“The emergency in the emergency”: The human rights mobilizations against enforced disappearance in Mexico before and during the pandemic era.

Criminal and institutional violence related to the “War on Drugs” has caused since 2006 more than 95 thousand disappearances of women and men in Mexico, with serious consequences in terms of human rights violations and humanitarian crisis. In response to this tragedy and faced with impunity, corruption and negligence of the state authorities, a national human rights movement has arisen, composed mainly by relatives of desaparecidos. Grouped in collectives and associations, the relatives of victims started a cycle of mobilizations against enforced disappearances that lasts until today, during the pandemic era. Their primary goal is the immediate and effective search for the disappeared ones through advocacy and lobbying; the civic monitoring over public investigations; the creation of networks and alliances at local, national, and international level with other social and institutional actors; non-violent public protest demonstrations such as marches, sit-in in front of institutional buildings, occupation of the prosecutor’s offices and press conferences. The objective of this contribution is to highlight the main characteristics and differences regarding the contentious issues, strategies and methods of protest used by the movement before and during the context characterized by the spreading of Covid-19. I argue that the measures of containment of the epidemiological emergency and the restrictions of the mobility forced the movement to change some strategies and forms of protest, for example by making massive use of social media and “digital demonstrations”, but, at the same time, they have not stopped the thirst for justice and truth. I show that the political and social effects of these measures and the development of the virus implied a worsening of the status of the relatives of desaparecidos, whose psychological, emotional, and economic conditions were already widely compromised by the forced disappearance of their loved one. Based on interviews to the relatives of victims, public reports, news, and movements’ press releases, this paper aims also to analyse the relationship between the movement and the Mexican state during the developing of the human rights cycle of protest.