Antonio Navalón
If it is true that people who forget their past are doomed to repeat it, then we Mexicans, who have lived through the signing of NAFTA and the political changeover after seventy years of PRI hegemony, are not emerging from a bad dream… but instead entering a full-blown nightmare.
Ciudad Juárez, that broken and forgotten border, has been left behind. The victims, those women forgotten by the State and abandoned to the worst of fates, have been erased from the country’s collective memory. But the worst thing is that we never imagined the importance and role that all this tragedy would have in shaping a tragedy that has taken hold in every corner of our country.
The first victims, the most invisible, were closely linked to the history that was beginning to be written in economic, neoliberal, and global terms. Since the Free Trade Agreement was signed in 1994, ushering in a new economic and social reality, Mexico not only entered an expanded market but also unleashed uncontrollable forces, structural contradictions, and wounds that we have been unable to heal. Yes, NAFTA brought development and growth, but not only economic growth. Its signing and implementation coincided with the multiplication of national nightmares.
Over time, various regions of the world have undergone different processes of economic liberalization and development. However, not all of them have led to a structural transformation of organized crime or its industrialization, as has happened in some Latin American countries.
In this regard, it is important to remember that economic advances in Southeast Asia, or China’s growing dominance over part of the Asian continent, did not lead to a resurgence of large-scale drug trafficking. Despite having been the epicenter of the historic “opium route” in the past, these regions managed to avoid a new explosion of violence associated with this phenomenon. This contrasts sharply with Mexico’s recent experience.
Although history often tends to be softened for political reasons or out of a social need to survive, in this case, it is urgent not to gloss over reality. Mexico today faces two deeply corrosive phenomena: the increase in the number of missing persons and the loss of territorial control by the state in the face of drug trafficking. These problems, together with the crisis in the judiciary, constitute the most serious threats facing the country.
Neither phenomenon emerged in 2018, but both became entrenched during Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s six-year term. The security strategy known as “hugs, not bullets,” based on a policy of non-confrontation with the cartels, created conditions that allowed organized crime to expand and strengthen in large areas of the country.
The question is not only when these problems arose, but what state policies made them possible. What decisions facilitated their expansion, concealment, or impunity? In this context, it is difficult to deny that the security policy implemented during the last administration contributed—either directly or by omission—to the current crisis of violence, disappearances, and territorial control by crime. In this sense, it is very difficult to deny that this is due to the era of hugs and not bullets.
At this point, we are all children of NAFTA. And it is unthinkable, even useless, to theorize what Mexico would have been like without that treaty. What we can—and must—do is examine in depth what decisions we made, what realities we ignored, and what price, beyond the economic one, we have paid from 1994 to today.
Because today, the phenomenon that most disturbs, that most unsettles, that most keeps the government awake at night—even if it does not always admit it—is the brutal prominence (ironical as it may seem) that the disappeared have achieved. It must be said, there was a time, not so long ago, when the disappeared were part of a universe with uniforms and rules. Not now.
Now, anyone can disappear. Now we all disappear. The disappeared have become part of Mexico’s emotional, political, and cultural landscape. But we cannot understand how we got to this point without first understanding the very origin.
Today, two issues hurt Mexicans deeply: the disappeared and femicide.
The women of Juárez were not only victims. They are the stigma and the unresolved issue of the country’s moral history. We could have detected it in time and even prevented it, but, as is becoming customary, either because it was too painful to face reality or due to a lack of acceptance, we decided to look the other way.
The UN, in a report published in 2024, counted 2,526 women murdered between 1993 and 2023 in Ciudad Juárez. Many of them were kidnapped, raped, and murdered. Their bodies were abandoned in deserts or vacant lots. Some remain unnamed. And although the numbers are shocking in themselves, the worst part is that there are “hundreds of missing women” who are not officially registered. How many were there really? How many do we refuse to count?
During those years, Juárez was home to around 330 maquiladoras, according to various academic studies and industry reports. They were factories of hope, of survival. But they were also factories of vulnerability. Many women walked for hours, alone, between the desert and nowhere, with grueling workdays, to bring money home. Danger was on the road. And they knew it. And we knew it. But no one did anything.
The issue is shocking not only because of the number of women murdered or disappeared—the number of which remains uncertain—but also because of the monstrous coincidence between poverty, maquilas, and death. The supposed way out of poverty—working in the maquilas—became synonymous with risk. In many cases, going to and from work meant not returning home. Being a woman and a worker in Juárez was a lethal combination.
What was truly terrifying was not only that they were killed, but that those who did it went unpunished. That the investigations were negligent, clumsy, corrupt, or non-existent, and that the bodies piled up without names, without justice, and without the possibility of mourning for their families.
The violence against women in Juárez was a symptom of what was to come. Today, the country not only mourns the women of Ciudad Juárez, but the mourning has been joined and amplified by the nightmare of the disappeared.
When we talk today about more than 100,000 people missing in Mexico, we understand that we are no longer facing a crisis. We are facing a moral and total tragedy. But we should not be surprised. It has happened to us before, and we did nothing about it. The women of Juárez did not keep us awake at night. We thought that violence was close, but alien. That it happened there, in another place, to other people. Not to us.
A serious mistake.
The State needs to regain control of its territory. But above all, it needs to regain its moral capacity to protect its citizens. Mexican society, for its part, needs to reconcile itself with its history, its shame, and its debt. Because before the more than 100,000 disappeared, there were thousands of women who were our mothers, our sisters, our daughters, and whom we saw raped, kidnapped, disappeared, and even killed without doing enough.
Today, the State remains indebted to the women of Juárez, with that deadly silence. With those muffled cries and with the families who still do not know where to place a cross—or anything else—to remember that there lies what was once a human being.
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