Los Vuelos de La Muerte

Forced Disappearance in Mexico

The first time I heard the word desaparecido—disappeared, a missing person— was in my high school Spanish class as we learned about the Dirty War in Argentina. The word, so small on our long list of Spanish vocabulary that also included words like castigo and golpe de estado and junta, did not capture then the millions of people and families affected by forced disappearances not just in Argentina but across Latin American countries. There on our vocabulary list that we used to prepare for examinations, the word desaparecido was cold, small, isolated and impersonal. As a class, we hurriedly moved on from the “unsavory” subjects of war, political suppression and violence. I certainly didn’t imagine the word in connection to Mexico. I didn’t think I would encounter the word in conversation again.

And yet I did. I completed my internship with Quinto Elemento Lab through the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS) winter internship program this past January. Quinto Elemento Lab, a Mexican investigative journalism project, has reported on topics that affect large swathes of Latin America, including forced disappearances, corruption, the drug trade and cartels.

For my internship, I learned the story of Alicia de los Rios Merino. De los Rios Merino was a high-ranking member of the Marxist-Leninist urban guerilla group that emerged in the 1970s in Mexico City, la Liga Comunista 23 de septiembre, or the LC23S. The group, made up of mostly young, radicalized and disgruntled university students, sought to challenge the Mexican government and institute a socialist republic. De los Rios Merino was forcibly disappeared by the Mexican government in January of 1978 because of her organizing with the group.

Her daughter, also named Alicia, is a lawyer and historian who has spearheaded the search for her mother. Alicia was just a baby when her mother disappeared, and has made groundbreaking discoveries of the nature of forced disappearances of other militants in the 70s in the process. Quinto Elemento has aided Alicia in this important work and the search for her mother through interviews, research and hours of poring through material from several different government archives.

Based on their meticulous research, Quinto Elemento Lab and Alicia have posited that Alicia’s mother was likely a victim of a gruesome tactic of the Mexican government in the 1970s to eliminate political opposition: los vuelos de la Muerte. Flights of death.

The flights of death were also a grisly phenomenon used in Argentina, Uruguay and Chile. Political prisoners were tortured, executed and then thrown from planes into the sea. In Mexico, the White Brigade — a military group that tracked down communists and political activists in the 1970s — jailed, interrogated, and disappeared political dissidents, often through flights of death. According to Quinto Elemento’s estimates, the Mexican government disappeared approximately 143 people in these gruesome “flights of death” in Pie de La Cuesta in Acapulco.

To help the Lab organize the large volume of audio collected through interviews, I logged and transcribed roughly 60 hour’s worth of recordings using AI software and then created a timeline of important events in the disappearance and search for Alicia’s mother. The interviews I transcribed ranged from as short as two or three minutes to two-hour long testimonies, including interviews with league militants who worked alongside Alicia’s mother and father in the 70s, former soldiers who participated in the criminal flights of death, witnesses and locals who lived near the military base in Acapulco where the flights took place, and survivors of forced disappearance.

Beyond the technical skills the internship taught me, working with Quinto Elemento was also instructive in investigative journalism methods and interviewing skills. With Alicia, Marcela Turati (a 2017 Nieman Fellow at Harvard) and other journalists at the Lab were able to locate a picture of Alicia’s mother from federal archives, taken when she was detained. By obtaining flight logs, they estimated the probable date when Alicia was thrown into the sea and after which she was never seen again. In one recording, I listened in awe as Turati, with journalistic ease, made her way through Acapulco by interviewing taxi drivers, people in markets and on the street to locate the oldest fisherman in Barra de Coyuca who still remembered los vuelos.

I’ve always loved journalism because I love speaking with people who are different from me. To me, piecing together a complete story through fragments of different conversations, reports, and archival materials is exciting. This love for journalism is why I joined The Harvard Crimson almost immediately as a freshman at Harvard. But completing this internship through DRCLAS completely changed the way I think about investigative journalism, what it can accomplish, and more importantly, what it should accomplish.

Disappearances affect hundreds of thousands of families in Mexico. The estimates of those who have been disappeared have risen above 110,000 people, but the United Nations Committee on Enforced Disappearances warned that the number could be higher. The work of Quinto Elemento, then, though focused on the disappearance of Alicia’s mother, has implications for the multitude of families affected by forced disappearance in Mexico and beyond.

One moment in particular will always remain with me. I was getting coffee with one of Quinto Elemento’s renowned journalists, Eloisa Diez, one sun-drenched afternoon in the cultural center of Coyoacán, where we sat for hours discussing the project, our goals and Alicia’s story. Eloisa told me something Alicia had said in an interview with herself and Turati — that as a young girl, Alicia was convinced that if she behaved well, she would be rewarded with her mother’s return. Just a little girl, she was convinced that it was her bad behavior that kept her mother away. It was a heartbreaking detail, emblematic of the kind of innocent and poignant logic of young children. It must be so painful to carry that burden, I thought, and so young. 

As the internship drew to a close and my time in Mexico City neared its end, I was dealing with a whirlwind of emotions. Whenever we met in the DRCLAS office in Mexico City, Lorena, the coordinator of our program, would ask me how I was doing. Then she would ask me, with eyes brimming with sincerity: “¿y tu corazón?” I felt that she really cared and wanted me to take care of my heart. I talked with Lore a lot about how my internship was unusual in that it involved lots of accounts and description of human suffering. But that was not all it was. Alicia’s search for her mother is also a testament to the resiliency of the human spirit. Her strength and relentless search for the truth of what happened to her mother — drawing on her historical and legal expertise — left me in awe. Though we never met, I knew that I was changed just by listening to, learning from and researching her story. 

What mesmerized me the most about Mexico City was how bright and colorful it was — it seemed that on every hidden, cobblestone street of Coyoacán, where I stayed, there was another blushing pink house to marvel at or a riot of bright purple jacaranda trees waiting to greet me. But as I bid farewell to the most colorful city I’d ever known, I was also reckoning with the dark parts of its history, full of stories like Alicia de los Rios Merino and her daughter, and other families missing relatives because of forced disappearances and state-sanctioned violence. I carried with me Alicia’s story, and I know I always will. It will serve as a reminder of what investigative journalism can and must accomplish. Though it cannot bring loved ones back or restore childhoods marked by the achy absence of a beloved parent, it can secure accountability and truth. It can make sure that the accounts of the silenced and disappeared ultimately reach the public’s ears.

Ultimately, my internship with Quinto Elemento gave me hope, and the confidence that the collective efforts of different groups — journalists, lawyers, historians, friends, daughters, mothers — have the power to secure a more just Mexico. No matter the obstacles.