The seventh National Search Brigade begins in Morelos

jessica xanthomila

Newspaper La Jornada
Sunday November 27, 2022, p. 9

With the participation of around 300 families of the disappeared, the seventh National Search Brigade began, which will carry out activities in 20 municipalities of Morelos over two weeks. There are six axes of intervention that will be carried out in churches, schools, sensitization, search in the field and in life, and identification.

At the beginning of this brigade, Alan García, representative of the office in Mexico of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (UN-DH), highlighted that this project “has helped us break the silence, promote and keep alive –perhaps like nobody else– the search for truth, memory, justice and encounter. Because with his word and example, he has placed an antidote against the atrocities that unfortunately still persist in Mexico and that continue to be committed day by day.

Tranquilina Hernández, coordinator of the Union of Resilient Families Searching for their Disappeared Hearts, from Morelos, who has been searching for her daughter Mireya for eight years, explained that in last year’s campaign they managed to recover 11 bodies. It makes me sad because we don’t want to find them like this, but at the same time it makes me very happybecause six disappeared are already with their loved ones.

At a press conference, Pietro Ameglio, from the Peace and Justice Service (Serpaj), expressed that the group Madres de Plaza de Mayo, founded by Hebe de Bonafini –who passed away last Sunday– and Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, Nobel Peace Prize from 1980, They follow your work (the brigade) in a very moved way. They feel and greet you in a very special way, mothers, wives, daughters, sisters, fathers, brothers, because you are the continuation in the region of this great example of peace building.

Alan Garcia highlighted that The year that we are about to conclude is already today the most violent against people who seek.

The murder in the last three months of Rosario Rodríguez, Blanca Gallardo and María del Carmen Vázquez should motivate us to demand from the State that all those people who are legitimately exercising their right to search have sufficient guarantees so as not to expose their integrity, their freedom, their lives.

Juan Carlos Trujillo, from Relatives in Search María Herrera, lamented that while to mobilize a country to seek legitimacy there are resources, (but) to go out and look for the people that your country unfortunately needs, there are no.