The Opinions - I Survived a Kidnapping in Mexico. Now I Tell the Stories of Those Who Didn’t.

Episode Date: February 12, 2025

In June 2020, Manuel Bayo Gisbert, a visual anthropologist and artist, was abducted by members of a drug cartel outside of Mexico City. He was beaten, tortured and ultimately released, making him one of the few survivors of kidnappings in Mexico. A crisis of violence and disappearances has plagued the country for decades. In this episode, hear Gisbert tell his own story and how it led him to collect the memories of those who are still missing.Read Gisbert’s essay and see his photos of the survivors and families of the disappeared on nytimes.com.Thoughts? Email us at [e-mail]. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it. My name is Manuel Vajizber. I'm a visual anthropologist, artist and activist living in Mexico. I document cases of enforced disappearance and state terrorism in Mexico. I started doing the work that I do after I was kidnapped in 2020 by a local drug cartel in the outskirts. of Mexico City. On June 4, 2020, my ex-partner and I, we were on a highway outside of Mexico City. We were trying to do some shots for a short film that she was doing.

And I had this bad feeling inside of me. We all know in Mexico that highways are extremely dangerous. And I remember telling her, in this place, women get raped all the time, people get kidnapped all the time, They found bodies in the highway or in the little towns that are adjacent to the highway all the time. So we have to be very careful. And we stopped in a little road that connected to the highway. And while she was doing her thing, I remember just watching my feet and watching the earth and thinking, there's no one here.

So we really have to move. When I lifted my head and looked at the field in front of me, there was four men coming towards us with submachine guns and a large rifle. They stopped right in front of me. They pointed their guns at me. I raised my hands and they ordered us to get in the car. When they put us in the car, they asked for $15,000 of ransom that we had. to ask that to our families. And from that point, I realized that my life was about to change.

They took us to a very lonely place where we got very badly tortured. They me tableron, which here in Mexico, tablear means like, they grabbed this very heavy and tick piece of wood and they hit you on the back as a way of tortures. So my legs and my back was completely bruised when I saw it days later. I got a broken vertebra, a broken rib, a collapsed lung. Two or three hours after they ordered us to get in the car, they stopped torturing us. And they took us back to the car.

And at the end, almost as a miracle, we came out of it alive. Not a lot of the people who are kidnapped get to tell their story or to think about their story. After I lived through it, I realized that violence in Mexico is all reaching. And in order to change it, we have to understand it. And I think a vital part of it is documenting cases and trying to connect those cases and trying to frame those cases in the stream of history. Mexico has a long history of disappearances and violence. Between the 60s and 1990,

the government repressed a number of social movements and guerrillas that were asking for social equality and economic equality. When I talk about guerrillas, I mean armed social movements organized by rural teachers, farmers, or students fighting for social equality. People rose in arms and the government being unable to completely silence the social movements or the guerrillas, they went to get the families of the people who were fighting. So towns got occupied by the army and people were kidnapped. women were raped.

There was this explosion of violence. Then between 1990 and 2006, it was relatively peaceful. But everything changed in 2014 when the government, the local police and the cartels were all involved in the disappearance of 43 students from the school of Ayotzinapa.

Corruption and political violence are endemic in Mexico. Yet this is, single incident, the disappearance of 43 students in the sudden state of Guerrero has galvanized all of this opposition here in the center of Mexico City. In a sense that took out the bail that some people still had and made it clear to all Mexican society that no one was safe.

Many Mexicans have simply had enough. They used to disappearance, they used to murder. But this case, these 43 people, they want the government to find out what happened to the missing students. And when we get to 2018, violence again exploded. Right now, at this very moment, there are 117,000 official cases of missing people, but some activists, human rights organizations, and families of the missing, believe that the real number might be as high as half a million.

When I was freed, I was completely broken. And I was very afraid. Not only because of me, but because of my then partner, because of my dad, because the family of my then partner, I was afraid that they might come back to ghettos. But I also have this very strange feeling that I now have some kind of deeper understanding of where I was standing in, of the land that gave birth to me,

And I always think about it almost as a call. Like I felt called by something. And I started to investigate. I quickly realized that of the 117,000 cases of missing people, there was very few who were able to speak or to be heard by a wider audience. So I tasked myself with finding as many of, of these people as I could and to let their cases be also hers. And I met Tita, Tita Radilla, the daughter of this man in Guerrero, who was taken by the army in the 70s.

She's an activist. She's a human rights defender. She's a human rights defender. and she started to look for her father when no one was looking and started to ask for justice and to ask for him to appear alive when that was almost like something foolish to do because you could get kidnapped or killed yourself. And I listened to tens of cases of her organization. Interview with Maria de Jesus Soriawayo. Okay.

What is the name of your family that was disappeared? Ivan Jan, Carlos, and Varyasori. The name of my son is Jonathan Guadalupe Romero Hill. My daughter, Sophia Lorenz Mendes. And I listened all of these conglomeration of pain, all like a syndicate of pain, that was so tightly and so powerfully contained inside of these people.

My papa is called Abelardo Morales Gerbacio. My brother Minerva Vera Varad I understood

also Trutita that I had to listen in order to heal. She said something aching to

that everyone needs to be heard. Robert Carlos Merina Vanda is my spouse

I'm mom of Gonzalo Garduio Nune Nuis. Javier of Jesus Gonzales

Miranda And all of these families, a part of the justice that they need is to be heard. So I know that they think that this kind of work is very important. It is also very sad from my part and my position that the only thing that we can offer to them is memory. If you analyze the individual cases, sometimes you can say it was, this person, it was this other person. But at the end, if you take a step back and see it all has a network of violence, you realize very quickly that even if an individual person commits an act of violence, it is due to the government allowing it and setting the soil for violence to be fertile

I realize that all of the cases are connected and it's like a web that the Mexican society has to first understand how how violence has transversed across our history, across time in the last 60 years especially, in order for us to be able to change and to start asking for justice and developing justice by yourselves. If you like this show, follow it on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. This show is produced by Derek Arthur, Sophia Alvarez Boyd, Vichaca, Phoebe, Lett, Christina Samuelski, and Jillian Weinberger. It's edited by Kari Pitkin,

Alison Bruzek, and Annie Rose Strasser. Engineering, mixing, and original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker, Carol Saburo, and Afim Shapiro. Additional music by Amin Sahota. The fact check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris. Audience Strategy by Shannon Busta, Christina Samueluski, and Adrian Rivera.

The executive producer of Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Dresser.