Looking for Alicia

On the beach in Pie de la Cuesta, a small vacation town in the municipality of Acapulco, a soldier in a cream-colored desert camouflage uniform appears out of nowhere, blocking the way. Just beyond the tents offering coconut-oil massages and rows of palapas where visitors feast until sunset, he had been sheltering from the heat behind a red and white sign that says STOP: NO ENTRY. Another, blue sign, its original illustrations now sun-blurred like overexposed photographs, warns:

PROHIBIDO PASAR
CAMPO MILITAR N-27-F
NO TRASPASSING
MILITARY BASE

A few steps ahead lies Military Air Base No. 7. Not much of the installation is visible from here: a row of tall, leafy palm trees that rise between low, white, architecturally dull constructions; the tallest is a two-story rectangle. There’s no glimpse of the runway, the control tower, or the fuel depot, only a few dilapidated checkpoints with sheet-metal roofs, manned by soldiers tasked with making sure that no absent-minded tourists or dangerous drug traffickers enter.

This view of the military base isn’t well known. More famous is the main entrance, on Air Force Avenue, where two antique decommissioned war planes painted with shark mouths lie mounted on a concrete base, as if poised for takeoff. A plaque pays tribute to their pilots. Nearby, behind the gate, soldiers on guard duty watch the people who approach to take selfies, making sure they don’t get too close. Behind them you can see a stretch of the runway.

In the last century, when Acapulco was at the height of its splendor, that paved strip running along the coast was its official airport. The planes that landed there carried presidents and secretaries of state, magnates, millionaire tourists, and divas and heartthrobs of Hollywood and golden-age Mexican cinema, who would then travel another seven rocky and deserted miles to reach the glamorous bay where the night was always young. Among the stars the showbiz chroniclers remember passing through are Cary Grant, Frank Sinatra, Bette Davis, Rita Hayworth, John Wayne, Orson Welles, and the athlete Johnny Weissmuller, best known for playing Tarzan. In the 1940s the city was immortalized by Agustín Lara’s piano and seductive voice, crooning to the actress María Félix: “Remember those Acapulco nights, beautiful María, María of my soul.”

In 1984, when the city had gone out of style and the airfield belonged to the Mexican Army, Pie de la Cuesta still lured Sylvester Stallone. He came, however, not to tan his muscles on the beach or test his strength against the rough Pacific waves but to film one of the Rambo movies—the second—in which the US government sends him to the Vietnamese jungle on a patriotic mission to rescue POWs from the military base where they’re still being held after the end of the war. The Pie de la Cuesta air base served as the location for the film’s epic battle, in which the shirtless veteran singlehandedly defeats a military squadron and frees the emaciated, long-forgotten prisoners of war.

The locals still remember his feats. But they suffer from amnesia when you ask them about the airplanes loaded with real political prisoners who, in 1979, five years before that film was shot, arrived here hooded, immobilized, and tortured. They weren’t gringos. They weren’t fighting communism. They were Mexicans, some very young. Here they were tortured again. And on the runway of Military Air Base No. 7 their last traces disappeared.

1.

In her hotel room Alicia De los Ríos Merino examines the spot where Air Force Avenue begins on Google Earth. She finds the entrance where she posed next to the decorative airplanes to get a photo of the facilities behind them without calling attention to herself. She enlarges the image, looking at it from different angles, searching for what she, as a historian, knows happened inside these fortifications.

She tries to match the architectural details with the information she reads in military files. Flipping through these documents, she finds black-and-white photographs and a sketch drawn twenty years ago by ex-soldiers who had been asked by the military police to recreate the atrocities that were committed there in the 1970s—part of an ill-fated attempt by the Vicente Fox administration to investigate and prosecute the crimes the state perpetrated during Mexico’s so-called Dirty War, when federal agents and the Army doubled down on their efforts to exterminate political dissidents.

Looking at the screen, Alicia tries to determine which bungalow might be the one that housed the White Brigade, the criminal squadron made up of military and secret state police members that hunted down young communist guerrillas and political dissidents across the country. They kidnapped, interrogated, and tortured their victims in secret prisons, killed many of them, and never returned the bodies to their families. Instead, as further punishment, they disappeared them.

“This is the old entrance,” she tells me. “Two cars would pull up here, a Brasilia and a van, they would radio or signal with their lights, and the chains would be lowered to let them in…. Two agents with long hair, in civilian clothes, would come in, they were called Carona and La Tripa, and they weren’t military police.”

The horror stories contained in those files are etched in Alicia’s memory. As she recognizes each place, she recalls what happened there.

“[Officers Mario Arturo] Acosta Chaparro, [general director] of police and transit in Acapulco, and [Francisco] Quirós Hermosillo, who ran the military police, were the ones in charge…. The cars arrived at these buildings made of rocks and cement, by the palms, the bungalow was a stonework structure…. I don’t think we’ve found the path that leads to the bungalow in the sketch, it was an open patio with outhouses…. Here’s where Quirós’s people stood watch, although the battalion’s solders—maybe to protect themselves—later said that they didn’t see or know what happened there…. They took [the prisoners] to the bungalow, right by the control tower…. This is where they drew the execution spot…almost next to it.”

The narrative slows down as its meaning sinks in.

They sat each prisoner down on a metal chair. On the beach.

They positioned their victims turned away, facing the sea. Always facing the sea. Always blindfolded.

They took out their nine-millimeter Uzis, the gun that Quirós Hermosillo nicknamed “the avenger.”

They fired.

Alicia knows what happened next: they would wrap rubber bags around the victims’ heads so the bodies could be carried to the runway without their blood staining the ground. When drops fell, they formed crusts that stank later, and the agents would have to hose them down.

“I wonder if they saw the sunset before they were killed,” she asked, taking notice of the huge, round, intense sun, now orange, that dons blood-red and Mexican-pink colors in the evening, the sun the locals boast about.

On the runway the Israeli-built Arava plane was waiting, designed to transport light cargo and drop parachutes. The side door opened upward. They loaded it with sacks of bodies, tied to rocks. Among the personnel the cargo was referred to as “packages.” At 2 or 3 AM, the Arava took off heading over the sea, far from the coast, and the bodies were flung into the ocean. Between 1974 and 1979 the Mexican government disappeared at least 143 people in these “death flights.” Some were still alive, unconscious. Alicia is here because she suspects that one of the “packages” aboard the plane that took off on the night of June 8, 1978, contained her mother, also named Alicia De los Ríos Merino.

*

Dear Mom,

Today, September 22, is your birthday. When I was a kid I watched my grandmother Alicia bake a cake to celebrate your life. I was the one who had to blow out the candles, and making a wish for us both I prayed to be able to hug you. I imagined you studying far away, until years later they admitted you were a political prisoner. I didn’t know what that meant, but it seemed bad. I pictured you as a prisoner in a gray jail, square, with bars, like the ones in movies. You were still beautiful despite the uniform you had to wear.

In the fantasies where I went to see you the policemen didn’t have faces, just uniforms. The hope of visiting you lasted until I was a teenager. But they never transferred you to a normal prison, you never got out, and I never met you.

*

When Alicia was seven or eight, she realized that her mother was in trouble. It happened when a cousin she had hurt playing tag angrily blurted out the family secret in retaliation: “Your mom is in jail!”

That poison dart punctured her world. Her mother wasn’t studying far away, nor was her grandmother her second mother or her grandfather her father; there was no tunnel in the wardrobe through which her mother sent secret messages and delivered presents every year on Three Kings’ Day. She was in jail.

Lichita grew up tormented by the thought that if she misbehaved her mother would never be freed. Then one day another cousin, Sandino, her constant playmate, got fed up with telling an inconsistent lie that was flaking away over time. In front of the whole family he shouted, “Why don’t you just tell her that her mom is disappeared?!”

At that moment, Alicia remembers, the family became a madhouse. Her grandmother sobbed, an aunt lashed out at the indiscreet boy, her grandfather stayed silent, and Lichita cried uncontrollably while another aunt promised her that they were looking for her mother.

“They told me, yes, she’s in prison, but we don’t know which one,” Alicia remembers now. Then, with a wry laugh, she says: “We never found out where she was, and that’s why we’re still here, looking.”

The Alicia who disappeared into a cell was the daughter of Chihuahuan ranchers, a socially anxious electronics student, a young woman with long, thick, smooth hair who acted in school plays; who was active in the September 23 Communist League and led a double life under the alias Susana; who distributed underground newspapers and urged students and factory workers to organize and demand their rights; who became a military leader in the guerrilla army (the first woman in the Communist League to hold that position); who participated in armed assaults against police; who fell in love during a jailbreak and participated, while she was pregnant, in a failed attempt to kidnap the Mexican president’s sister; who gave birth in secret and entrusted her baby to her parents while she continued to fight for the revolution.

When she was captured in Mexico City, the rest of the De los Ríos Merino family was trapped along with her. Ever since the phone rang in her parents’ house in Chihuahua in January 1978, when Alicia told one of her sisters, “They’re coming for me, look for me,” the whole family has been held hostage by that demand. Thanks to the testimony of three other League members, they learned that she had been at Military Base Number 1 in Mexico City, and that unlike the other militants she hadn’t been released.

The De los Ríos women looked for Alicia the way people did back then: organizing alongside other families with disappeared relatives, marching with black-and-white photos of the prisoner, leading hunger strikes, denouncing the military and its secret prisons to international organizations, figuring out ways in administration after administration to approach governors, secretaries of state, National Defense chiefs, and presidents, to beg them to bring their loved ones back alive.

*

Dear Mom,

We looked over and over through the Federal Security Directorate’s documents, the most extensive police archive dealing with the counterinsurgency that we could access. We found a mug shot of you, wearing an expression we recognize from your father Gilberto, looking at your captors with glimmers of dejection and dignity in your eyes. Your sadness made us cry. We read the interrogation carried out at Military Base Number 1, imagining you wounded and subdued by the perpetrators. We learned by heart the testimonies of your surviving comrades Mario Álvaro Cartagena López, Amanda Arciniega Cano, and Alfredo Medina Vizcaíno, who bravely told the press and the authorities that they had seen or heard you in military prisons between 1978 and 1980. We insisted that the FEMOSPP [Special Prosecutor for Social Movements and Crimes of the Past] explain who detained, hid, and tortured you, who has kept you disappeared for forty-three years. But the state failed us, and the de facto amnesty for the perpetrators lived on.

*

As the years went by, Alicia came to understand that finding a disappeared person in Mexico is like chasing a ghost through a labyrinth full of false doors. “We lived in a world sustained by hopes, none of them confirmed,” she says.

Years ago someone said she had seen Alicia in Nicaragua fighting alongside the Sandinistas. A friend thought he recognized her in a shopping mall in El Paso, Texas, where she winked at him to keep her secret. A historian published allegations that in the Santa Martha Acatitla women’s prison—through which, in fact, she never passed—she had given birth to a baby girl who was also disappeared. An aunt claimed that Alicia was the mysterious woman disguised as a nurse who illegally slipped into the hospital where her father was dying and caressed his forehead. (The hospital confirmed that a uniform was stolen.) It was her voice that called the house in 1993 and said, “Take care of my daughter, give my mother and father a kiss,” but didn’t respond when asked: “Where are you?”

The family received cryptic messages from witches and clairvoyants, which fueled their hunches and desperate hopes. One aunt was convinced that Alicia was the “Comandanta Lucha” mentioned by Subcomandante Marcos in one of his poetic letters from the Lacandon Jungle. Licha went to investigate, moving for a time to Chiapas. In 2000, when Licha was living in Mexico City, someone recognized Alicia in a photo of a homeless, mentally ill woman published in the newspaper Reforma, and Licha started going out at night to look for her mother in the city’s squalid shelters, imagining her driven mad by the torture she endured.

By then Licha had gotten a law degree, married a Mexican left-wing rock icon nearly twice her age, and given birth to two children, Sebastián and Nicolás. She was unemployed, not practicing law, and led a seminomadic life between concerts at the Zapatista communities in Chiapas and wherever else her husband was asked to play. She combined motherhood with organizing work in her collective, the Kloakas Komunikantes (literally a creative spelling of “interconnected sewers”), which filled her schedule with political volunteer work “from below and to the left.”

At thirty-four she came to feel that this life, with its increasingly frequent financial and emotional potholes, wasn’t the one she wanted. She decided to apply a method to her search, and to her life along with it. In 2008 she won a grant to study history and returned with her children to her maternal grandparents’ house in Chihuahua. She was on a new path: single motherhood, supported by her network of aunts, combined with study and fieldwork.

Knowing she had no time to lose because the doñas—the old ladies like her grandmother—were dying, she systematically took down testimonies from other mothers of disappeared children and absorbed their memories; she interviewed her parents’ political comrades and her own family; she rummaged through newspaper archives smelling of dust and damp, explored the horrors contained in the official records of the repression, and created archives of her own: books, old magazines, newspaper clippings, interview transcripts.

Years before, she had asked the Jesuit-founded Miguel Agustin Pro Juárez Human Rights Center—known in Mexico as the Prodh—to take on her mother’s case. They provided lawyers, and in 2002 they filed a lawsuit against the Mexican government, accusing it of “illegal deprivation of liberty.” But the criminal case remained stalled for nearly twenty years. In 2020 Alicia reappeared in the Prodh’s offices. A president who self-identified as a member of the left had taken office more than a year earlier. It was time, she had decided, to take up her search again.

2.

There’s no way to see the air force base from the beach. The boatmen are amused and incredulous at the idea of viewing it from offshore. It’s the open sea, they answer. The current could carry you away; the Pacific is fierce on this coast. The red pennants hung along the sand back them up. Waves crash furiously, hurling themselves at the shore once, twice, a million times, day and night. The two-hundred-peso tours offered by vendors chasing cars along the coastal avenue only cover the calm lagoon of Pie de la Cuesta, separated from the rough sea by a fourteen-kilometer strip of land called the Barra de Cocuya.

“We’ll take you to the freshwater lagoon,” offers one of the boatmen, displaying a map with the stops on the tour. “You’ll see the house of the man who had seven wives, the place where Luis Miguel got a clay-mask treatment, the location where they filmed Rambo 2. You can see hundreds of transatlantic birds, pelicans. There’s a stop at a restaurant, and the sunset. It’s a tropical voyage, we’re about to set off. What do you say?”

Every boat owner is a microentrepreneur with a business to look after. They all have to be agreeable; they chat with travelers, sharing anecdotes and historical facts. They’ve got an answer to every question except one: “Is it true the military threw people from planes into the sea here?”

That question shuts down every smile. Some of the men are offended, others indignant, responding that they’ve never heard such nonsense, that it’s a bunch of lies, that someone must have mistaken parachuting tourists for lifeless bodies.

*

The oldest fisherman on the Barra de Coyuca is Valente Diego Jacinto, born in 1930, father of nine children, and grandfather, great-grandfather, and soon to be great-great-grandfather to more offspring than he can count.

At home, on the same street as the town cemetery, he remembers that there used to be only fourteen houses here, all occupied by fishing families. When he was eighteen Valente became a soldier, and so he got to know the Pie de la Cuesta air base, which is in the next village over, just fifteen minutes down the land barrier by car.

As a soldier he spent eight years doing push-ups (that’s what he remembers most). Then he became one of the pioneers of the boat-ride business in this tourist destination, which was already a celebrity favorite. Now the economy is bad, he complains; there are more fishermen than fish. On the empty lot next to his patio, where Alicia and I went to meet him, he has a boat parked on dry land, like the ship in Fitzcarraldo.

Valente is talkative. He gets excited retelling his memories of the beach. He’s missing teeth, which can make him hard to understand. He’s the only one who’s not scared off when we ask about the death flights.

“Is it true that they threw people into the sea here?”

Yes, he answers: “They threw them out there, they threw them wherever from the plane. They dropped them over here, dropped them out over the sea and the bodies washed up here on the beach, their necks were all broken…. Yeah. They strangled them.” He pauses. “Well, they tortured them.”

Sometimes his memory won’t supply details. He mentions a man from Acapulco who ordered people killed and thrown into the water. But he doesn’t remember his name. At another moment he says it was a police officer. One time, he says, “they killed about four people. They took them there already dead and threw them on the corner. They shot them here. […] I don’t know what year it was. It was a long time ago. Those years are long gone, now I don’t remember.”

“Who did they throw out? Were they men?”

“Men and women, they didn’t care. Sometimes they took off their shirts or pants, just left them in their underwear…. Yeah. That’s how things were back then.”

“Was it a military plane?”

“No, they were small planes, with two sets of wings; there used to be planes like that, but now there aren’t.”

At one point in the conversation he starts to mix up the dead. The ones from the cyclone that swept away his sister and her husband, along with the gasoline tank and the boat’s motor. He spent a long time looking for her: “Through the mud, I went through it all, sea, land, by plane, by boat, I never found her.” He claims the blue sharks ate her, because there were lots of them back then. And the recent dead, from the criminal violence that’s exploded in the area, shot anywhere in town “as soon as it’s dark.” All mixed together in his mind with the tortured ones who fell from the planes. Later he says it was when José López Portillo was president. None of those bodies are in the potter’s field, because the cemetery by the beach has been swallowed several times by the sea, which even knocks over the cinderblock wall in cyclone season, unearthing the dead.

A couple of times I asked whether the planes come from the military base. No, he answers impatiently. “They were different biplanes. The soldiers didn’t have biplanes, just bigger planes and helicopters.” But his description of the biplanes, the time, and the location coincides with the available information about the death flights.

“They tortured them and everything, they killed them, and they threw them in the sea, threw them wherever, in the trees, in the lagoon, falling, falling,” he insists. “I only managed to see maybe five people. Early in the morning, because there was a plane that threw them out early in the morning, around dawn, they went by here.” He points to the sea.

“And the tourists didn’t get scared?”

“No. They didn’t know, it was just the people from around here who knew about the bodies. So that was it.”

Don Valente recounts these experiences in front of a granddaughter and an older woman who’s dating one of his sons. They don’t pay much attention to what he says, dismissing it as an “old guy’s imaginings.”

His neighbor Mr. Chente—another retired fisherman, with the same undernourished appearance, who lives on the next street over and rivals Valente in age—stands behind his front gate, which is improvised from scraps of wire, with a cloth for a door. When asked about the death flights he says they happened, that everyone trembled when the planes passed by. And he justifies them: “They threw them out still alive. Instead of throwing them in jail they threw them into the water, from above. They took them in the plane and up there they tossed them out. They tied a rock to their neck and that was it. When they threw them into the sea it was because they were bad people, killers. They caught them and threw them out.”

*

Dear Mom,

It’s only today, nineteen years after we reported the case, that we’ve found agents involved in your detention, interrogations, and transfers. For decades the perpetrators tried to stay in the shadows, but now we’ve managed to get the FGR [the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office] to summon them.

The first witness to your case was scheduled to give testimony on Thursday, July 22. Though I was warned that he might not show up, to our surprise he did. The ex-agent—normal height and build, in his seventies, wearing brand-name athletic clothes and accompanied by a young lawyer—was sitting with a confused look in his eyes. Just like in my childhood imagination, he didn’t seem to have a face. His features, covered by a Covid mask, could have been anyone’s.

When I saw him, the Lichita who wanted more than ever to visit you in your unknown prison took my hand nervously. I comforted her: “This is a meeting we can’t put off, with one of the men who might have taken mama.”

*

Over the years Licha kept adding pieces to the picture of Alicia’s possible fate. She had learned how to carry out research, interviewing survivors of the repression of those years, working through declassified documents, discarding the hypotheses that her mother had been seen alive in Texas, Chiapas, or Nicaragua, or anywhere by 1980. Her case advanced further than any other because Alicia and her lawyers from the Prodh put so much pressure on two state prosecutors that they finally took an interest in moving it forward and started calling retired military officers to testify. The officers claimed not to remember anything from those years, but their names and signatures are all over the paper trail the military unwittingly left behind at the stages of disappearance through which her mother had passed. The prosecutors also gained access to information that Alicia’s lawyers had requested from secret military archives about the counterinsurgency. Those new documents, combined with other evidence that Alicia and her lawyers had already gathered, led them to start investigating the Pie de la Cuesta military base.

Exhibit #1. In this black-and-white photo, “Susana” no longer has the thick, dark, straight, well-combed hair she did in previous images. She looks disheveled, her hair sheared in uneven layers, her face scratched, unsmiling. The picture, found in the Federal Security Directorate’s archives, was taken in 1978 inside the country’s most infamous political prison, Military Base Number 1.

Exhibit #2. Shortly after he was released from the capital’s military base, Mario Álvaro Cartagena López declared that he had seen Alicia alive. Soldiers in the secret prison had taken her to see him, and she had identified him as the militant known as “El Guaymas.” Cartagena would later tell Licha that what he felt in Alicia’s eyes was less a betrayal than a warning that stiffened his determination: “Don’t give in! Don’t give anyone up.” He resisted; after the torture his leg had to be amputated.

Exhibit #3. The testimony of Alfredo Medina Vizcaíno, a Chihuahuan militant who, along with another political prisoner named Reyes Ignacio Herrera, encountered Alicia first at Military Base Number 1 and then was transferred with her to the Pie de la Cuesta base, where they saw Alicia until sometime before June 8. Both were taken away on June 9, to multiple prisons, and eventually freed.

Exhibit #4. The Arava 2005 flight log from June 8, 1978, documenting that the airplane made a “nighttime,” “local” flight to and from the Pie de la Cuesta airbase. Local flights typically lasted no more than two hours. The flight lasted from 3 to 5 AM.

Exhibit #5. Photographs and written testimonies found in the secret military files of ex-army members who were summoned for questioning in 2002. One picture shows three of the men making a hand gesture—the same one that the crews of the military police’s unmarked cars would make to ask to enter the base and bring in their human cargo. Another depicts one ex-soldier sitting on a small bench on the Pie de la Cuesta beach and staring at the sea, pretending to be in the execution seat, while another takes aim at the back of his neck. A third shows several men lying inside an Arava airplane, playing dead guerrilla fighters in what looks like a macabre work of performance art.

Exhibit #6. Court testimonies from pilots and mechanics who participated in the nocturnal flights carrying “packages.” One of them states: “Then it was only the pilots, the three soldiers responsible for throwing the bodies out, and me. After we took off we’d fly for about twenty or thirty minutes and then start throwing out the dead bodies we were carrying…. Captain DAVID asked me if we could keep the door open in the air so that it would be faster, and I said yes, and that was what we did, so there was a safety cord, and just as I was about to tie it I saw that there were lights below. I informed Captain DAVID, thinking it might be a boat, and that’s why after that we would fly out to sea for an hour after leaving the Base before we threw the bodies out, so they wouldn’t fall near the beach or on a boat or something. Also the blood that dripped out got into all the little cracks in the plane’s floor, and even though they washed it, when it started to get hot around midday it smelled awful.”

Two ex-soldiers who went on record in military court about their participation in this criminal extermination method—the mechanic Margarito Monroy Candia and the police officer Gustavo Tarín Chávez—estimated the number of victims. The former guessed around 150, the latter as many as 1,500.

*

From a Facebook message posted by Licha on April 18, 2023: “According to testimony from the survivors of forced disappearance at Military Bases Numbers 1 and 7, my mother and other comrades were seen for the last time in a building on that beach between 1971 and 1979. (Alicia’s documented presence at Pie de la Cuesta was in early June 1978.)”

3.

In July 2022 Licha sat in a chair in an old apartment in downtown Mexico City. Around her were arranged plastic boxes of tiny screws, dental molds, bite-correcting plastic guards, mountains of paper and books. Across from her a skinny indigenous man in his twenties with long black hair relayed messages as if someone were whispering them in his ear.

He was a medium that a friend of hers recommended she consult to communicate with her mom. But a different visitor showed up to their appointment. “The issue that’s been dwelling most within you and that you’ve always considered most important is your mother,” the seer began, “but there’s unfinished business with your father that you’ve been avoiding.”

She nodded, smiling the way she does all the time, no matter what storm of emotion she’s enduring.

“Well, your father is waiting for you to look for him, for you to give him the same importance as you do your mother. It’s as if your mother is lost, but your father is looking right at you.”

“To look for him?” Alicia was surprised, but she didn’t object: she meekly answered this stranger’s questions about her relationship with her father. She described how when she was ten years old she was changing the frame on the portrait of Che Guevara in her grandparents’ house when a small picture of a stranger fell out from behind it, with a name written on it: “Enrique Pérez Mora ‘Tenebras.’” At fourteen she learned that this young man, with dark and unruly hair, was her father. Her parents met when her mom helped six guerrilla members break out of the Oblatos prison in Jalisco; he was among them. Within a few months Alicia and El Tenebras, living in hiding, were expecting a child.

She had her doubts that her father was reproaching her. She posts about him on Facebook, has done research to reconstruct his life, and is even working on a documentary about his story. She has a tattoo of a heart with two interlaced names: La Susan and El Tene. But she hadn’t come here to ask the spiritualist about his fate. She knows that her paternal grandmother crossed half the country by bus in her pajamas, recovering from appendicitis, after identifying the body of her son, the guerrilla assassinated in a police ambush in Sinaloa. Alicia’s grandmother kept her murdered son’s heart preserved in a formaldehyde jar in her dresser. Alicia first saw this relic when she was about twenty-five. She was struck by its pinkish tone and the large size of the arteries. The image often kept her up at night.

The medium insisted on giving voice to Tenebras, telling Alicia that her abandoned father wanted her to know that he was still there for her, that it was better she hadn’t grown up with him because he had been full of rage and surrounded by violent men, which would have hurt her.

“He says that you’re searching for the two of them because you’re lost. More than doing it for them, you’re looking for yourself, because all your attention is on the past, and you’ve lost the present.” The young man kept talking, as if taking dictation. “He says there’s still time for you to connect to the present. You should keep on looking, but don’t lose the thread with your children.”

Alicia stopped repeating “okay, okay.” She was no longer smiling. The interpreter of the dead raised his eyes as if listening to something from far away, to a voice or message coming from the kitchen behind him. It didn’t take him long to receive a new frequency; he nodded quickly, and in tune with what seemed like another channel he abruptly spoke: “Your father is okay. It’s your mother who seems very lost. I feel like she’s in a dark place, in a place without memory, a very strange place. All I see is darkness…sooooo much darkness.”

“Is there water?”

“I don’t know, it’s so dark.”

Alicia looked solemn while the man spoke a prayer in Purépecha, gave her some advice, and blessed her.

During the session Alicia received a call from a doctor in Chihuahua. Her son, a teen handball player, had suffered heatstroke a few days earlier. At first she wasn’t too worried, but now the doctor said that her son’s aorta was partially obstructed and that he would need surgery. Alicia heard the medium’s words repeating in her mind: don’t lose the thread with your children. The next morning she canceled all her appointments and returned to Chihuahua.

Over the following days Alicia struggled with the image of her mom in a dark place, lost, cold, disconnected. Scenes came over her from records she had found of the little-known trials held by the Secretariat of National Defense to charge two generals—Quirós Hermosillo and Acosta Chaparro—with murder in connection with the death flights. (The Army initiated these proceedings by accusing them of trafficking drugs for the Juárez Cartel.) 

The stories she had read became fixed images, like bloody crusts that no amount of scrubbing could wash away. They came to her like nightmares even when her eyes were open. She pictured people falling from the sky, soldiers washing blood off the beach, the victims killed facing the sea. Reading the statements of the air base’s survivors, who had seen Alicia-Susana in June 1978, she imagined that the Pacific could be the dark, cold place where all communication with the living is cut off.

Around that time she wrote a letter and sent it to news stations, asking ex-members of the White Brigade, their families, and anyone who might have information about her mother’s location to contact her, but there were no answers. She also paid close attention to the work of a recently created truth commission tasked with investigating the atrocities the state had committed during the counterinsurgency. She signed up to visit military sites, looking for former secret prisons.

Then, in 2022, a healer originally from Mexico City but now based in Acapulco sent Alicia a message. While she was leading a ritual on the Pie de la Cuesta beach to honor the lives of local indigenous rights activists killed by Covid-19, the healer said, someone left a black-and-white photo on the altar she was using, and she felt the presence of the person it showed—a woman with straight, dark, thick hair. She started receiving powerful messages: Alicia’s mother needed a ritual. 

*

From a Whatsapp message sent on April 7, 2023: “Hi Laura, this is Alicia de los Ríos…. You performed a ritual here in Pie de la Cuesta involving a photo of my mother, who is a disappeared person. We’re in Pie de la Cuesta now and I’d like to meet you. Do you think that’d be possible, Laura? We’ll be here until Saturday. Take care.”

*

Looking at you, Alicia, the woman starts crying inconsolably. She says that the tears aren’t her own, that they belong to your mother, whom she can’t see or hear but only feels. She tells you that last night, when she got your message letting her know that you were in Acapulco and wanted to see her, she was overwhelmed by sadness. That your mother’s cries came over her like a wild energy, like the sea lashing the sand.

Laura, the healer—or medium, or shaman; you’re not sure what to call her—asks you questions that your mom wants answered: whether her mother, the family’s first Alicia, is still alive, whether she has grandchildren. You think about Niko and Sebas. Laura keeps apologizing, with a mix of surprise, embarrassment, and shock, saying this has never happened to her before. She has never felt for someone else in quite this way.

“These tears are hers; she’s saying goodbye because she needs to rest; she says that she’s been holding onto you all these years; she says the whole sea should be covered in white flowers because she’s not the only one. There are men and women there too, their souls are there, and they all want to rest now,” she tells you.

You listen to her. She doesn’t give you an opening to tell her about your mother. Laura needs to explain that last night, when she was by the refrigerator, your mom dictated messages to her and she didn’t understand that she had to take notes, until she realized how urgent it was. Now she reads aloud what she frantically managed to type on her phone; you miss some stretches that are muffled by the waves crashing behind you.

“Dear daughter, I’ve been waiting for you, I wanted to tell you that I love you always and carry you in my heart, I’m proud of you because you’re so important to me…. I knew that one day you’d come, I’ve been waiting to see you all this time since I disappeared…. Now I can be at peace because I know that you understand what I fought for and that you keep fighting as I did, I love you, and it was important to me that you come say goodbye to me so that I can rest, my soul needs to rest…. I know that you’ll keep fighting for me so that the truth comes out, to shed light on my death, the same death shared by so many here…. Keep fighting so that everyone knows that a bullet—a bullet?” Laura looks surprised. “No, sorry, I don’t know why I wrote ‘a bullet,’” she apologizes. “We died for a Mexico where everyone would be able to eat, where everyone could participate, where everyone could live with dignity…. Thank you, my child, for being here, I love you, I’ll always carry you in my heart…. I can only send you these messages here, by this sea attaching me to other women’s wires….” Laura stops again, confused. “Wires? No, I don’t know why I wrote ‘wires,’ that’s a mistake…. Cover the sea with white flowers, for our souls, to free my soul and the souls of my comrades; it will mean that our souls are at rest and our country is at peace; honor the fact that we died fighting for peace, for the dignity of the Mexican people…”

Some words she uses, like “democracy,” are jarring. From what you know about your mother that wasn’t the animating ideal for her or her organization in the late 1970s, but you keep listening. You’re confused when she mentions wires and bullets, but you remember what Don Valente said about the torture victims buried in the sea. Killed by gunfire.

It’s unsettling; sometimes you want to laugh. You remember Whoopi Goldberg in Ghost and you feel strange, ridiculous, not sure whether to believe this woman who wants you to perform this goodbye with her. 

Laura looks outlandish on this beach. She contrasts sharply with the people sunbathing in swimsuits. Her long hair covers her back, and she wears a cloth tied on her head like a red turban, along with bracelets, necklaces, and pendants made of beads and sea stones. Her long, heavy Tehuana dress stretches down to her calves, embroidered in wool patterns trimmed with lace. Her leather sandals are those of a prehispanic dancer. Her lipstick is smudged from the tears. But suddenly you swat away your doubts and think: “I’ve done lots of other things, and now I’m here, why don’t I do this, too, and take it seriously?”

You’ve decided to give in to the experience and trust her, so you follow Laura’s instructions and draw a circle in the sand as a symbol of peace. You lay down the white flowers you bought at the market, along with patriotically colored pages from an educational picture book, which you found as a substitute for the flag. You struggle to light the candles, whose flames refuse to steady in the fast breeze.

You repeat Laura’s words (“I’m covering the sea with these white flowers, bringing peace to your souls”), you feel the pain in your chest getting heavier (“I accept you as my mother, I thank you for all the things I’ve learned searching for you”), tears rise up from somewhere deep inside you (“I bless everything you’ve given me, but today I’m giving you everything that’s yours, in respect and humility, because I’m going to follow my own path”), you don’t want to say it, because you don’t want to say goodbye to her, but you repeat the words (“I bring you these flowers so you can rest”), you fight against yourself, you don’t want to let your mother go, but the words that you’re repeating are a farewell, and you feel sad (“I’m honoring the struggle you’ve undertaken for the Mexican people, for a path toward happiness and dignity”).

Laura asks you to say goodbye.

“And if I don’t want to?” you ask, holding your mother tight.

Now it’s time to scatter the white flowers over the waves, and you do it with all your might; the sea carries them back, and you toss them again, but it returns them to your feet, and you try to throw them again, but they insist on coming back. Better to take them in your hands and squeeze them.

“Is there anything else you want to say to her?” Laura asks.

“Yes.” Your voice cracks as you say “I love you.”

The waves dance to the rhythm of the rattles that Laura shakes as she finishes the prayer.

Tonight you’ll feel at peace. You’ll notice that the anguish that was weighing on your heart is gone. Outside the agitated sea roars, but you won’t hear it. You’ll be asleep, surrounded by a peace you’ve never known.

*

I traveled to Pie de la Cuesta, in Guerrero, to find you. I looked out at the sea that probably swallowed you and I sense a storm: it’s you. For you I would cover the sea in white flowers. Stubborn, proud, and rebellious, you could never let them take away your essence, and you keep scattering clues for those of us searching for you. I believe that we’re close to finding out what happened to you. We’ll keep looking. Without wavering, we’ll find you. May my love honor you always, mom.