GUADALAJARA, Jal. (Process) .– Mrs. Mary travels from Honduras, her native country, to the United States in search of her son, a migrant kidnapped in Mexico. During her journey through our country, she understands the magnitude of the crisis of disappearances.
Meanwhile, Don Francisco, the dean of the Pesh ethnic group in Honduras, faces the destruction of the La Mosquitia jungle, the flight of his offspring and the extinction of his language. Both fight, in their own way, against a common theme.
The name of the documentary is Toshkua (“disappear”, in the Pesh language), by Ludovic Bonleux (France, 1974), which was part of the Mezcal Award at the 38th edition of the Guadalajara International Film Festival (FICG). It is the sixth documentary by this filmmaker based in Mexico, who expressed in an interview that the idea for the film arose “because of the humanitarian drama that the country is experiencing” due to so many disappeared people.
In his five previous documentaries, Bonleux addressed the violence and politics of Mexico, realizing when filming activists from Guerrero about the serious problem of disappearances and the tireless struggle of relatives to find their loved ones; Subsequently, he was more concerned that, among those absent “invisible to society”, are the migrants, “even more impalpable”, for whom there are no statistics on them “much less the names of the bodies that are found”. This is how the idea for Toshkua was born, says the director:
“I wanted to be a little more global than my other documentaries that were very local. According to me, the situation in Central America and Mexico is also closely linked to the economic system in which we live and the influence of the United States in the area. If we talk about forced disappearances, obviously the role of the United States was key in the era of the counterinsurgency wars and today these same techniques have been adopted by criminal groups that are precisely the ones that murder, kidnap and disappear the migrants. So this tape allows me to talk about those unvisible topics and also take a trip from Honduras to the border with the United States”.
Mexico is a nation in transit: origin and destination of migratory processes that have reached record numbers, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM).
parallel accounts
In the film, Mrs. Mary is looking for her son Marco Antonio Amador Martínez, who disappeared in 2013:
“His destination was the United States to seek a better future and on the border with this neighboring country he was unable to pay the ‘coyote.’ Later he took a truck to go to work in Reynosa, Tamaulipas; but going through the Ribereña highway, which is very dangerous, people from an armed group took him down and nothing more is known about him.”
–How did you find the other story, that of Don Francisco Hernández?
–They called me to make a documentary with a linguist about the Pesh language of Honduras, which is being lost today since only about 500 people speak it in the Mosquitia area, and there I met Don Francisco. In that place they take away their land and their children have to migrate to the United States. It was a way of telling why people emigrate. It is not always for taste. 80% do it out of obligation, because they don’t have money or there are people who are forcing them to leave violently. So that interested me a lot.
He met Mary as part of the caravan of Central American mothers that comes to Mexico every year. With the premiere of Toshkua at the FICG, Bonleux also launched an impact campaign called Search Without Borders:
“It is to make visible this drama of the disappeared migrants and push the authorities to have a true and efficient count of how many migrants have disappeared in the country. There are more than 120,000 disappeared in Mexico, of which 95% are Mexican, however, we know that more and more migrants are disappearing, more than Mexicans. A migrant, without identification, is much more likely to disappear in this country than a Mexican.”
There are three impact goals, he finally explained:
Strengthen groups, such as the Amor y Fe Committee of Relatives of Deceased and Disappeared Migrants of Tegucigalpa, Honduras. Promote government and civil mechanisms to search for Central Americans in Mexico, in conjunction with allied organizations. And raise awareness among audiences in Central America, Mexico and the United States about the reasons why people migrate, in order to raise awareness and encourage support.
