Despite the threats they receive in their work, women seeks not to be afraid.
Grace Fernández, a member of the movement for our missing in Mexico, states that, as relatives, they are willing to stay in search even in highly dangerous places, otherwise they would have to wait for the authority to do something.
In an interview, the search engine highlights the risks to do the work that the authorities do not want to do. “The companions go and get where neither the police nor the National Guard gets why? Because fear already stole them.”
“Not only were we stolen our relative stole our fear and then it is not an option to go home to cry. I have been looking for my sister for 15 years and I have learned that the fear I have is to think that I will not return home.”
Grace Fernández, mother seek.
A panic button that takes
In a meeting with federal authorities, Blanca Estela Ramírez, Search for Colima, showed officials how slow and useless the panic button that the protection mechanism for people defending human rights and journalists in Mexico for their search engine could be.
Thirty seven seconds passed for a voice to ask him if everything was fine. “In what they answer me, the chingada already loaded me,” he released after pressing the button.
The little more than half a minute may seem a quick or latest response when life is at risk, said the activist.
“In case of emergency, this button is useless (…) it only serves in case something happens to know where to find me,” added Blanca Estela Ramírez, who for years has been looking for her niece, Joana Isabel López Álvarez, “La China”, a young man disappeared on November 26, 2019.
(Photo: Facebook.)
Some search engines have received the panic button from the federal government to request help when they consider that their life is at risk. However, they consider that it is more an ornament article than useful.
“To the companions who belong to the federal protection mechanism, they are given a panic button, but we are still vulnerable because it is a panic button that does not work if it is not in the first quadrant where there are services, the places that we are going to look for there is no communication, so it becomes obsolete and it becomes anything more a clothing accessory,” adds Yoltzin.
(Photo: Adolfo Vladimir/Cuartoscuro.)
The search engine describes some of the failures facing the panic button, beyond the delay in an answer: it does not work in rural areas, its battery is downloaded quickly and can put them at risk.
“The button does not have a way of silencing. If I am hiding, the button will sound because it will sound. Then, if we are in a risk situation, and what we are doing is hide, what we are least going to do is squeeze the button because it sounds,” he explains.
