MEXICO CITY — The government of Mexico’s president has accused the press and volunteers who search for bodies of missing people of “necrophilia,” comments that sparked criticism this week.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is known for insulting people he considers opponents. But a pre-recorded segment prepared by state television that aired Wednesday at its morning news conference used unusually crude language.
He accused journalists and volunteer searchers of suffering “a delirium of necrophilia” for having reported on an alleged clandestine crematorium on the outskirts of Mexico City.
Authorities have denied that human remains have been found there, and López Obrador has often suggested that any reports of rampant violence in Mexico are a politically motivated attack against him. Necrophilia is a term used to describe the erotic attraction to corpses.
The attack appeared aimed at Ceci Flores, who has spent much of the last decade searching for the bodies of her two missing children without much help from the government. Flores announced the discovery of the alleged crematorium last week; She has long accused the government of ignoring the plight of Mexicans due to the more than 100,000 missing people in the country.
“When would you imagine a president using the full power of government to portray a mother searching for her children as the enemy?” Flores said Wednesday night.
“If someone is delusional, it’s them, they have ‘necrophobia’, they prefer not to see the dead, not to see the missing and ignore the painful reality,” he said.
López Obrador’s spokesman and his press office did not respond to requests for comment on whether the statement in the video reflected his personal thinking. But the president has regularly called those who complain about gang-fueled violence in Mexico “vultures” or people “trying to profit from the pain.”
In fact, his administration has spent much more time searching for people falsely listed as missing (who may have returned home without notifying authorities) than it has searching for graves that their families say they desperately need to close.
Maybe Flores was wrong about the clandestine crematorium. He said his team had found bones, clandestine graves and identification cards around a charred well on the southern outskirts of the city. City prosecutors said the bones belonged to dogs and that the people whose ID cards were found there had discarded them or had them stolen, and were alive.
But drug cartels in northern Mexico, where Flores is from, often use these burn sites and clandestine graves, and she and other “search mothers” have found many of these sites and reported them to authorities.
Just this week, prosecutors in Flores’ home state of Sonora confirmed that they had identified 45 missing people among 57 sets of remains at a body dump known as “El Choyudo” that was originally discovered by Flores’ group, Las Seeking Mothers of Sonora. .
“Seeking mothers” typically do not try to condemn anyone for the disappearances of their relatives. They say they just want to find his remains. Many families say that not having definitive knowledge of a family member’s fate is worse than knowing that a loved one has died.
The Mexican government has spent little time searching for the missing, so volunteers conduct their own searches for clandestine graves where cartels hide their victims, often acting on anonymous tips and plunging steel rods into the ground to detect the smell of decomposition.
At least seven volunteer searchers have been killed in Mexico since 2021.
More than any debate about Flores’ record, Wednesday’s comments at the president’s briefing appeared to reflect the president’s angry response to anything he perceives as criticism.
Montserrat Tula, a Mexico City resident, was concerned about the comments at the president’s press conference.
“There is no justification under any circumstances for using such disrespectful and insulting language,” Tula said, adding that the pre-recorded segments of his press conferences “are used, for the most part, to carry out some form of online persecution.” against anyone who commits anything.” journalism.”
The necrophilia comments appeared in one of the president’s weekly segments known as “Who’s Who in Lies,” in which a spokesperson attacks press coverage that the president believes is unfairly biased against him. But much of the president’s own press conferences almost every day are devoted to attacking journalists, accusing them of being part of a conspiracy and even questioning how much they earn.
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