Letter to the Editor: “Mexico’s Disappeared”

In reply to: “Mexico’s Disappeared,” April 2, 2025

To the Editors:

In obsessing over the Ayotzinapa case, Claudio Lomnitz argues, the Mexican public has lost sight of the other 110,000 people disappeared in the country in the last decade and a half. Their fixation with a single, isolated incident has become an obstacle to tackling the wider problem of disappearances writ large. But if Lomnitz wants to demonstrate the connections between the “emblemetization” of one of the most notorious cases of forced disappearance and the lack of attention to all the other ones, he has failed. Instead, his essay functions as an invitation to forget: first to stop digging for the truth, and ultimately to stop talking about the forty-three disappeared students altogether.

The Ayotzinapa case is still alive in the first place, Lomnitz argues, for purely political reasons: López Obrador was the one to win the most from the political crisis brought on by Ayotzinapa, so once in power, he continued stoking the fire to keep its narrative alive. Ever since then Morena, López Obrador’s party, has repeatedly remobilized the issue in order to manipulate public opinion.

It is true that during his 2018 run for the presidency, López Obrador made a public commitment to solving the case—a move that won him a good share of votes. But in office, he would not make good on that promise. Three years after making his public declarations on Ayotzinapa, the case’s prosecutor went into exile, castigated by the president, and the entire investigation was derailed. “You, Mr. President, lied to our face, you fooled us, and you betrayed us,” the parents of the disappeared told López Obrador in July 2014. Lomnitz concedes these facts. But how can they possibly square with his hypothesis that López Obrador wanted to keep the case alive?

This contradiction owes to Lomnitz’s understating of both the military’s growing power and the strength of its desire to cover up its now-undeniable role in the disappearances. He argues that three successive presidents, invested in winning the military over to their side, sought to paint a portrait of the Ayotzinapa story that minimized the military’s role in the disappearances. But this is too meek a description of the military, a force that, in the past two decades, has expanded dramatically and grabbed an ever-greater amount of political power in the process. In reality, the military has not merely nudged three successive governments to tiptoe around its role in Ayotzinapa; it has successfully pressured them to bury the case altogether—and to silence the movements fighting to keep it alive.

The result is that both López Obrador and his successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, have run out of options to deal with the Ayotzinapa crisis—at least those that don’t involve confronting the military head-on. For both, Ayotzinapa has been less a political gold mine than a pile of radioactive waste; if it were up to them, the case would simply recede into the background, never to be mentioned again. Just two weeks into office, Sheinbaum made this much clear. If they wanted the case to go forward, she told the parents of the disappeared students, they would have to stop demanding the release of the army’s internal files about the case—a concession that would effectively slam the door shut on its resolution.

Lomnitz also dismisses the key factor that distinguishes Ayotzinapa from other disappearances: the fact that it became the site of a massive social movement, stretching outward from the families of the disappeared and murdered students, through Mexico’s vast network of rural teachers’ colleges, and finally to the hundreds of thousands of Mexicans who follow news of the case, attend demonstrations, or disapprove of the government’s protection of the military. That is, after all, what a social movement depends on: different tiers of committed militants, affected parties, and a wide, incensed audience.

Lomnitz, an anthropologist, devotes little time to these particulars, for it is only in eliding this dimension that his argument can develop. Looking for answers as to why a social grievance remains lodged in public attention, Lomnitz has searched under the hoods of political opportunism and popular culture. But in dismissing the multifaceted social movement that has emerged around Ayotzinapa, he not only has failed to account for its persistence but painted a cartoonish—if not conspiratorial—image of it.

Lastly, Lomnitz’s belief that prosecutorial attention is a zero-sum game is a false one. It is certainly true that a lack of resources plagues prosecutorial efforts, but this state of things is the product of decisions made over the course of multiple administrations, not an immutable truth set in stone. The essay, in inviting competition among Mexico’s various groups for the status of most-favored victim, fails to entertain the possibility that the country’s justice and prosecution system—a system that has failed all victims, however recognizable—can be refashioned.

Such an effort, tied to a progressive politics committed to addressing Mexico’s crises of violence, murder, and disappearances, will necessarily run through the resolution of its most visible case. If the Ayotzinapa case goes unpunished, there will never be a commitment from the state to resolve the broader issue. Why would it pay heed to the lesser-known cases if the most emblematic of them cannot force a change of course?

Camilo Ruiz Tassinari
University of Chicago

Claudio Lomnitz responds:

The social movement demanding truth for the forty-three Ayotzinapa students has indeed been “radioactive” for the López Obrador and the Sheinbaum governments, for the precise reasons that Tassinari notes. But he is wrong to claim that my essay is “an invitation to forget” either the students who were abducted, or the roughly 600,000 people who have been murdered or disappeared since Mexico’s 2006 declaration of a war on drugs. I do not even remotely wish for or suggest that readers to turn away. Instead, I am arguing that political action requires a new analytical lens.

As long as there was hope for a program of transitional justice, the case of the Ayotzinapa students served as the rallying point for a broad-based movement. The atrocities they endured rallied a vast and heterogeneous coalition that applied pressure for a substantive reorientation of Mexican justice. But transitional justice cannot just happen at any time. Historically, such an undertaking has only followed the fall of a dictatorship, for instance, or the end of apartheid. Only a momentous transformation can generate the political capital required to “restart” the justice system. And in Mexico, that moment already came and went. The opportunity was there after López Obrador’s 2018 electoral landslide, but it was squandered when the new president decided to hitch his movement’s star to the military’s wagon.

That alliance proved to be so demanding that López Obrador was not even able to make the Ayotzinapa case into a publicity stunt. Indeed, he underestimated the difficulty of instrumentalizing it. Despite its unusual characteristics—including the shoe-horned rhyming scheme with the 1968 student massacre at Tlatelolco—the Ayotzinapa case is, in one key respect, entirely unexceptional. Because the Mexican military was never able to wage a war on all drug cartels simultaneously, it has consistently made tacit or effective alliances with some local criminal organizations while combating others. The devastating, ongoing onslaught of disappearances thus frequently occurs with the acquiescence—and at times, as with the Ayotzinapa students, the direct involvement—of the military. The robust alliance between López Obrador’s political movement and the military made the airing of this truth about Mexico’s disappearances impossible. And where there is no space for airing the truth, there can be no transitional justice.

Initially, López Obrador’s slogan of “hugs, not bullets” (abrazos, no balazos) for the workers of the illicit economy was a welcome promise of social reintegration. But that step needed to be taken in tandem with making the country hear the truth of all of its victims and then committing it to seeking, finding, and honoring the disappeared and the dead.

In fact, the formula sparked nothing of the sort. López Obrador was able to keep the hope for transitional justice alive for a while by ceding some political space to prominent human rights activists, including in the office of the special prosecutor for the Ayotzinapa case. But when justice’s push came to the military’s shove, López Obrador sacked those officials, protected the military, and attempted to fiddle with the astronomically high number of homicides and disappearances that had occurred during his own government. At that point, any hope for transitional justice turned futile, and so the political efficacy of the Ayotzinapa case declined. All the while, Mexico’s political class and its political parties, including López Obrador’s Morena party, relied too heavily on money from the illicit economy to dispense with their alliances there.

Today the conditions for justice are no better. As a result, the mythology that was deployed to push for transitional justice is no longer effective, and it tends to be used demagogically. The resonances between Ayotzinapa and 1968 were always misleading—as is always the case when a new social movement erupts, as Marx showed in his Eighteenth Brumaire—but now that the movement has been either controlled or coopted, the slogan that “It Was the State” offers little help in understanding the ongoing tragedy of mass disappearances.

Under present conditions, we must dare to give the mechanics of disappearance a good hard look. The reasons for mass atrocities in contemporary Mexico are more readily discerned in disappearances of Central American migrants on the U.S.-Mexico border or in the massive levies of forced soldiers currently under way in the war unfolding in the state of Sinaloa, which has resulted in over 1,200 disappearances since September 2024.

These cases do not resonate with the romance and tragedy of 1968—wherein the state is the evil oppressor of a good civil society—or with the mythology of Mexico’s democratic struggle against the dictatorship of one-party rule. Myths, as Claude Levi-Strauss pointed out, also die.

The post Letter to the Editor: “Mexico’s Disappeared” appeared first on Boston Review.