EYDER PERALTA, HOST:
The World Cup comes to Mexico. For a football-crazed country, it's cause for celebration. But it also comes at a complicated moment, as Mexico faces a vicious drug war that's left tens of thousands of people disappeared. This week, NPR producer Fernando Narro and I went to Guadalajara, which is hosting four World Cup games and is also the capital of one of the most violent states.
(SOUNDBITE OF CATHEDRAL BELLS RINGING)
PERALTA: The families of the missing gather in the shadow of the golden spires of Guadalajara's metropolitan cathedral. On one side, workers put the finishing touches on a massive TV screen in the middle of FIFA's fan zone. On the other, the bells announce a mass. And in the middle of the square, the families begin their ritual.
RUTH ALEJANDRINA: (Speaking Spanish).
PERALTA: "The most important thing is that their faces are visible," Ruth Alejandrina (ph) says. The families shuffle hundreds of posters with pictures, mostly of young men but also women and kids, who are among the more than 130,000 Mexicans who are reported missing. Alejandrina warns, paste the pictures only on the bollards.
ALEJANDRINA: (Speaking Spanish).
PERALTA: "If someone screams at you, don't pay attention. It's people without a conscience." They grab paintbrushes and buckets full of glue, and they fan out onto the street. They do this every week because the government removes the posters, sometimes the day after they put them up. Hector Flores (ph) moves with intensity.
HECTOR FLORES: (Speaking Spanish).
PERALTA: "Visibility bothers governments," he says. Five years ago, his son, Danny (ph), was picked up by local authorities, and he hasn't heard from him since.
FLORES: (Speaking Spanish).
PERALTA: "The government doesn't want tourists or people out shopping to see the reality."
The reality is that Flores never stops thinking about his son, who was 19 the day he disappeared. Every week, he puts up posters. Nearly every week, he picks up a shovel and digs through fields trying to find him.
FLORES: (Speaking Spanish).
PERALTA: "We say the families of the disappeared die every night, only to be reborn every morning."
FLORES: (Speaking Spanish).
PERALTA: "And we suffer the worst kind of torture, which is hope. It's not wrong to celebrate the World Cup," he says. "It's not wrong to cheer on your national team.
FLORES: (Speaking Spanish).
PERALTA: "What is wrong," he says, "is to forget."
FLORES: (Speaking Spanish).
PERALTA: "What's wrong is to stop searching, to stop naming the people we miss."
But as he moves from bollard to bollard, papering the city with the faces of the disappeared, the world around him keeps spinning.
ALEJANDRINA: (Speaking Spanish).
PERALTA: The construction crew puts up a bright-pink stage. A group of young women practice Shakira's latest dance moves, and as the street musicians begin their set, the families of the missing play a pickup game of football.
UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL ARTIST: (Singing in Spanish).
PERALTA: For as long as anyone remembers, football in Mexico has had mystical powers. The great Mexican soccer scribe Juan Villoro once wrote that football is a profession that authorizes the use of magic.
UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL ARTISTS: (Singing) Hallelujah. Hallelujah.
PERALTA: Andres Fabregas, an anthropologist who studies football, says football can do great things. He remembers when the southern state of Chiapas got a football team. It came after an armed rebellion by the Zapatistas at a moment when that part of the country felt left behind. Their first game was against the Chivas of Guadalajara, Mexico's de facto national team.
ANDRES FABREGAS: (Speaking Spanish).
PERALTA: "People faced a major dilemma."
And they solved it by cheering for both teams. As soccer gods would have it, the match ended up tied.
FABREGAS: (Speaking Spanish).
PERALTA: "People were so happy."
FABREGAS: (Speaking Spanish).
PERALTA: "Both the national and the local identity had won, and the local soccer team took on a greater meaning..."
FABREGAS: (Speaking Spanish).
PERALTA: "...As a symbol of reunification."
Like others, Darwin Franco, a journalist in Guadalajara, says he also believes in the magic of football, but things have changed. With prices so high, FIFA has made tickets to the stadium unaffordable. A tight security perimeter keeps most people away.
DARWIN FRANCO: (Speaking Spanish).
PERALTA: "The fan fest the government built in downtown Guadalajara," he says, "has used up nine times more money than what they spend yearly looking for the disappeared. The government," he says, "has bet on a lie instead of reality."
FRANCO: (Speaking Spanish).
PERALTA: "And the biggest affront," he says, "is that the government has never acknowledged that there is a crisis."
(SOUNDBITE OF BIRDS CHIRPING)
PERALTA: I meet Letizia Ramirez (ph) at a neighborhood a stone's throw from Guadalajara's international airport. Letizia is part of a collective of mothers who searches for their missing children.
LETIZIA RAMIREZ: (Speaking Spanish).
PERALTA: A few weeks ago, her group received an anonymous tip that there was a mass grave in the patio of an abandoned house, less than 2 miles from the airport where most soccer fans will fly into. They dug and found human remains, and that's when they turned the scene over to authorities.
RAMIREZ: (Speaking Spanish).
PERALTA: "So far," she explains, "they have found 60 bags full of remains, mostly extremities."
This is remarkably common in Mexico. By the government's own accounting, in the past eight years, there have been 242 clandestine graves found in the state of Jalisco alone. Human bodies are dismembered and then buried in graves as deep as 10 feet. This grave was in the middle of a residential neighborhood with lots of traffic, with lots of life.
RAMIREZ: (Speaking Spanish).
PERALTA: "This happens because people don't say anything and because the police don't do their job."
RAMIREZ: (Speaking Spanish).
PERALTA: As we talk, a truck full of cadaver dogs arrives, and Letizia says goodbye. She crosses the police line to supervise, to make sure authorities count all of the dead.
(SOUNDBITE OF ROOSTER CROWING)
PERALTA: We walk down a hill, across a ravine to a little farm just below the mass grave. From there, we can see investigators working the scene.
(SOUNDBITE OF HORSE NEIGHING)
PERALTA: But here, things feel oddly normal. Jorge Luis Reyes (ph) sells pajaretes, a traditional breakfast drink made with raw milk and moonshine.
JORGE LUIS REYES: (Speaking Spanish).
PERALTA: "You want to try it," Reyes asks. He pours a little agave honey, a little instant coffee into a mug.
(SOUNDBITE OF ITEMS KNOCKING TOGETHER)
REYES: (Speaking Spanish).
PERALTA: He reaches under a goat and squeezes its milk right into the mug.
(SOUNDBITE OF MILK SQUIRTING)
PERALTA: I take a drink. It's warm and sweet and a little bitter. I ask him, did you know about the mass grave?
REYES: (Speaking Spanish).
PERALTA: He bought this place 15 years ago, but he would come and go. Then a memory surfaces.
REYES: (Speaking Spanish).
PERALTA: Two-and-a-half years ago, he said, they found a head. They reported it, but that was that. "Sometimes," he says, "you think about what's happening and you can't explain why or how."
REYES: (Speaking Spanish).
PERALTA: "It's like we have a veil over our eyes," he says, "and we don't realize what's right in front of us. We're full of distractions," he says. And this week, there's one more - FIFA's World Cup. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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