On 15 January, near the municipality of Tecomán, in the Mexican state of Colima, the van of lawyer Ricardo Lagunes was found damaged and with bullet holes. hat afternoon, Lagunes had been traveling with Antonio Díaz, a teacher and human rights defender, and a member of the Indigenous community of San Miguel de Aquila. No one has heard from them since.
Both men had been very active in the social and legal struggle to demand that the Ternium mining company comply with the terms agreed upon for the occupation of the community’s land. A few weeks before their disappearance, they had received threats from the company’s management.
“We want to call attention to the Ternium mining company for the responsibility it may have in bringing my brother Ricardo Lagunes and the teacher Antonio Díaz back alive. Ternium is the most powerful actor in the region and the impacts of its operations have not only affected the environment but also the social fabric, generating conflict and violence. The company has ties with various local actors and we think (also) with the possible perpetrators of the disappearance. We demand an investigation, that the company give us support to find my brother and Antonio, the teacher,” said Ana Lucía Lagunes Gasca in a press conference a few days later.
The disappearance of the two human rights defenders has mobilized not only their families and the community, but also rural and Indigenous organizations from all over the country, the extensive and active Mexican social and associative network, the media, and even politicians. Numerous international human rights organizations have also joined in. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Committee against Enforced Disappearances and various mechanisms of the UN Human Rights Council have also formally expressed their concern about the case.
Despite the attention that their disappearance has received and all the national and international pressure that is being exerted, nothing has moved apart from the anguish that is growing among friends and families of the two men. Every day that goes by, the probability of finding them alive diminishes.
And this anguish is similar to that of hundreds of thousands of other families in a country where 109,000 people have disappeared, almost all of them since 2006, the year when the so-called “war on drugs” and the militarization of public security began. Many of these disappearances are enforced disappearances, that is, they have been perpetrated by public authorities or with their participation, connivance, acquiescence or omission.
Contrary to the narrative that is being pushed, the victims are not necessarily criminals or people linked to organized criminal groups. Disappearances abound as a means to hide sexual violence and femicides, and they are often connected to human trafficking and exploitation, forced recruitment, reprisals, child abductions or, as in the case of the LGBTIQ+ community, to “social cleansing.” Cases of disappearances also abound in the context of migration where, in the absence of safe ways to travel, people are at the mercy of violence perpetrated by criminal groups and security forces. Disappearance has also become a recurrent practice to silence investigative reporters, who have become particularly targeted by violence in Mexico.
Moreover, as in the case of Ricardo Lagunes and Antonio Díaz, enforced disappearance is being used as a measure of coercion in social conflicts. These conflicts are often related to land grabbing and the development of mining, energy or large infrastructure projects. And they are contexts where the separation between private actors, organized crime and authorities is often blurred, leaving the local population – mostly Indigenous – in situations of absolute vulnerability.
Making a person disappear has the perverse effect of harming not only the direct victim. When a person disappears, the pain of the uncertainty destroys entire families and the terror it provokes in their communities leaves them paralyzed. It is probably the cruelest violation of human rights.
And in countries like Mexico, the disappearance of people goes largely unpunished. According to official figures, by the end of 2021, only between two and six percent of cases had been brought to trial and only 36 sentences had been handed down nationally. This flagrant impunity only revictimizes the families and paves the way for more enforced disappearances to occur. Additionally, there is a tremendous crisis in the forensic system, which is still waiting to identify the remains of more than 52,000 people lying in their facilities or in mass graves.
In the face of these aberrations and despite all the dangers involved, hundreds of families have organized themselves into networks and groups to search for their missing loved ones. Men, and especially women, with normal and ordinary lives have had to specialize in law, archaeology, forensic medicine, communication and other fields in order to do what the state has not been able to do: ensure the right to truth, justice and reparation. Theirs and that of a whole country deeply scarred by violence and impunity.
Ricardo Lagunes and Antonio Díaz are people with a certain visibility and connected to a large number of local, regional and international actors. Yet this has not protected them from being disappeared and illustrates once again the structural nature of disappearances in Mexico. Let us hope their relatives will soon receive a call from them, a sign that they are still alive. May they know they are not alone in their wait and their search, in their uncertainty and their resistance.