“México Is a Burial Machine”: A Conversation with Marcela Turati

Zenia Yébenes

Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Unidad Cuajimalpa

zyebenes@cua.uam.mx

Rodrigo Parrini-Roses

Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Unidad Xochimilco

rparrini@correo.xoc.uam.mx

Edited and translated by Lindsay Smith and María Torres

Abstract

How can we conceptualize and investigate the relationships between territories and the production of situated knowledge in the field of violence? This interview addresses this question and attempts to outline some possible strategies, based on the experience of a Mexican journalist. Marcela Turati’s 2023 book San Fernando: Última parada allows us to talk about the ways in which borders constitute complex nodes of human, economic, political, and criminal flows, where diverse ecologies, landscapes, territories, and social practices intersect. The violence recounted in her book shows how these nodes are also devices for selecting vulnerable or disposable people, who can be killed or disappeared without the state pursuing those responsible or seeking justice, what Turati calls “an authorized crime.”

Resumen

¿Cómo pensar e investigar las relaciones entre los territorios y la producción de conocimiento situado en el campo de la violencia? Esta entrevista aborda esta pregunta e intenta esbozar algunas posibilidades y estrategias a partir de la experiencia de una periodista mexicana. El libro San Fernando: Última parada, publicado en 2023, permite hablar sobre las maneras en que las fronteras constituyen nodos complejos de flujos humanos, económicos, políticos y criminales, donde se entrecruzan ecologías, paisajes, territorios y prácticas sociales diversas. La violencia que se relata en el libro muestra cómo esos nodos son también dispositivos de selección de personas vulnerables o desechables, que pueden ser asesinadas o desaparecidas sin que el Estado persiga a los responsables ni haga justicia. A lo anterior, la periodista le llama “un crimen autorizado.”

Keywords

México, violence, disappearance, journalism, forensic anthropology, justice

Introduction

Marcela Turati is one of the most prominent investigative journalist analyzing violence, disappearance, and impunity in México. Her writing is critical to our understanding of what happened in México during the guerra contra el narco (the war against Narco), a conflict that began in 2007 with the use of the Mexican armed forces to combat narcotrafficking and continues to this day. It is difficult to comprehend the Mexican borderlands in their lived reality without understanding how this conflict has shaped every aspect of life and public infrastructure.

Turati’s latest book, San Fernando: Última parada (2023), is the result of 12 years of research on the city of San Fernando in Tamaulipas, 85 miles from the Mexican border with Texas. San Fernando came to public attention after the 2010 discovery of a massacre of 72 migrants, mostly Central Americans, in an abandoned bodega close to the city. Eight months later, dozens of additional graves were identified containing more than 193 cadavers, the majority of which had been passengers on buses—many of them migrants about to reach the United States, who were detained and murdered in San Fernando by a cell of the Zetas cartel supported by the municipal police.

Turati shows how the city of San Fernando became an obligatory passage point to reach the United States via the east coast of México, one of the most important migratory routes of the last decade. The city’s strategic location transformed it into a node of power for local cartels and space of death of migrants, displaced populations, and young, working-class people, not only in the case of the spectacular massacres of migrants in 2010 and 2012, but in the everyday disappearances of people who traveled through. In her book, she describes this not as organized crime but as crimen autorizado (authorized crime), a type of systemic violence that fuses state and criminal actors.

This conversation (excerpted, translated, and edited for clarity) took place on August 11, 2024. It was part of a broader project titled “The Politics of Darkness: Narratives of Violence in Contemporary México”, a research collaboration between Zenia Yébenes and Rodrigo Parrini-Roses.

Conversation Excerpt

Zenia Yébenes (ZY): Your book is made up of very powerful scenes. There are some that hit me more than others. The division into two parts especially caught my attention. The first is the raw part, and the second, although not without rawness, has glimpses of something different. How do you think and elaborate the relationship between writing and experience? Is there a border between the two?

Marcela Turati (MT): I have written a lot about San Fernando. We created the #Másde72 collective as a result of noticing that it was not only the massacre of the seventy-two migrants. It was indeed about distinct massacres. Before that we had the 72migrantes.com project. It was a great help to publish our findings regularly. However, I have the feeling that in all those years I lost information, that I forgot things, because in all the changes of cities and houses I lost notebooks. Along with what I didn’t remember, there was also what I hadn’t seen. I started to make a database of what I already had, and, in the end, I realized that I had identical databases that I had forgotten.

At some point, I asked myself how I would be able to write the book after having published so much. I needed to tell the story in a different way. So I decided that I would like the readers to listen to the protagonist, not just their testimony. But it was necessary to intervene in their story, to add in parentheses what the interviewees were doing and, in the meantime, let them speak.

To decide on the structure, I would stick Post-it notes on the wall with titles like “the lady,” “the daughter,” “the undertaker.” Soon, it seemed to me that this chorus of voices looked like a lotería (lottery). I began to select testimonies—some I left long, others I included as a chorus—and I began to realize that, for example, this story could have happened on this bus as well as on any other. If it looked too similar to another testimony, I began making selections: moving, removing, and adding.

The first part of the book situated the territory of San Fernando, a space unknown to most people. Those who read the story are surprised by the description of the place. “Had we known, we would have better understood the bodies we were digging up,” the forensics experts working there who read the book told me. There was a stigma around thinking that it was a territory inhabited by bad people (los malos), but what about the people who lived there? How did they live? For me, it was a watershed moment to enter Tamaulipas. It is impossible to tell this story from México City. But not only that, I needed to look for the voices so that the story could be told by those who in a film are considered extras—those who exhume the graves, the citizens who watch in silence, the silenced journalists, the soldiers who are on the roads—but who have a lot of information.

ZY: It strikes me that when you start the book you say that your soul was unleashed.

MT: I said, “my soul was left in a checkpoint.” And that came out because I also felt like a zombie on returning from San Fernando to see the freshly exhumed bodies piled up in the morgue, but I decided to write in spite of it. For me, it was one of my best stories. What I saw was very hard, as if those dead were talking to me. Later someone gave me a USB with photographs of 120 (of the 196) exhumed bodies. Since I saw those images, something happened to me, but it still took me two years to open and study them. I was covering a lot of topics. I had the feeling as a journalist that someone was going to beat me to it, someone else was going to have the story and publish it before me, but I didn’t feel strong enough to write about it. I didn’t know how to tell it in a news story; there was so much cruelty towards those bodies. I knew from that moment that I needed to tell it in a book.

When I went to San Fernando, I didn’t know anyone. There was a gringo reporter and local reporters. I didn’t know where I was going to stay or which hotel. Then, that colleague said to me, “Hey, do you want to go to the bus terminal?” We went and suddenly he was gone. There were only men, like pandilleros (gang members), that were doing nothing, watching everyone who arrived, I remember that. And I started to feel bad. But I still didn’t know what was going on in that place, but I started to feel a pain in my belly and in the nape of my neck. Later I learned that those points on the body are the site of the three F’s: fight, flight, or freeze, the [place] of survival. I didn’t know if I should go or stay. Later, I learned that my body was telling me to go, that in that bus terminal people had disappeared.

Rodrigo Parrini-Roses (RPR): San Fernando could be the last, but also the first stop. There is something inaugural in all this, such as the creation of logistics and certain procedures that later spread and came to occupy the territory in México and Central America. With this book, you will find keys to doing research on violence in México, beyond journalism.

MT: San Fernando made me understand things. It’s a “taken” place and a model of how [organized crime] takes over communities. People who work in mining territories have written to me and told me, “What you say in your book is heavy. What can we do to prevent them from taking over here? Because that’s how they started here too and they are following the same steps.”

With the research I understood the importance of understanding the territory, the routes, the ports, the geography, the lakes, the border. This is a fight for territory and for control of the economy and the people who live there. They are considered a source of income, a type of background scenery in which everyone is an ATM, from which [the cartel] is constantly extracting money (extortion, charging for each passing migrant or car, kidnapping) and using as example of punishment. The territory and the roads are fundamental. Drugs are not the principal business, but rather the control of the roads, but to have a route. That is why it is important to cover up the violence, so that people do not know what is happening.

RPR: I think your book is not just about the history of San Fernando but about violence in contemporary México, even if you don’t address other places. However, you describe a kind of technology of violence that is replicated in other places: family collectives, drug traffickers, corrupt officials, broken state apparatuses, morgues that do not work, buses, roads. It is as if it were a scene, an abstract map of which San Fernando would be a singular example of something larger and systematic.

MT: Well, I also think that in San Fernando, I found clues that suggested that some people who had disappeared were victims of forced recruitment. First, I didn’t understand very well the camps that people said existed, and there was a lack of information there. We are sure that they did not take them off the buses to kill them, but that they also needed them to grow their armies and maintain their wars. I also began to understand that finding a clandestine mass grave does not mean that they are no longer disappeared; there is the risk that the state will disappear and hide bodies. They will bury them in a collective grave in some cemetery, and no one will ever identify them. I came to understand that everyone is culpable. That’s why the subtitle of the book is “a visit to authorized crime,” because this doesn’t happen without authorization. How are these disappearances and massacres possible? How do these institutions operate? The same institutions that do not prevent the disappearances along these highways, that do not protect the public, that don’t fight against those that disappear others, that exhume bodies and then disappear people again, that do not investigate forensic malpractices despite the existence of a recommendation from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights on what to do with the bodies after the ruling on femicides of Campo Algodonero.¹ We remain the same: the same type of violence, the “historical truths” that are invented to close cases,² the scapegoats that they grab and present as ones responsible.

The migrant issue is also very interesting…because they were at least two independent groups that had access to the investigation in San Fernando.³ You could peer through the cracks and see how the whole system operates: that it doesn’t protect you, it doesn’t search for you, and if it does find you, it disappears you again. It rarely happens in México that independent external experts are allowed to review official investigations. In all the emblematic cases like Tamaulipas, Ayotzinapa, Cadereyta,⁴ you find the same structure: the Attorney General of the Republic, its area of organized crime and expert witnesses, which work together to hide the violence and end up hiding the bodies.

RPR: In your book there is a phrase that made a great impression on me: “México is a burial machine.” It is a very powerful expression, but also very disturbing and fundamental in terms of what is happening now and the story that could be told.

MT: We did a series with Quinto Elemento Lab in 2021, “Forensic Crisis,” where we tried to explain different dimensions of this crisis. In one of the articles, written jointly with Efraín Tzuc, we talk about the death trailers, the corpses they lose in the morgues, how the forensic medical services operate with so few personnel, and how, in the end, they bury every unidentified body in mass graves. Every month, in any part of México, they send a person to the mass grave. They do not even make the minimum effort to investigate; the corpses go to the community burial site because there is no room and it is necessary to make space. This is the pattern. They dig, exhume, and bury again.

RPR: When writing about violence, it is as if it were necessary to return to something that was not only in the order of pure violence, of loss, of helplessness. That seems to me to be behind the text, but it is not obvious, because I think it would not make sense to put it there if it comes up in the conversation. I mention it not because it needs to be unraveled. What I see is a clue, if not for restorative justice, then for restorative rituals. Souls should be repaired without trying to spiritualize this process. It is as if you could not or did not want to stay with that alone.

MT: I wanted the end of my book to be a memorial with all the names of the people I know who have disappeared in San Fernando, on those roads. But I couldn’t mention every name we collected because the Procuraduría General de la República (Attorney General’s Office of the Republic) could put me in jail. We had been compiling names from files of the disappeared for years. We had more than three hundred names. And at the end, I was going to reproduce a list, but I could not. Also, because I did not know who had already been found. My wish is that a truth commission is set up and we can name all those who are missing, who have not yet been found, or those who were murdered. We know that not all the names will be there, but some of them will be. To name them and make them visible so that the families know that somewhere their dead matter.

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