Honor the dead, honor the living

In these holy days, we remember our dead, relatives and friends, to whom we dedicate a flowery altar, a visit to the cemetery or a silent dialogue. This year we also remember those who lost their lives due to the scourge of Covid-19, the increase in heart and respiratory diseases in 2020 and 2021, or due to the extreme and criminal violence that continues its devastating course.

Honoring the dead is not laughing at death even though it dances in popular imagery and confetti, food, flowers and candle flames shine on altars. Honoring those who will come, following the light of the candles and the cempasuchil petals, is both a celebration and recollection, mourning. Celebration of their lives, acknowledgment of the mark they left on ours, sorrow for those who left too soon or whose lives this brutal Mexico cruelly cut short. In different regions, cultures and families of the country, traditions persist, resignify or transform according to various rites and beliefs; they are updated in new generations that give them meaning and make them their own.

Although, unlike other countries, in Mexico the representations of death, in sugar skulls, tilica calacas and elegant catrinas, are part of the imaginary and our daily life, the “laughing at death” that is attributed to the “Mexican ” does not imply a trivialization of it. Those who see the popular celebration as just a “fiesta” are mistaken and since 2015 they have transformed it into a mass spectacle, a tourist attraction, a folklore that blurs the deep sense of tradition.

Exalting Mexican “resilience” in the face of death, repeating the sung “challenges” to the lady with the scythe is perhaps a strategy of resistance in the face of the horror of death, or a gesture of black humor to shake off the specter. The preservation of culture and family memory, the recollection or the colorful celebration of these days have a particular personal, family or community meaning that must be respected.

In contrast, ignoring, minimizing or laughing at the death of others and others in massacres, femicides and pandemics is a lack of respect for the living and the dead that denotes disconnection with the painful reality hidden by giant catrinas and decorated skulls. That is the unfortunate attitude that the federal and local governments have assumed in the face of the enormous loss of human life derived from Covid-19 and the incessant lethal wave that plagues our society.

Who expected that, like others, the Mexican government would honor the people who died in two years of the pandemic, the health personnel who, in often precarious conditions, gave their lives to save others, or who would at least acknowledge the pain of their families? , has been met with an indifference bordering on cynicism. Who cares, the authorities seem to think, more than half a million excess deaths, from Covid-19 and from the lack of attention to other diseases under the guise of the pandemic? Who cares about 4,000 deaths among health personnel? Or the more than 35,000 people killed in 2021? Or that 520 people perished at the criminal hands last week? To the evident negligence during confinement, to the continuous rise in violent deaths, it has followed the same strategy of downplaying the urgent, maintaining a deceptive discourse, protecting irresponsible officials and promising improvements that will never come.

Minutes of silence or words of comfort would be useless. If they did not know how to honor our dead, the rulers should at least honor those who, in life, need decent health services, well-paid jobs, hospitals without shortages of supplies and equipment, affordable medicines; citizen security in the streets, justice.

Given the brutality of death in Mexico, the spectacularization of the catrinas is a sinister masquerade.