grief

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Four years without justice “in this country that is no longer ours”

A few words of introduction:

Four years ago, on July 31, 2015, five lives were taken in a Mexico City apartment. They were Nadia Vera Pérez, Yesenia Quiroz Alfaro, Mile Virginia Martín, Olivia Alejandra Negrete Avilés, and Rubén Espinosa Becerril. Their torture and execution-style killings received international attention, in particular because Nadia Vera, a social justice organizer and human rights defender, and Rubén Espinosa, a photojournalist, had fled to Mexico City from Veracruz following attacks and death threats due to their work. Before her murder, Nadia stated that should anything happen to her, it would be Javier Duarte who was responsible. Duarte was then governor of Veracruz and is now serving a nine-year sentence for corruption after he fled the country and was extradited from Guatemala. During his rule, widespread human rights abuses were the norm, including the assassination of journalists and political opponents.

While a few people have been detained for the murders, the state’s investigation has been egregiously irregular, incompetent, and disrespectful to the victims and their families. Over the course of four years, it has offered a variety of narratives – from a robbery gone bad to a cartel settling of accounts – yet, unsurprisingly, has assiduously avoided investigating the most likely scenario, that it was an extrajudicial assassination ordered and organized by state actors.

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Writings Available in Print

Recently, a few pieces of writing I’ve done have become available in printed form. In the interest of propagandizing, I’m sharing them here.


Earlier this year, I wrote two articles for It’s Going Down critiquing the eco-extremist group Individualists Tending Toward the Wild (ITS) and their supporters. They caused a bit of an uproar in one corner of the internet and led to numerous other articles, statements, podcasts, and death threats. The two pieces have since been put together in a zine that can be found here.

 


At the end of last year, I conducted a podcast interview with Sofi, an anarchist compañera from Mexico City deeply involved in solidarity work with anarchist prisoners in Mexico. The interview covers a lot of ground, discussing various prisoners, conditions inside Mexican prisons, and the incredible autonomous organizing prisoners and their supporters are carrying out on both the inside and outside. The translated transcript has been made into a zine. Check it out here.

 

Last month, the anthology Rebellious Mourning: The Collective Work of Grief, edited by Cindy Milstein, was published by AK Press. As they describe it:

We can bear almost anything when it is worked through collectively. Grief is generally thought of as something personal and insular, but when we publicly share loss and pain, we lessen the power of the forces that debilitate us, while at the same time building the humane social practices that alleviate suffering and improve quality of life for everyone. Addressing tragedies from Fukushima to Palestine, incarceration to eviction, AIDS crises to border crossings, and racism to rape, the intimate yet tenacious writing in this volume shows that mourning can pry open spaces of contestation and reconstruction, empathy and solidarity.

With each passing day, it feels like a volume such as this is increasingly necessary and urgent. Alongside powerful works addressing a variety of subjects, both inspiring and heartrending, I’m honored to have a few words of my own included that introduce the translation of a letter by Mirtha Luz Pérez Robledo. The letter was written on the one-year anniversary of the murder of her daughter, social justice organizer Nadia Vera. Nadia was killed along with four others in 2015, in all likelihood by the state, in what is known as the Narvarte Massacre. Mirtha’s words weave an aching portrait of personal and collective loss within a context of pervasive injustice and impunity. I encourage readers to pick up a copy of the book in order to engage with them and the other resonant contributions found within.