Picturing the Surreality of Grief for Mexico’s Disappeared

March 19, 2021

(The New Yorker) – The Mexican government reported that, by the end of that year, there were more than twenty-four thousand disappeared people in the country, many of them believed to be victims of organized crime. (The official number currently surpasses seventy-nine thousand.) The Ayotzinapa case gave greater visibility to the subject of disappearances in Mexico, and the private pain of those grieving the vanished became public. Affected citizens created search collectives, hoping to uncover the buried remains of their missing loved ones in fields where assassins deposited bodies. Martínez’s gaze, until then fixated on his immediate surroundings, turned outward.