A Family’s Loss,
Mexico’s Tragedy
By David Gonzalez Mar. 29, 2016 Mar. 29, 2016
This week Lens is featuring photographers from around the world who have been chosen to attend the fourth annual New York portfolio review.
A loved one vanishes. One moment a son, a brother, a husband, walks out the door, just as they do every morning. But one day, night falls and they’re not home. The sun rises, beds remain empty. Slowly, you realize something is wrong. Days and nights turn into a blur and nothing is known, except for the hurt, fear and longing that hang over your house.
This is the reality that Yael Martínez and the family of his wife, Lucero, have been living since 2013, when two of his brothers-in-law, Ignacio and David, disappeared in Iguala, Mexico. If the town sounds familiar, it’s because disappearances are what made it infamous. Iguala is where 43 students from Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College were kidnapped in 2014, never to be found since. If the loss of these two was not enough, the family’s heartbreak was compounded when a third brother, Beto, died in jail while awaiting trial on drug charges. The police said he hanged himself. The family — which saw signs of violence on his corpse — suspected otherwise.
His family is not alone in their grief. In the state of Guerrero and elsewhere in Mexico, the violence fueled by the drug cartels, aided by corruption and impunity, has irrevocably changed the lives of thousands of families. In order to relate his family’s experiences to what has been convulsing his country, Mr. Martínez looked inward, producing a series of images that are quiet, personal and haunting: of empty rooms bathed in shadows, parents whose faces are etched with grief, portraits of loved ones looking at times lost, other times in pain.
“I wanted to show the emotional and psychological fractures that come with such losses,” Mr. Martínez said. “There is fear and impotence because you can’t get an answer. There is frustration. You can’t sleep. The routine of your life has been shattered. You can never be the same after that.”
The death and disappearances in his family happened before the 43 students were kidnapped, even though many people had known about situations like these for years. Beto had been arrested in February 2013 for carrying marijuana and was jailed for six months before his death. The other two brothers vanished within days of each other in early May: Ignacio was seen being hauled into a van in Iguala’s city center; David went out one day and did not come home, not unusual as he liked to party, Mr. Martínez said.
Their parents filed reports with the police, Mr. Martínez said, but nothing happened.
“My mother-in-law never got a response from the police,” he said. “It was only after the 43 students were kidnapped that they started to investigate things. A lot of people after that started raising their voices demanding answers.”
Mr. Martínez’s own response to the family tragedy was to let his in-laws’ sorrow stand in for similar tragedies in so many other families. What he chronicled showed a family torn asunder by events out of their control, with questions that have yet to be answered.
In the wake of the death and disappearances, Mr. Martínez’s father-in-law and several sons moved to Acapulco, itself hardly a haven given recent violence.
His mother-in-law stayed in Taxco, about a half-hour from Iguala, convinced her two sons are alive, somewhere. She has even provided the authorities with a sample of her DNA to help with any possible identification of the bodies that have been found in numerous graves since the student kidnappings. Every Tuesday, Mr. Martínez said, she checks in with the authorities to see if anyone has been found.
“When we lost Beto and buried him, that hurt,” Mr. Martínez said. “But it’s difficult for the ones who disappeared because you cannot close the circle of life and death and let that person go. My mother says they are still alive. Sometimes she says maybe no. I go outside with my wife and she’ll see someone who looks like one of her brothers. They live with this anxiety. They want to hold on to that hope and keep to alive.”
Mr. Martínez chose to make these quieter images, rather than resort to more traditional photojournalistic approaches. You will not find empty graves or blood-streaked walls. He says that by looking at these small, personal moments in the aftermath of loss, he can begin to shed light on what so many other families are enduring in his country.
His work has won him the support of the Magnum Foundation, which last week named him one of the recipients of its Emergency Fund grants. He says the grant is a vote of confidence in photographers like him, who are telling their own stories in their own way.
“I am glad to see more opportunities for Latin American photographers,” he said. “We can tell our stories our way. We can represent ourselves and tell the stories that we are living. That work is more honest and totally different from what is usually shown.”
The grant will allow him to continue to work on the project, “Broken Roots,” which has begun to include other families who have experienced such losses.
“It is important to have this testimony,” he said. “If not, impunity will continue. This worries me. How do we find a way out of this situation? The panorama is so dark.”
Mr. Martínez and his wife found one way: Soon after the brothers died and disappeared, he and his wife decided to have a second child. Her name is Zuria Citlali. She will turn 1 next week.
“You try to put your feet on the ground and find another path,” he said. “After the loss, my wife felt the need to start over. To see another aspect of what we are living through, the darkness and light.”
