MEXICO CITY.- Jorge Verástegui is very clear about his option for the presidency of Mexico and he is not a woman. His candidate is called Antonio. He is his brother who disappeared 15 years ago.
Verástegui is one of the promoters of the “Vote for the Disappeared” campaign, an initiative of a group of relatives ahead of Sunday’s elections to make visible a problem that has not stopped growing since 2006, although this week President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said that it no longer happened.
The objective is “to make noise, to make political actors uncomfortable with the issue of disappearances that is always relegated,” explained Verástegui, a lawyer who has been searching since 2009 for his brother and nephew who disappeared in the northern state of Coahuila.
The campaign is not intended to discourage participation. Quite the opposite. It is a call to those who have already decided to cancel their vote to join the initiative to elect a missing person, of the more than 114,000 in Mexico – according to official figures -, and to write it on the part of the ballots intended for the “unregistered candidates”.
María Esther Aguilar Cansimbe will also be on one of those ballots. Ernesto Aroche, co-director of the digital media Lado B in Puebla, in the center of the country, will vote for her, “because she is the first female reporter to disappear in Mexico in this century,” she explained. In 2009 she left her house to cover an evacuation drill and did not return.
Aroche had already annulled his vote in other elections and was determined to do it again, but this proposal “gave much more meaning (to the protest vote) because the journalistic union is not exempt from this problem.”
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, Mexico is the country with the most missing journalists, 16 at this time.
The “Vote for the Disappeared” platform has created files with names of absentees distributed by districts so that whoever wishes can choose their ‘candidate’ there. Then they ask that a photograph of the ballot be uploaded to the networks to display it as they have already done with a handful of voters arriving from abroad.
The protest votes in Mexico have had many faces, from scratched ballots, with insults written on them or even in 2013 there was a “candidate” who broke into the elections for mayor of the capital of Veracruz, in the Gulf of Mexico, with the slogan “ Tired of voting for rats? “Vote for a cat.”
In 2021 Verástigui and other relatives tried a first experiment of voting for their missing people but only now did they formally launch the campaign. In those elections there were more than a million and a half invalid votes and more than 40,000 went to unregistered candidates, an option that has to be counted by the electoral authorities.
In some Latin American countries, regulations have been put in place to make visible those who disappeared from military dictatorships at the end of the 20th century.
In Argentina there has been a rule since 2013 by which the voter registry must record the status of “absent voter due to forced disappearance” in cases in which they have been officially declared as such by the Secretariat of Human Rights. Chile did something similar in 2021 as a memory exercise for missing detainees whose relatives have not processed “presumed death” certificates.
This type of initiative is still far from being considered in Mexico, which only aspires to show the indignation of many family members.
Clemente Rodríguez, father of one of the 43 student teachers from the Normal Rural of Ayotzinapa who disappeared almost ten years ago in the south of the country, is an example of this indignation.
“I voted for (Enrique) Peña Nieto (in 2012), I voted for López Obrador (in 2018) and the same thing happens again, we thought he was going to give us a solution and the vote was not valid,” he lamented.
The only thing he has found of his son, Christian Alfonso Rodríguez Telumbre, is a tiny fragment of burned bone. The case remains unclarified.
That is why he said that if he finally goes to vote he will write on the ballot “We are missing 43” or the name of his son. “I no longer believe in parties, it’s always the same.”
Source: AP
