If I find him and I don't find the others, I'm not going to be happy. I'm not going to be complete.
From Futuro media and PRX, It's Latino USA. I'm Maria no Josa Today activist Lucia Dsinoo. She's a mother who became a leader in the fight to search and find that disappeared in Mexico. Lucia Dshinao is a former teacher. She lived a quiet and pretty much happy life in the seaside state of Vera Cruz in southern Mexico, but then in twenty thirteen, her world was turned upside down. Overnight that year, her twenty nine year old son, Luis Guillermo,
a popular DJ, didn't return home. He had been kidnapped.
I just collas.
It was horrible because it's like this feeling, this complete realization that he's missing.
And so given the inaction of the Mexican authorities, Lucy decided she had to do something that would be the beginning of her tireless search for her son, a quest that is now over ten years old.
If my son, Amia, how can I say I give up?
As drug related violence grew in Veracruz and the rest of Mexico, kidnappings became more and more frequent. In twenty thirteen, the year Luis Gilletmo went missing, six hundred people disappeared in the state of Veracruz and close to eighteen thousand disappeared in all of Mexico. Soon, Lucy would meet other mothers just like her. They considered themselves fighters looking for their disappeared children. Amid their shared suffering, they formed a group.
They called it Solesito, which means a little sun in Spanish.
When you're looking for something or for somebody, you need a lot of light. So I said, well, so the sun sun is the symbol of light.
What happened next seems pretty much impossible to believe, but it's true. These mothers started to dig, literally digging, doing the jobs of archaeologists and forensics in their search for their children. In twenty sixteen, they discovered what turned out to be one of the biggest mass graves in all of Latin America, Golinas Re Santa Fe, located in the state of Veracruz. Over the next few years, Solesito became an inspiration to others outside of Meca families also looking
for their missing loved ones. In this episode, Lucy tells us about her continuous efforts to find her son and how she's built a community of mothers mothers of disappeared children. Here's our conversation, Lucy, welcome to Latino, USA. It's an honor to have you on our show.
Thank you so much. It's a very good opportunity for me to get the word out of the missing cases in Mexico.
Lucy, let's go back to before you became an activist, because you had another life you're living in back Gruz. Just kind of paint the picture. What was your daily life like.
I had begun to live quiet life, traveling with my husband because he's a sea captain, so he has to travel very much. And I accompanied him because my kids were already growed ups. So I had the opportunity to get around travel visit different places in Indonesia, Singapore. So life was pretty nice for me because I was already feeling very free. I was traveling back and forth and this ting the kids very frequently too. You know, I never neglected them, never ever, So I was a mom all the time.
So then, and I know this is hard, Lucy, and I know that you've done this before, but it's not easy to even have to ask this question, because on June twenty eighth of twenty thirteen, that's the day that everything changed. This kind of joyful life of journeys it comes to an end because it's on that day that your son, his full name is Luis more Lagunes Das, disappears.
It's in Bedra Gruz, and at that time in twenty thirteen, Bera Gruz, which is normally not known as a state of a lot of violence, but at this time Betra Gruz, and frankly Mexico in general, the violence was really on the uptick in a way that it was drawing a lot of attention.
Thirty one Now bodies have now been confirmed in the eastern Gulf Coast state of Vera Cruz as a state that has been plagued by drug related violence.
So can you tell us what happened on June twenty eighth, twenty thirteen.
Well, actually it happened kind of slowly for me because I didn't find out the first day because when he was working, I tried to not interfere, but his girlfriends started calling me, sending messages and stuff like she couldn't reach him, and she had no idea what he was. In a couple of days, all the alarms went off, and that's when I started to get really worried. I called his friends, people that worked for him, and they said that he was all right, not to worry, he
would call me. But there was this feeling, this, you know, like God's feeling.
So you call his friends, you're getting desperate now, and they're telling you, no, not the progupe elasta en like he's okay, Like, don't worry. It's not that they knew where he was. They were just saying the normal thing, he's out visiting somebody, or his phone is lost battery. Is that kind of what they were saying to you.
They said that he was working at a place where he didn't have any signal. He was working in one of a cienda. But then I knew that not that many days would go and my son wouldn't reach me because he knew that I would get crazy. It turns out that the people who worked for him were involved, and it's kidnapping.
Oh my god.
So this is no mystery, This is not you know, it's not something they were doing to protect me. They were just falling for time. You could just feel it as a mom exactly. Yeah.
And then and you began to feel like these people who are his coworkers were actually not being honest with you. And I guess what's even worse, Lucy, is that everybody was looking at you and saying, what's the matter with you? You're acting crazy? Everything is fine.
When I go back, you know, mentally to that day, it's like a nightmare.
And I can hear it in your voice. It's like you're right back there, you know, in your bedroom, unable to get out of bed, collapsing, total mental exhaustion and sadness. At some point, Lucy, in this trajectory, something clicks for you. You probably had already seen many mothers in Mexico Kee Yoran, Yoran is done this. Esperada's just crying. But not all of them stand up and say, you know what, I need to fight, I need to do something. I cannot
just sit here and wait. Do you remember when that moment happened for you?
Yeah, Like, I went to see the authorities and I took a good look at the at the police that were in charge of the investigation. I noticed, I said, this are not the kind of people that I trust with something like my son, I said, I got to do something, And then I started meeting all the other people who were going through the situation.
You never imagined that you would be one of them.
I never. I never, because Mexico was the country of peace. But then they declare war all of a sudden, and Vera Cruz was completely completely taken over by violence and insecurity, more.
Violence in Mexico, but on a worrying scale, thirty five bodies dumped underneath a bridge in eastern Mexico. But a Cruz was a quiet port city. Now dead men and women are dumped near shopping centers.
But my son was not a very rich person that I thought would be a good candidate for kidnapping. He was a very successful businessman at twenty nine, and that's when they saw they would make some money out of him, and they did well.
How did you decide exactly what to do do in those first days of beginning to take some sort of action.
It's just knowing that my son needed me and that I wouldn't let him down. I was easy for me to decide because I knew there was no other There was no choice I had to stand up and do something. I was in a terrible depression. I was sick. I was so weak with crying and going all over you know, different places, different agencies, going from one place.
It was.
Madness and my heart was completely broken. But at that time I just wanted to die. I wanted to lay down in just die. But I figure, who's going to looks at my son? And I got up and started fighting.
You know, Lucy, I really want to thank you for being so honest with me, because you don't ever get over a trauma like this. Now you can live day to day and find a way to laugh, but you never can get over this. It's been ten years, and just hearing you talk about this, I'm right there with you in your sadness and just the kind of craziness of going from one Mexican institution to another trying to
find answers. At some point, you know, these become the initial efforts to turn your particular rage and now with other people just like you, into something that was organized. I think you started by what creating a WhatsApp group?
Yeah, that's the way it started. You know, technology, technology can do wonders. Because I started meeting people that were undergoing my same situation, and even worse because some of those moms had little children and they didn't have a lot of time to go around. I had like a moral obligation to help them too. You know, I have a college education and I know what to say to the authorities. Some of them don't even know how to start, you know, placing a file or anything like that. So
I said, I need to help them. I need to find not only my son, I need to find them all, because I'm not going to be satisfied with just finding my son. That's too selfish. And I said, no, I gotta get up and do something about all the other ones too. And that's when it started.
People do begin to know and hear about STO And in twenty sixteen, you're at a Mother's Day demonstration in Beracruz, drawing attention to this issue, and two men jump out of a vehicle and they hand this group of mothers a map take us to that moment at the demonstration.
It happened so suddenly, I mean, nobody noticed the two men. We look at their faces because there were so many of us going around and making a lot of noise, and they handed us those copies and they just left. This really happened like in a flash. So when I saw that, I knew immediately because it was very specific. But I didn't want to tell the months at the moment because that would spoil the strength the energy of the march. So the next day I told them, look,
we have the place. Now we know where we're going to start looking. So we were there for three years, digging every day.
That happened in August of twenty sixteen, is that when you uncovered this grave.
That's when we began, because you know, it takes time. We found one hundred and fifty six graves. Three hundred and two buddies were there waiting for us to bring them to the light.
Oh my god.
And the authorities had carried out a search over there already, but they didn't do a good job.
And how did like literally it dig? How did you later figure out, actually, we can't just dig. We need to come up with a way to see if there's something underground. We're going to use sticks and we're going to use our sense of smell.
Yeah. Actually it took a course in forensics, so they taught us the basics. So they teach us how not to damage the bones, but the actual technique of finding the bodies we learned in Iguala with the people who were looking for the students from Mayotin Napa.
Demonstrations in Mexico increased and became violent this weekend, as protesters accused the Mexican government of reacting slowly to the disappearance and apparent murders of forty three students who attended a rural teachers college.
And they're the ones who teach you to put the stick into the ground, and depending on the smell that comes out from the stick that you've put into the ground, you'll know whether or not there's a body underneath.
We use it's two meters and a half, usually like a pole made of iron. It's one of those constructions, okay, okay, And we have a custom made because we have to place something on top, like a tee so that we can pull it out. We hammer it into the ground completely all the way in, and we have to be very careful because you don't want to damage to break the bones. And then once we have the we picked up the sense of smell, we can make a hole so we don't have to go around making holes without
having any idea. And then most of the times, if we pick up the smell on the pole, it's usually a body. It's kind of very basic, very primitive kind of technique, but it works. It works for us because we tried to use dogs. The dogs didn't work. I think they are overpowered because there were so many and the dogs didn't pick up anything.
It feels Lucy that at this point in the journey it was like we've taken control of our emotions. So now we're unstoppable because now we're just going to do all of the research, all of the work, all of the data, all of the digging. It feels like you just there was a turn in the whole story about as you said, you know, the emotions went to a different place.
Yeah, because the pain is there. It's there all the time, but you learn to work around it. And I can tell you I was not expecting to see what I have seen.
So how do you take care of each other? How do you support each other? As mothers of the disappeared in Mexico.
We are very close, We are sisters. Because pain is an equalizer. So I try to give them workshops, get people that teach them how to do things that can help them, you know, make a living. But it's the sisterhood. And in the group, for example, we can talk about our missing children all the time and nobody gets upset. Nobody complains because in their houses, you know, with their families,
they cannot talk about them anymore. Because families, people complain, they say, he's lost, you're never going to see him again, so stop talking about him or her, and they get mad. But with us, we can talk about them all the time and they are present all the time. It's the one place where we can be ourselves because that's what we are now. What is at the center of our lives is looking for for our loved ones.
That's really incredibly powerful. Lucia, So our listeners don't know this, but you're speaking to us from London, where you live these days. That's a big change to leave Vera Cruz and end up in London.
It's related to my husband's work. But every three months I traveled back to Mexico. I'm still in charge of the group. People say, but are you going to be doing this for the rest of your lives? That's exactly the way it looks, and I don't mind. I know I have to find my son, and not only my son, because it's not only about him anymore. If I find him and I don't find the others, I'm not going to be happy. I'm not going to be complete. So I have to find them all and or at least continue trying.
Can you give us an update on the status of the investigation of the disappearance of your son, Luis Giermo.
I know things, but justice in Mexico is non existence. They say that the official figure is ninety eight percent impunity. I say it's one hundred because we are like three hundred mothers in the group and maybe a little bit more, and none of those cases has any kind of justice so far. So now I know that my son's workers were involved, but a lot of pieces I'm missing because they've been so neglectful, and I'm on top of the of the investigation all the time, even from here. They
really just did. I make it so hard so that people say, Okay, I give up, I'm done with this, But that's not going to happen. It's my son. How can I say I give up.
Something is going to happen in Mexico this year. That is historic. Mexico will end up having a woman president elected this year. And I'm wondering, have you heard anything from either candidate regarding so Lesito or your son or the disappeared in Mexico.
Not so far. But I mean, we don't get involved in politics. Solesito is so independent. We make our own money. We do a lot of things to collect the money that we need for the searches, raffles bengals, we sell secondhand clothes. We don't want to be attached to any kind of politician because that would let you down eventually, and we cannot be let down anymore. We've been let down by everybody, so that's it that no more.
I appreciate your independent It's really something to admire. Every May tenth Mayo is Mother's Day in Mexico, no matter what day it ends up. You have two other grown adult kids besides Luis Gietmo who disappeared, And I want to know what Mother's Day is like at home for you. Do you celebrate Mother's Day?
For us, Mother's Day, it's just another day for fighting, trying to do something for our missing children, and they're always at the center of all those days. We have the Mother's Day in March.
I just find it so interesting that as a Mexican mom, Mexican Mother's Day has become, as you say, a day of activism and just another day to fight.
Yeah. Like before it meant a present in and maybe a good time, today it means so much more. We don't celebrate anymore. You know, my other kids, if they are in Vera Cruz or Mexico at the time, we get together and we do a little something, but our fight is really the core of everything we do.
Lucy, I thank you so much for spending some time with me on this Mother's Day. I really appreciate it. The and and good luck on your search for Luis gi Erbo and and you know, congratulations on being a grandma. Also because la bida continu.
Lucy Grazia Abrasso.
This episode was produced by Roxanna Guire and edited by Andrea Lopez Cruzado. It was mixed by Julia Caruso. The Latino USA team also includes Victoria Strada, Renaldo Lanoz Junior, Jori mar Marquez, Marta Martinez, Mike Sargent, Nour Saudi, and Nancy Trujuillo. Penilee Ramirez is our co executive producer. Our director of Engineering is Stephanie Lebou. Our marketing manager is Luis Luna. Our theme music was composed by Senia Rubinos. I'm your host and co executive producer Maria Josa. Join
us again on our next episode. In the meantime, I'll see you on all of our social media, which now includes Peek Dog, Instagram, YouTube, tweet, eggs, all of them. I'll see you there and remember yes.
Latino USA is made possible in part by W. K. Kellogg Foundation, a partner with Communities where Children Come First, New York Women's Foundation, the New York Women's Foundation, funding women leaders that build solutions in their communities, and celebrating thirty years of radical generosity and funding for Latino USA's coverage of a culture of health is made possible in part by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation