right by the control tower…. This is where they drew the execution spot…almost next to it.”

The narrative slows down as its which means sinks in.

They sat every prisoner down on a steel chair. On the seashore.

They positioned their victims turned away, going through the ocean. At all times going through the ocean. At all times blindfolded.

They took out their nine-millimeter Uzis, the gun that Quirós Hermosillo nicknamed “the avenger.”

They fired.

Alicia is aware of what occurred subsequent: they might wrap rubber baggage across the victims’ heads so the our bodies may very well be carried to the runway with out their blood staining the bottom. When drops fell, they shaped crusts that stank later, and the brokers must hose them down.

“I wonder if they saw the sunset before they were killed,” she requested, taking discover of the large, spherical, intense solar, now orange, that dons blood-red and Mexican-pink colours within the night, the solar the locals boast about.

On the runway the Israeli-built Arava airplane was ready, designed to move mild cargo and drop parachutes. The facet door opened upward. They loaded it with sacks of our bodies, tied to rocks. Among the many personnel the cargo was known as “packages.” At 2 or 3 AM, the Arava took off heading over the ocean, removed from the coast, and the our bodies have been flung into the ocean. Between 1974 and 1979 the Mexican authorities disappeared no less than 143 folks in these “death flights.” Some have been nonetheless alive, unconscious. Alicia is right here as a result of she suspects that one of many “packages” aboard the airplane that took off on the evening of June 8, 1978, contained her mom, additionally named Alicia De los Ríos Merino.

Pricey Mother,

At the moment, September 22, is your birthday. Once I was a child I watched my grandmother Alicia bake a cake to rejoice your life. I used to be the one who needed to blow out the candles, and making a want for us each I prayed to have the ability to hug you. I imagined you finding out distant, till years later they admitted you have been a political prisoner. I didn’t know what that meant, but it surely appeared dangerous. I pictured you as a prisoner in a grey jail, sq., with bars, like those in films. You have been nonetheless stunning regardless of the uniform you needed to put on.

Within the fantasies the place I went to see you the policemen didn’t have faces, simply uniforms. The hope of visiting you lasted till I used to be an adolescent. However they by no means transferred you to a traditional jail, you by no means bought out, and I by no means met you.

When Alicia was seven or eight, she realized that her mom was in hassle. It occurred when a cousin she had damage enjoying tag angrily blurted out the household secret in retaliation: “Your mom is in jail!”

That poison dart punctured her world. Her mom wasn’t finding out distant, nor was her grandmother her second mom or her grandfather her father; there was no tunnel within the wardrobe by way of which her mom despatched secret messages and delivered presents yearly on Three Kings’ Day. She was in jail.

Lichita grew up affected by the thought that if she misbehaved her mom would by no means be freed. Then in the future one other cousin, Sandino, her fixed playmate, bought fed up with telling an inconsistent lie that was flaking away over time. In entrance of the entire household he shouted, “Why don’t you just tell her that her mom is disappeared?!”

At that second, Alicia remembers, the household grew to become a madhouse. Her grandmother sobbed, an aunt lashed out on the indiscreet boy, her grandfather stayed silent, and Lichita cried uncontrollably whereas one other aunt promised her that they have been searching for her mom.

“They told me, yes, she’s in prison, but we don’t know which one,” Alicia remembers now. Then, with a wry snort, she says: “We never found out where she was, and that’s why we’re still here, looking.”

The Alicia who disappeared right into a cell was the daughter of Chihuahuan ranchers, a socially anxious electronics scholar, a younger lady with lengthy, thick, easy hair who acted in class performs; who was lively within the September 23 Communist League and led a double life underneath the alias Susana; who distributed underground newspapers and urged college students and manufacturing unit staff to arrange and demand their rights; who grew to become a navy chief within the guerrilla military (the primary lady within the Communist League to carry that place); who participated in armed assaults in opposition to police; who fell in love throughout a jailbreak and took part, whereas she was pregnant, in a failed try to kidnap the Mexican president’s sister; who gave start in secret and entrusted her child to her dad and mom whereas she continued to struggle for the revolution.

When she was captured in Mexico Metropolis, the remainder of the De los Ríos Merino household was trapped alongside along with her. Ever because the cellphone rang in her dad and mom’ home in Chihuahua in January 1978, when Alicia informed one among her sisters, “They’re coming for me, look for me,” the entire household has been held hostage by that demand. Due to the testimony of three different League members, they realized that she had been at Army Base #1 in Mexico Metropolis, and that not like the opposite militants she hadn’t been launched.

The De los Ríos ladies seemed for Alicia the best way folks did again then: organizing alongside different households with disappeared family members, marching with black-and-white pictures of the prisoner, main starvation strikes, denouncing the navy and its secret prisons to worldwide organizations, determining methods in administration after administration to strategy governors, secretaries of state, Nationwide Protection chiefs, and presidents, to beg them to deliver their family members again alive.

Pricey Mother,

We seemed again and again by way of the Federal Safety Directorate’s paperwork, probably the most intensive police archive coping with the counterinsurgency that we might entry. We discovered a mug shot of you, carrying an expression we acknowledge out of your father Gilberto, taking a look at your captors with glimmers of dejection and dignity in your eyes. Your unhappiness made us cry. We learn the interrogation carried out at Army Base #1, imagining you wounded and subdued by the perpetrators. We realized by coronary heart the testimonies of your surviving comrades Mario Álvaro Cartagena López, Amanda Arciniega Cano, and Alfredo Medina Vizcaíno, who bravely informed the press and the authorities that that they had seen or heard you in navy prisons between 1978 and 1980. We insisted that the FEMOSPP [Special Prosecutor for Social Movements and Crimes of the Past] clarify who detained, hid, and tortured you, who has stored you disappeared for forty-three years. However the state failed us, and the de facto amnesty for the perpetrators lived on.

Because the years glided by, Alicia got here to grasp that discovering a disappeared individual in Mexico is like chasing a ghost by way of a labyrinth stuffed with false doorways. “We lived in a world sustained by hopes, none of them confirmed,” she says.

Years in the past somebody mentioned she had seen Alicia in Nicaragua preventing alongside the Sandinistas. A good friend thought he acknowledged her in a shopping center in El Paso, Texas, the place she winked at him to maintain her secret. A historian printed allegations that within the Santa Martha Acatitla ladies’s jail—by way of which, in reality, she by no means handed—she had given start to a child lady who was additionally disappeared. An aunt claimed that Alicia was the mysterious lady disguised as a nurse who illegally slipped into the hospital the place her father was dying and caressed his brow. (The hospital confirmed {that a} uniform was stolen.) It was her voice that known as the home in 1993 and mentioned, “Take care of my daughter, give my mother and father a kiss,” however didn’t reply when requested: “Where are you?”

The household obtained cryptic messages from witches and clairvoyants, which fueled their hunches and determined hopes. One aunt was satisfied that Alicia was the “Comandanta Lucha” talked about by Subcomandante Marcos in one among his poetic letters from the Lacandon Jungle. Licha went to research, shifting for a time to Chiapas. In 2000, when Licha was dwelling in Mexico Metropolis, somebody acknowledged Alicia in a photograph of a homeless, mentally sick lady printed within the newspaper Reforma, and Licha began going out at evening to search for her mom within the metropolis’s squalid shelters, imagining her pushed mad by the torture she endured.

By then Licha had gotten a regulation diploma, married a Mexican left-wing rock icon practically twice her age, and given start to 2 kids, Sebastián and Nicolás. She was unemployed, not practising regulation, and led a seminomadic life between live shows on the Zapatista communities in Chiapas and wherever else her husband was requested to play. She mixed motherhood with organizing work in her collective, the Kloakas Komunikantes (actually a inventive spelling of “interconnected sewers”), which crammed her schedule with political volunteer work “from below and to the left.”

At thirty-four she got here to really feel that this life, with its more and more frequent monetary and emotional potholes, wasn’t the one she wished. She determined to use a way to her search, and to her life together with it. In 2008 she gained a grant to check historical past and returned along with her kids to her maternal grandparents’ home in Chihuahua. She was on a brand new path: single motherhood, supported by her community of aunts, mixed with examine and fieldwork.

Realizing she had no time to lose as a result of the doñas—the outdated women like her grandmother—have been dying, she systematically took down testimonies from different moms of disappeared kids and absorbed their recollections; she interviewed her dad and mom’ political comrades and her circle of relatives; she rummaged by way of newspaper archives smelling of mud and damp, explored the horrors contained within the official data of the repression, and created archives of her personal: books, outdated magazines, newspaper clippings, interview transcripts.

Years earlier than, she had requested the Jesuit-founded Miguel Agustin Professional Juárez Human Rights Middle—recognized in Mexico because the Prodh—to tackle her mom’s case. They supplied legal professionals, and in 2002 they filed a lawsuit in opposition to the Mexican authorities, accusing it of “illegal deprivation of liberty.” However the legal case remained stalled for practically twenty years. In 2020 Alicia reappeared within the Prodh’s places of work. A president who self-identified as a member of the left had taken workplace greater than a yr earlier. It was time, she had determined, to take up her search once more.

There’s no solution to see the air power base from the seashore. The boatmen are amused and incredulous on the thought of viewing it from offshore. It’s the open sea, they reply. The present might carry you away; the Pacific is fierce on this coast. The purple pennants hung alongside the sand again them up. Waves crash furiously, hurling themselves on the shore as soon as, twice, one million occasions, day and evening. The 2-hundred-peso excursions supplied by distributors chasing automobiles alongside the coastal avenue solely cowl the calm lagoon of Pie de la Cuesta, separated from the tough sea by a fourteen-kilometer strip of land known as the Barra de Cocuya.

“We’ll take you to the freshwater lagoon,” provides one of many boatmen, displaying a map with the stops on the tour. “You’ll see the house of the man who had seven wives, the place where Luis Miguel got a clay-mask treatment, the location where they filmed Rambo 2. You can see hundreds of transatlantic birds, pelicans. There’s a stop at a restaurant, and the sunset. It’s a tropical voyage, we’re about to set off. What do you say?”

Each boat proprietor is a microentrepreneur with a enterprise to take care of. All of them need to be agreeable; they chat with vacationers, sharing anecdotes and historic details. They’ve bought a solution to each query besides one: “Is it true the military threw people from planes into the sea here?”

That query shuts down each smile. A few of the males are offended, others indignant, responding that they’ve by no means heard such nonsense, that it’s a bunch of lies, that somebody will need to have mistaken parachuting vacationers for lifeless our bodies.

The oldest fisherman on the Barra de Coyuca is Valente Diego Jacinto, born in 1930, father of 9 kids, and grandfather, great-grandfather, and shortly to be great-great-grandfather to extra offspring than he can rely.

At house, on the identical avenue because the city cemetery, he remembers that there was solely fourteen homes right here, all occupied by fishing households. When he was eighteen Valente grew to become a soldier, and so he bought to know the Pie de la Cuesta air base, which is within the subsequent village over, simply fifteen minutes down the land barrier by automotive.

As a soldier he spent eight years doing push-ups (that’s what he remembers most). Then he grew to become one of many pioneers of the boat-ride enterprise on this vacationer vacation spot, which was already a star favourite. Now the financial system is dangerous, he complains; there are extra fishermen than fish. On the empty lot subsequent to his patio, the place Alicia and I went to satisfy him, he has a ship parked on dry land, just like the ship in Fitzcarraldo.

Valente is talkative. He will get excited retelling his recollections of the seashore. He’s lacking enamel, which may make him onerous to grasp. He’s the one one who’s not scared off after we ask concerning the loss of life flights.

“Is it true that they threw people into the sea here?”

Sure, he solutions: “They threw them out there, they threw them wherever from the plane. They dropped them over here, dropped them out over the sea and the bodies washed up here on the beach, their necks were all broken…. Yeah. They strangled them.” He pauses. “Well, they tortured them.”

Generally his reminiscence gained’t provide particulars. He mentions a person from Acapulco who ordered folks killed and thrown into the water. However he doesn’t bear in mind his identify. At one other second he says it was a police officer. One time, he says, “they killed about four people. They took them there already dead and threw them on the corner. They shot them here. […] I don’t know what year it was. It was a long time ago. Those years are long gone, now I don’t remember.”

“Who did they throw out? Were they men?”

“Men and women, they didn’t care. Sometimes they took off their shirts or pants, just left them in their underwear…. Yeah. That’s how things were back then.”

“Was it a military plane?”

“No, they were small planes, with two sets of wings; there used to be planes like that, but now there aren’t.”

At one level within the dialog he begins to combine up the useless. Those from the cyclone that swept away his sister and her husband, together with the gasoline tank and the boat’s motor. He spent a very long time searching for her: “Through the mud, I went through it all, sea, land, by plane, by boat, I never found her.” He claims the blue sharks ate her, as a result of there have been numerous them again then. And the latest useless, from the legal violence that’s exploded within the space, shot wherever on the town “as soon as it’s dark.” All blended collectively in his thoughts with the tortured ones who fell from the planes. Later he says it was when José López Portillo was president. None of these our bodies are within the potter’s area, as a result of the cemetery by the seashore has been swallowed a number of occasions by the ocean, which even knocks over the cinderblock wall in cyclone season, unearthing the useless.

A few occasions I requested whether or not the planes come from the navy base. No, he solutions impatiently. “They were different biplanes. The soldiers didn’t have biplanes, just bigger planes and helicopters.” However his description of the biplanes, the time, and the situation coincides with the obtainable details about the loss of life flights.

“They tortured them and everything, they killed them, and they threw them in the sea, threw them wherever, in the trees, in the lagoon, falling, falling,” he insists. “I only managed to see maybe five people. Early in the morning, because there was a plane that threw them out early in the morning, around dawn, they went by here.” He factors to the ocean.

“And the tourists didn’t get scared?”

“No. They didn’t know, it was just the people from around here who knew about the bodies. So that was it.”

Don Valente recounts these experiences in entrance of a granddaughter and an older lady who’s courting one among his sons. They don’t pay a lot consideration to what he says, dismissing it as an “old guy’s imaginings.”

His neighbor Mr. Chente—one other retired fisherman, with the identical undernourished look, who lives on the following avenue over and rivals Valente in age—stands behind his entrance gate, which is improvised from scraps of wire, with a fabric for a door. When requested concerning the loss of life flights he says they occurred, that everybody trembled when the planes handed by. And he justifies them: “They threw them out still alive. Instead of throwing them in jail they threw them into the water, from above. They took them in the plane and up there they tossed them out. They tied a rock to their neck and that was it. When they threw them into the sea it was because they were bad people, killers. They caught them and threw them out.”

Pricey Mother,

It’s solely in the present day, nineteen years after we reported the case, that we’ve discovered brokers concerned in your detention, interrogations, and transfers. For many years the perpetrators tried to remain within the shadows, however now we’ve managed to get the FGR [the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office] to summon them.

The primary witness to your case was scheduled to provide testimony on Thursday, July 22. Although I used to be warned that he won’t present up, to our shock he did. The ex-agent—regular peak and construct, in his seventies, carrying brand-name athletic garments and accompanied by a younger lawyer—was sitting with a confused look in his eyes. Similar to in my childhood creativeness, he didn’t appear to have a face. His options, coated by a Covid masks, might have been anybody’s.

Once I noticed him, the Lichita who wished greater than ever to go to you in your unknown jail took my hand nervously. I comforted her: “This is a meeting we can’t put off, with one of the men who might have taken mama.”

Through the years Licha stored including items to the image of Alicia’s potential destiny. She had realized how one can perform analysis, interviewing survivors of the repression of these years, working by way of declassified paperwork, discarding the hypotheses that her mom had been seen alive in Texas, Chiapas, or Nicaragua, or wherever by 1980. Her case superior additional than some other as a result of Alicia and her legal professionals from the Prodh put a lot stress on two state prosecutors that they lastly took an curiosity in shifting it ahead and began calling retired navy officers to testify. The officers claimed to not bear in mind something from these years, however their names and signatures are all around the paper path the navy unwittingly left behind on the levels of disappearance by way of which her mom had handed. The prosecutors additionally gained entry to info that Alicia’s legal professionals had requested from secret navy archives concerning the counterinsurgency. These new paperwork, mixed with different proof that Alicia and her legal professionals had already gathered, led them to start out investigating the Pie de la Cuesta navy base.

Exhibit #1. On this black-and-white photograph, “Susana” not has the thick, darkish, straight, well-combed hair she did in earlier photographs. She seems to be raveled, her hair sheared in uneven layers, her face scratched, unsmiling. The image, discovered within the Federal Safety Directorate’s archives, was taken in 1978 contained in the nation’s most notorious political jail, Army Base #1.

Exhibit #2. Shortly after he was launched from the capital’s navy base, Mario Álvaro Cartagena López declared that he had seen Alicia alive. Troopers within the secret jail had taken her to see him, and he or she had recognized him because the militant generally known as “El Guaymas.” Cartagena would later inform Licha that what he felt in Alicia’s eyes was much less a betrayal than a warning that stiffened his dedication: “Don’t give in! Don’t give anyone up.” He resisted; after the torture his leg needed to be amputated.

Exhibit #3. The testimony of Alfredo Medina Vizcaíno, a Chihuahuan militant who, together with one other political prisoner named Reyes Ignacio Herrera, encountered Alicia first at Army Base #1 after which was transferred along with her to the Pie de la Cuesta base, the place they noticed Alicia till someday earlier than June 8. Each have been taken away on June 9, to a number of prisons, and finally freed.

Exhibit #4. The Arava 2005 flight log from June 8, 1978, documenting that the airplane made a “nighttime,” “local” flight to and from the Pie de la Cuesta airbase. Native flights sometimes lasted not more than two hours. The flight lasted from 3 to five AM.

Exhibit #5. Pictures and written testimonies discovered within the secret navy recordsdata of ex-army members who have been summoned for questioning in 2002. One image reveals three of the lads making a hand gesture—the identical one which the crews of the navy police’s unmarked automobiles would make to ask to enter the bottom and convey of their human cargo. One other depicts one ex-soldier sitting on a small bench on the Pie de la Cuesta seashore and staring on the sea, pretending to be within the execution seat, whereas one other takes intention behind his neck. A 3rd reveals a number of males mendacity inside an Arava airplane, enjoying useless guerrilla fighters in what seems to be like a macabre work of efficiency artwork.

Exhibit #6. Court docket testimonies from pilots and mechanics who participated within the nocturnal flights carrying “packages.” One in all them states: “Then it was only the pilots, the three soldiers responsible for throwing the bodies out, and me. After we took off we’d fly for about twenty or thirty minutes and then start throwing out the dead bodies we were carrying…. Captain DAVID asked me if we could keep the door open in the air so that it would be faster, and I said yes, and that was what we did, so there was a safety cord, and just as I was about to tie it I saw that there were lights below. I informed Captain DAVID, thinking it might be a boat, and that’s why after that we would fly out to sea for an hour after leaving the Base before we threw the bodies out, so they wouldn’t fall near the beach or on a boat or something. Also the blood that dripped out got into all the little cracks in the plane’s floor, and even though they washed it, when it started to get hot around midday it smelled awful.”

Two ex-soldiers who went on file in navy courtroom about their participation on this legal extermination methodology—the mechanic Margarito Monroy Candia and the police officer Gustavo Tarín Chávez—estimated the variety of victims. The previous guessed round 150, the latter as many as 1,500.

From a Fb message posted by Licha on April 18, 2023: “According to testimony from the survivors of forced disappearance at Military Bases Numbers 1 and 7, my mother and other comrades were seen for the last time in a building on that beach between 1971 and 1979. (Alicia’s documented presence at Pie de la Cuesta was in early June 1978.)”

In July 2022 Licha sat in a chair in an outdated condo in downtown Mexico Metropolis. Round her have been organized plastic containers of tiny screws, dental molds, bite-correcting plastic guards, mountains of paper and books. Throughout from her a thin indigenous man in his twenties with lengthy black hair relayed messages as if somebody have been whispering them in his ear.

He was a medium {that a} good friend of hers advisable she seek the advice of to speak along with her mother. However a special customer confirmed as much as their appointment. “The issue that’s been dwelling most within you and that you’ve always considered most important is your mother,” the seer started, “but there’s unfinished business with your father that you’ve been avoiding.”

She nodded, smiling the best way she does on a regular basis, it doesn’t matter what storm of emotion she’s enduring.

“Well, your father is waiting for you to look for him, for you to give him the same importance as you do your mother. It’s as if your mother is lost, but your father is looking right at you.”

“To look for him?” Alicia was shocked, however she didn’t object: she meekly answered this stranger’s questions on her relationship along with her father. She described how when she was ten years outdated she was altering the body on the portrait of Che Guevara in her grandparents’ home when a small image of a stranger fell out from behind it, with a reputation written on it: “Enrique Pérez Mora ‘Tenebras.’” At fourteen she realized that this younger man, with darkish and unruly hair, was her father. Her dad and mom met when her mother helped six guerrilla members get away of the Oblatos jail in Jalisco; he was amongst them. Inside a couple of months Alicia and El Tenebras, dwelling in hiding, have been anticipating a toddler.

She had her doubts that her father was reproaching her. She posts about him on Fb, has accomplished analysis to reconstruct his life, and is even engaged on a documentary about his story. She has a tattoo of a coronary heart with two interlaced names: La Susan and El Tene. However she hadn’t come right here to ask the spiritualist about his destiny. She is aware of that her paternal grandmother crossed half the nation by bus in her pajamas, recovering from appendicitis, after figuring out the physique of her son, the guerrilla assassinated in a police ambush in Sinaloa. Alicia’s grandmother stored her murdered son’s coronary heart preserved in a formaldehyde jar in her dresser. Alicia first noticed this relic when she was about twenty-five. She was struck by its pinkish tone and the massive measurement of the arteries. The picture typically stored her up at evening.

The medium insisted on giving voice to Tenebras, telling Alicia that her deserted father wished her to know that he was nonetheless there for her, that it was higher she hadn’t grown up with him as a result of he had been stuffed with rage and surrounded by violent males, which might have damage her.

“He says that you’re searching for the two of them because you’re lost. More than doing it for them, you’re looking for yourself, because all your attention is on the past, and you’ve lost the present.” The younger man stored speaking, as if taking dictation. “He says there’s still time for you to connect to the present. You should keep on looking, but don’t lose the thread with your children.”

Alicia stopped repeating “okay, okay.” She was not smiling. The interpreter of the useless raised his eyes as if listening to one thing from distant, to a voice or message coming from the kitchen behind him. It didn’t take him lengthy to obtain a brand new frequency; he nodded rapidly, and in tune with what appeared like one other channel he abruptly spoke: “Your father is okay. It’s your mother who seems very lost. I feel like she’s in a dark place, in a place without memory, a very strange place. All I see is darkness…sooooo much darkness.”

“Is there water?”

“I don’t know, it’s so dark.”

Alicia seemed solemn whereas the person spoke a prayer in Purépecha, gave her some recommendation, and blessed her.

Through the session Alicia obtained a name from a physician in Chihuahua. Her son, a teen handball participant, had suffered heatstroke a couple of days earlier. At first she wasn’t too nervous, however now the physician mentioned that her son’s aorta was partially obstructed and that he would want surgical procedure. Alicia heard the medium’s phrases repeating in her thoughts: don’t lose the thread along with your kids. The following morning she canceled all her appointments and returned to Chihuahua.

Over the next days Alicia struggled with the picture of her mother in a darkish place, misplaced, chilly, disconnected. Scenes came visiting her from data she had discovered of the little-known trials held by the Secretariat of Nationwide Protection to cost two generals—Quirós Hermosillo and Acosta Chaparro—with homicide in reference to the loss of life flights. (The Military initiated these proceedings by accusing them of trafficking medication for the Juárez Cartel.) 

The tales she had learn grew to become fastened photographs, like bloody crusts that no quantity of scrubbing might wash away. They got here to her like nightmares even when her eyes have been open. She pictured folks falling from the sky, troopers washing blood off the seashore, the victims killed going through the ocean. Studying the statements of the air base’s survivors, who had seen Alicia-Susana in June 1978, she imagined that the Pacific may very well be the darkish, chilly place the place all communication with the dwelling is lower off.

Round that point she wrote a letter and despatched it to information stations, asking ex-members of the White Brigade, their households, and anybody who might need details about her mom’s location to contact her, however there have been no solutions. She additionally paid shut consideration to the work of a not too long ago created fact fee tasked with investigating the atrocities the state had dedicated in the course of the counterinsurgency. She signed as much as go to navy websites, searching for former secret prisons.

Then, in 2022, a healer initially from Mexico Metropolis however now based mostly in Acapulco despatched Alicia a message. Whereas she was main a ritual on the Pie de la Cuesta seashore to honor the lives of native indigenous rights activists killed by Covid-19, the healer mentioned, somebody left a black-and-white photograph on the altar she was utilizing, and he or she felt the presence of the individual it confirmed—a lady with straight, darkish, thick hair. She began receiving highly effective messages: Alicia’s mom wanted a ritual. 

From a Whatsapp message despatched on April 7, 2023: “Hi Laura, this is Alicia de los Ríos…. You performed a ritual here in Pie de la Cuesta involving a photo of my mother, who is a disappeared person. We’re in Pie de la Cuesta now and I’d like to meet you. Do you think that’d be possible, Laura? We’ll be here until Saturday. Take care.”

Taking a look at you, Alicia, the girl begins crying inconsolably. She says that the tears aren’t her personal, that they belong to your mom, whom she will’t see or hear however solely feels. She tells you that final evening, when she bought your message letting her know that you simply have been in Acapulco and wished to see her, she was overwhelmed by unhappiness. That your mom’s cries came visiting her like a wild power, like the ocean lashing the sand.

Laura, the healer—or medium, or shaman; you’re unsure what to name her—asks you questions that your mother desires answered: whether or not her mom, the household’s first Alicia, continues to be alive, whether or not she has grandchildren. You concentrate on Niko and Sebas. Laura retains apologizing, with a mixture of shock, embarrassment, and shock, saying this has by no means occurred to her earlier than. She has by no means felt for another person in fairly this manner.

“These tears are hers; she’s saying goodbye because she needs to rest; she says that she’s been holding onto you all these years; she says the whole sea should be covered in white flowers because she’s not the only one. There are men and women there too, their souls are there, and they all want to rest now,” she tells you.

You hearken to her. She doesn’t provide you with a gap to inform her about your mom. Laura wants to clarify that final evening, when she was by the fridge, your mother dictated messages to her and he or she didn’t perceive that she needed to take notes, till she realized how pressing it was. Now she reads aloud what she frantically managed to kind on her cellphone; you miss some stretches which can be muffled by the waves crashing behind you.

“Dear daughter, I’ve been waiting for you, I wanted to tell you that I love you always and carry you in my heart, I’m proud of you because you’re so important to me…. I knew that one day you’d come, I’ve been waiting to see you all this time since I disappeared…. Now I can be at peace because I know that you understand what I fought for and that you keep fighting as I did, I love you, and it was important to me that you come say goodbye to me so that I can rest, my soul needs to rest…. I know that you’ll keep fighting for me so that the truth comes out, to shed light on my death, the same death shared by so many here…. Keep fighting so that everyone knows that a bullet—a bullet?” Laura seems to be shocked. “No, sorry, I don’t know why I wrote ‘a bullet,’” she apologizes. “We died for a Mexico where everyone would be able to eat, where everyone could participate, where everyone could live with dignity…. Thank you, my child, for being here, I love you, I’ll always carry you in my heart…. I can only send you these messages here, by this sea attaching me to other women’s wires….” Laura stops once more, confused. “Wires? No, I don’t know why I wrote ‘wires,’ that’s a mistake…. Cover the sea with white flowers, for our souls, to free my soul and the souls of my comrades; it will mean that our souls are at rest and our country is at peace; honor the fact that we died fighting for peace, for the dignity of the Mexican people…”

Some phrases she makes use of, like “democracy,” are jarring. From what you realize about your mom that wasn’t the animating excellent for her or her group within the late Nineteen Seventies, however you retain listening. You’re confused when she mentions wires and bullets, however you bear in mind what Don Valente mentioned concerning the torture victims buried within the sea. Killed by gunfire.

It’s unsettling; typically you wish to snort. You bear in mind Whoopi Goldberg in Ghost and you’re feeling unusual, ridiculous, unsure whether or not to imagine this lady who desires you to carry out this goodbye along with her. 

Laura seems to be outlandish on this seashore. She contrasts sharply with the folks sunbathing in swimsuits. Her lengthy hair covers her again, and he or she wears a fabric tied on her head like a purple turban, together with bracelets, necklaces, and pendants fabricated from beads and sea stones. Her lengthy, heavy Tehuana gown stretches all the way down to her calves, embroidered in wool patterns trimmed with lace. Her leather-based sandals are these of a prehispanic dancer. Her lipstick is smudged from the tears. However all of the sudden you swat away your doubts and suppose: “I’ve done lots of other things, and now I’m here, why don’t I do this, too, and take it seriously?”

You’ve determined to provide in to the expertise and belief her, so that you observe Laura’s directions and draw a circle within the sand as a logo of peace. You lay down the white flowers you purchased on the market, together with patriotically coloured pages from an academic image e-book, which you discovered as an alternative choice to the flag. You wrestle to mild the candles, whose flames refuse to regular within the quick breeze.

You repeat Laura’s phrases (“I’m covering the sea with these white flowers, bringing peace to your souls”), you are feeling the ache in your chest getting heavier (“I accept you as my mother, I thank you for all the things I’ve learned searching for you”), tears stand up from someplace deep inside you (“I bless everything you’ve given me, but today I’m giving you everything that’s yours, in respect and humility, because I’m going to follow my own path”), you don’t wish to say it, since you don’t wish to say goodbye to her, however you repeat the phrases (“I bring you these flowers so you can rest”), you struggle in opposition to your self, you don’t wish to let your mom go, however the phrases that you simply’re repeating are a farewell, and you’re feeling unhappy (“I’m honoring the struggle you’ve undertaken for the Mexican people, for a path toward happiness and dignity”).

Laura asks you to say goodbye.

“And if I don’t want to?” you ask, holding your mom tight.

Now it’s time to scatter the white flowers over the waves, and also you do it with all of your would possibly; the ocean carries them again, and also you toss them once more, but it surely returns them to your ft, and also you attempt to throw them once more, however they insist on coming again. Higher to take them in your palms and squeeze them.

“Is there anything else you want to say to her?” Laura asks.

“Yes.” Your voice cracks as you say “I love you.”

The waves dance to the rhythm of the rattles that Laura shakes as she finishes the prayer.

Tonight you’ll really feel at peace. You’ll discover that the anguish that was weighing in your coronary heart is gone. Outdoors the agitated sea roars, however you gained’t hear it. You’ll be asleep, surrounded by a peace you’ve by no means recognized.

I traveled to Pie de la Cuesta, in Guerrero, to search out you. I seemed out on the sea that most likely swallowed you and I sense a storm: it’s you. For you I might cowl the ocean in white flowers. Cussed, proud, and rebellious, you might by no means allow them to take away your essence, and you retain scattering clues for these of us looking for you. I imagine that we’re near discovering out what occurred to you. We’ll preserve wanting. With out wavering, we’ll discover you. Might my love honor you at all times, mother.