#FueronLosFederales

I hope by now, people know what happened to Carmen Aristegui a few months ago. Some of us have been fighting for spaces of free speech and trying to at least, raise our discontent. Yesterday night I was trying to reach the online portal that kept her team publishing information from matters that no one dares to cover in Mexico.

After the cached site directed me towards it, all I got was: Unavailable... O.K. I waited for a bit and tried again. Wait, what? Unavailable? What's going on? A quick search led me to Twitter, then to YouTube, then to the rest of the smaller media that are trying to cover relevant news happening in Mexico. For a minute I thought Tlatlaya was being discussed. Tlatlaya, a matter I wanted to reflect upon because looking at an image of soldiers involved in this massacre, I thought of El Salvador, of countries from Central America, of far away lands that have dictators and impune mass murders. Of Trujillo ruling nations where "presidents" end up becoming a caricature of decay and tacky pompousness. 

What's become of my country? Colleges are emptied if our president wants to make a speech in his former college. Fiction on top of surreal is emerging every week just to keep the historical truth afloat.

Sadness  about my country sometimes overcomes me, specially in these beautiful, blue skied days. Jacarandas are blooming everywhere and a teasing spring heat seduces my senses with a happy laissez faire.

#FueronLosFederales is the presumed reason Aristegui Noticias is down, just after they published this note, [DDos] attacks have been reported on their website.

I sigh. Look at the horizon. I endure the notes as I watch or read and listen to these vile events on this plaza in Apatzingán or any other Mexican plazas I've been before as a kid, licking on an ice-cream while my dad was paving roads somewhere around. Stains with rivers of blood along cries of children at night silenced by gunshots is all I see and hear now.

I can draw a lot of conjectures but one thing is for sure. Students, farmers, fruit and vegetable pickers, cattle raisers, journalists, women and men protecting their families are getting killed.

As Vargas Llosa wrote about his fictional Trujillo and the media:

“He undressed and, wearing slippers and a robe, went to the bathroom to shave. He turned on the radio. They read the newspapers on the Dominican Voice and Caribbean Radio. Until a few years ago the news bulletins had begun at five. But when his brother Petan, the owner of the Dominican Voice, found out that he woke at four, he moved the newscasts up an hour. The other stations followed suit. They knew he listened to the radio while he shaved, bathed, and dressed, and they were painstakingly careful.”