Mexico’s ‘anti-monuments’ force country to remember its missing

Their faces gaze from banners on street corners, in trendy neighborhoods and roughshod barrios. Their eyes watch from gas stations and toll booths. On Mexico City’s central Paseo de la Reforma, an entire roundabout has been taken over by family members begging for help to find their missing loved ones. In cities from Monterrey to Mérida, the missing loom large, a constant, ever-present reminder of a crisis that has overtaken the nation.

More than 100,000 people have disappeared in Mexico, a staggering human rights catastrophe. A combination of soaring cartel violence and government impunity has left tens of thousands of people unaccounted for, many of them dead and buried in unmarked graves, others kidnapped and forced to work for organized crime.

But while they may be missing, they are ever-present in cities across the country, changing the urban fabric as relatives and activists demand help in the face of government inaction through murals, posters, statues, blockades and tent encampments.

Related: ‘Disappearing the disappeared’: outcry after Mexico reduces number of missing

The phenomenon is perhaps most palpable in Mexico City, seat of the country’s political power. In recent years, the statues of great heroes from Mexico’s past that line Paseo de la Reforma have been joined by a new set of public monuments created by an underground collective of artists, activists, engineers and architects to draw attention to the extraordinary acts of violence sweeping the nation.

The first such anti-monument, as they are known, was set up in 2015 marking what remains Mexico’s most devastating case of disappearance: the forced disappearance of 43 student teachers from the Ayotzinapa rural teachers’ college at the hands of a crime faction working with local and federal authorities. The anti-monument of a giant red 43 remains a painful reminder of violence and impunity in Mexico, particularly given that the case remains unsolved.

Related: A Mexican town celebrates even as it mourns the victims of forced disappearance: ‘There’s still this emptiness’

This week marks the 10th anniversary of the mass vanishing, which has become a thorn in the side of Andrés Manuél López Obrador. The president, who leaves office at the end of the month, had vowed to solve the case and even created a special truth commission to investigate the students’ disappearance, but little significant progress has been made in solving one of Mexico’s most horrifying crimes.

According to one of the activists behind the anti-monument who gave only his codename, Juan, the idea for the monument was not just about drawing government attention to the 43 missing students but also the tens of thousands of other missing people in Mexico – hence the inclusion of a plus sign next to the number. And unlike a speech or a rally, he said, an anti-monument is built to last – until such time as justice is served.

“With a poster, with a slogan, with a banner, it’s very easy for them to fade away,” said Juan. “But to represent that absence as a three-dimensional object makes it so that it can’t fade away, it’s not something ephemeral.”

On the 26th of each month, parents of the missing students march through Mexico City to mark the anniversary of the mass disappearance. Along the way, they stop at the anti-monument to read out the names of their missing sons, marking another month without their children.

The anti-monument “is so the government doesn’t forget”, said Cristina Bautista, whose son Benjamín was among the 43 who disappeared that night. “We can never forget our children. For us as mothers, they are always present.”

Valentina Rozas-Krause, assistant professor of architecture and design at Adolfo Ibáñez University in Chile, said that these kinds of anti-monuments were a powerful way for citizens to reappropriate public spaces and counter official narratives.

“If the state has been silencing these deaths or if the disappearances haven’t been investigated, you can say, no, they’re not forgotten, this is not closed, we will not rest until they’re back or until we know what happened.”

A few hundred feet from the 43 sculpture on Paseo de la Reforma, family members and activists have pasted faces of their missing loved ones all over a set of bollards, creating another ad-hoc anti-monument to the disappeared.

One of the faces is of a young man, Jhonatan Guadalupe Romero Gil , a lawyer, who was 25 when he was abducted by police in 2018 along with a friend in the city of Acapulco. His friend’s body was found the next day, but Jhonatan has not been seen since. His mother Socorro has spent the last six years searching, begging for help from the police and prosecutors, but has received no answers.

Related: Can Mexico’s 43 missing students get justice at last – or will politics prevail?

“It’s been hell, truly,” she said. “There were days that I didn’t sleep, I stayed inside all day crying. I wanted to die.”

Like many mothers in Mexico, Socorro took matters into her own hands, even going out into the field searching for her son’s body. In 2023, she found a grave with 17 corpses. None were her son. Now she travels the country and even the world with her little posters, putting them up everywhere from Mexico City to Venice.

“I want to think that he’ll see one of the posters one day,” she said through tears. “Or that the people who took him away will see a poster, take pity and tell me where he is.”

Reporting for this story was supported by the Alicia Patterson Foundation