[Warning: Contains some descriptions of violence and physical harm]
A few weeks ago the world briefly turned its collective gaze towards Mexico, my country, due to the violence unleashed after the Army took down Nemesio ‘El Mencho’ Oseguera Cervantez, the secretive leader of one of the most powerful criminal organizations in the world—the ‘Jalisco Nueva Generación’ cartel.
Burning vehicles and military helicopters circling over tourist resorts in Puerto Vallarta, make for exciting TV footage for the 8 o’clock news. But what was largely missing from the international coverage, are the more subtle ways in which cartel violence has festered into the everyday life in vast regions of Mexico.
Perhaps there is no more insidious form of this gang brutality, than in the incredibly large numbers of civilians who are officially considered ‘missing’ by Mexican authorities, after their families report their disappearance to the police under circumstances directly or indirectly linked to cartel activities.
Missing individuals are, in many ways, the most convenient form of crime for authorities that are more eager to look the other way, instead of fixing the problem of insecurity; because a missing person can be easily swept ‘under the rug’ of official statistics, which conceal under dry arithmetic the alarming rise of citizens who end up vanishing without a trace. In the last 25 years there have been over 130,000 disappearances and counting; with most of those reports coming (unsurprisingly) from States like Jalisco, with a heavy cartel presence.
Enough men, women and children to fill up the Azteca stadium (one of the future venues for the coming World Cup). But the human mind gets used to these morbid spreadsheets of anonymous tragedies—the same way the American society has gotten used to the news of yet-another mass shooting—and without a bloody corpse lying on the street which would bring the attention of the media, eventually what was once a unique person with a life full of dreams and aspirations gets reduced to a simple name, filed under and endless list that few bother to read.
Contrary to popular assumptions, the men and women whose names end up enlarging the statistics of deaths and disappearances in Mexico were not themselves involved in any illegal wrong-doings—though the authorities prefer it if the public assumes they were, because they then can whitewash the violence as mere ‘score-settling’ between the gangs, giving an illusory sense of immunity to the ‘law-abiding citizens’. There are all sorts of innocent people who can go ‘missing’ in Mexico: Young women who get sexually trafficked; young men who get ‘enrolled’ by the cartels under false pretenses (many are responding to phony job offers posted on social media); illegal immigrants from South or Central America, trying to reach the mirage of the American dream with barely anything on their backs; store owners, small business people—even cab drivers— who refuse to pay ‘protection’. The list goes on and on, but one common denominator is that most of the people who tend to go missing are economically lower-class, blue-collar workers whose disappearance does not land on the front page of any newspaper—because they are, quite simply, nobodies.
Nobodies. No-Bodies. In George Orwell’s famous dystopia, Nineteen Eighty-Four, enemies of the State were condemned to ‘vaporization’: a term that indicated the subject would be wiped from all public records, as if they had never existed at all. The Mexican dystopia is not as efficient, and thus the missing ones leave almost no physical trace, except for a few meager possessions and photographs kept in old albums or modern cellphones. The more lasting track the disappeared ones leave in this world is in the memories of those who are still searching for them. Even a ‘nobody’ is somebody to someone who misses them.
Hence, a grassroots movement has emerged in this country in the last few decades, which challenges both the indifference of the government and the wrath of the cartels, by doing what the authorities are unwilling or incapable of, due to fear or complicity: searching for the whereabouts of those lost souls—be they either alive… or dead.
In Mexico these groups are largely known as ‘madres buscadoras’ (searching mothers) because—as the name implies—they mostly consist of women looking for one (or more) of their children. A searching mother will start her quest by putting up posters on the streets with the face of their missing loved one, and after exhausting whatever meager legal avenues are at their disposal, they will eventually join a collective of other searching parents that regularly trek across the desolate countryside (usually after receiving an anonymous tip) trying to locate one of the thousands of clandestine mass graveyards peppering the lands controlled by the Narcos, where they unceremoniously dump the bodies of all those unfortunate to cross their path; usually, after brutally torturing them.
A searching mother will often end her quest in two ways: Either she will finally obtain forensic proof that the remains found during one of those searching expeditions belonged to the person(s) they were looking for—which will transform the searing pain of Uncertainty to the dull grief of Closure—or she herself might end up joining the statistics of missing people; the risk of attracting too much attention to the affairs of those who prefer to remain in the shadows. Who would have thought ‘missingness’ could be contagious?
This is the actual face of the cartel violence in Mexico that seems to never end, no matter how many drug lords like ‘El Mencho’ or ‘El Chapo’ they get rid of. A reality that is downplayed by politicians, and is commonly overlooked by Hollywood when they make films or TV shows about Mexico with that shitty yellow filter they like so much. But it is this crude reality what Mexican author Alma Delia Murillo decided to portray in her latest novel, “Raíz que no desaparece” (Root That Is Not Missing).
A great human tragedy, but why are you reading about all this on a website like The Daily Grail, you might be asking (if I haven’t lost you already with my longish introduction)? Turns out Murillo’s novel, while being a work of fiction based on real events, highlights an aspect about the search for missing people that should be of great interest to our readers: Premonitory dreams as an active asset in the toolkit of the searching mothers.
Murillo first learned about the premonitions while accompanying one of the collectives during a searching expedition: the parents confided with the writer and told her they would sometimes dream of their missing children, and those dreams sometimes contained specific clues about their whereabouts—a certain overlooked spot in a field, and abandoned ranch, or something else which in retrospect showed a level of accuracy beyond mere coincidence.
Sometimes those dreams would give the mothers the certainty that they were no longer seeking a living person, but a corpse. The distinction between premonitory dreams and spirit communication becomes blurry.
One of the women, for example, ‘saw’ her daughter in a dream wearing a dress with a pattern of butterflies; some time later the young woman’s body was finally found (showing signs of strangulation) wearing the same dress.
In the late 1970s groups of individuals with esoteric inclinations in the UK conducted what was later known as ‘psychic quests’: Expeditions through the British landscape—so rich with centuries of history, much of it violent one might add—in search of relics or alleged magical items using dreams, visions and ‘channeled’ materials as guidelines. Graham Phillips’s The Green Stone is perhaps one of the most popular books on the subject.
The searching mothers of Mexico are not looking for Excalibur or the lost tomb of Merlin, but based on Murillo’s novel and the interviews she’s given to explain its inception, it is not preposterous to acknowledge these parents’ quest does indeed contain a strong psychic component.
Regular visitors to this website wouldn’t find this surprising. After all, parapsychologists such as Dean Radin (whom we interviewed not too long ago) have long noted how trauma plays a significant role in either triggering or boosting latent psychic abilities which seem to be present in all humans—the veritable ‘crack of the cosmic egg’ through suffering. If PSI experiments yield such incipient results under controlled laboratory conditions, Radin has explained to nay-sayers ad nauseam, it is because experimenters are bound by ethical protocols not to put their test subjects in any real danger—like that faced by the searching mothers on a daily basis in a country like Mexico.
The other key component in Murillo’s novel came to her serendipitously—as these things usually do—when a different tragedy unfolded in the Mexican news: in 2022 a palm tree that for over a century had adorned one of the most emblematic avenues in Mexico City (the Reforma roundabout) began to wither and die; the result of a plague combined with climate change and poor urban management. The new leftist government took the opportunity to replace the palm with a willow tree, which is more endemic to Mexico (the Aztecs called these trees ‘ahuehuetes’); never mind that such plants require a lot of water to thrive and Mexico’s capital has been suffering a water crisis for decades—the ironic fate of a city that was once built in the middle of a lake.
With much fanfare the city officials planted the new adult willow where the centennial palm tree once stood; but to their dismay their ahuehuete began to wilt and lose its color. It was plainly obvious this tree was dying too, despite the repeated assurances from government botanists who kept insisting it was just ‘adapting’ to its new surroundings. To cover the embarrassing decay of the willow, the city planners ended up putting up a metal wall to shield it from public view. The collectives of searching mothers hijacked the wall in the roundabout, and turned it into what they called an ‘anti-monument’ by pasting posters of their missing loved ones all around it.
The dying willow tree became a symbol of the government’s apathy against crime. What they wanted to remain concealed was revealed into the open.
But what if it was more than an unfortuitous circumstance, Murillo thought? What if Nature itself was somehow expressing its dismay over the unanswered crimes of the countless missing?
Leaving aside ‘woo-woo’ notions of omens or even curses, how does a tree biochemically react if human bodies that have suffered extreme violence are buried nearby? Murillo started to wonder while preparing her manuscript. Would these silent witnesses to the barbarity of men—which are not mere living machines, but complex beings capable of interacting with their environment and other organisms in ways our modern science is just starting to grasp— be able to reveal their secrets to those willing to listen?
“Root That Is Not Missing” does indeed portray the trees as discrete allies of the searching mothers in their battle against oblivion. Dream Quests and Nature Guides, does that sound familiar?
Alma Delia Murillo’s is not just a book about ‘magical realism’ but a book about Magic itself, without even using the very word; something I had the opportunity of mentioning to her in person during a recent book signing, in which I also showed her the artwork that illustrates this review. She agreed with my assessment (she also liked my drawings) and added that our modern society should do well in exploring these uncharted waters of human potential, which nowadays have only caught the attention of Intelligence services like the US Stargate program (which is even briefly mentioned in one of the chapters).
There are other habits in the lives of searching mothers that have the whiff of ritualistic magic; in some cases in a rather literal sense, since one of the manual tools used during searching expeditions is a metal cross-shaped rod, which is first driven into the ground where a mass grave is suspected, and then later is extracted and placed closed to the nose so the smell of decay can be detected. Reading this in the novel reminded me of a morbid version of dowsing, in which the prospector is looking for a well of death instead of water.
Other rituals are less gruesome. Many of the mothers told Murillo they keep writing letters to their missing loved ones, as both a coping mechanism for grief and a strategy to combat the erosion of memory. Almost as if it were an immunological response to the anguish inflicted by the absence of their missing children, some of the women Murillo interviewed for the book ended up developing Alzheimer’s; which is another reason she felt compelled to write her novel, in order to keep the memory of those absent ones alive—the final pages of the book are filled with a long list of names of real missing individuals, along with the date when they disappeared and the State of the Republic where they were last seen.
Trees turned into paper, which is then turned into books, that seed the memory of the missing children in the minds of countless readers. Is that not another form of Plant Magic?
Tragedies like that of the searching mothers of Mexico are, sadly, quite common in Latin America. During the 1970s, the military regime in Argentina (which was backed by the CIA) disappeared thousands of civilians, which triggered the emergence of the popular movement known as “Las madres de la Plaza de Mayo” (the Mothers of May Plaza), which fought the silence of officialdom with nothing but courage and the banging of cooking pots.
During those years, sometimes the Argentinian authorities went so far as to tell the women enquiring on the whereabouts of their children or husbands that they were crazy, those individuals had never existed and they had just made them all up in their minds—South America has a better knack for ‘vaporization’, it seems…
In 1983 Argentinian musician Carlos Cano composed the song “El tango de las madres locas” (The Tango of the Mad Mothers) in honor of the women who were ‘crazy’ enough to defy the dictators and refused to forget.
Paying attention to dreams and the omens of Nature, like the fictional characters in Murillo’s novel—and the real women who inspired the book—may also seem like madness. But faced with a reality that overcomes fiction, in a country that is slowly turning into a massive clandestine graveyard, ‘irrationality’ seems the only path left.
When your child goes missing and years or even decades go by, left-brain logic would dictate that the ‘sensible’ thing to do would be to give up and move on with your life. But as one might conclude after reading Alma Delia Murillo’s novel, there may be no greater madness among humans to begin with than becoming a mother—risking the integrity of your own body, and for what? To bring another innocent life into this fucked-up world of ours??
Madness. Pure lunacy.
…And yet I’m typing these words right now on my computer, and you’re reading them on your screen, because two women chose not to be ‘rational’: your mother, and mine.
The right-brained madness of motherhood defies the very nature of left-brain thinking, by making the mother risk everything for her children. Which may be the reason why the Mother is also the most powerful magical symbol of all. My very own nation, Mexico, was founded under the banner of motherhood, in the form of the Virgin of Guadalupe—the Christianized version of Tonantzin, the Aztec mother goddess of Earth and Fertility.
And if you mess with her children? Whoo boy lookout—Tonantzin might just morph into her chthonian form Coatlicue, the monster mother with vipers instead of arms.
Mothers *can* found or topple entire nations. This is the secret our ‘rational’ authorities don’t want us to remember. They don’t want us to realize the best way to save us from the cold brutality of criminal violence (or any form of authoritarian barbarity) is with the irrationality that makes you refuse to forget, hold a banner or bang a cooking pot, and shout to the top of your lungs in front of the men holding bayonets or AK-47s: “¡Vivos se los llevaron y vivos los queremos!” (Alive They Took Them and Alive We Want Them).
The divine madness of motherly love.
Alma Delia Murillo’s “Root That Is Not Missing” is a beautiful homage to those mad mothers, and an open invitation to become a little madder ourselves.
“Raíz que no desaparece” was published in 2025 by Alfaguara Editorial and Penguin Random House. The book is unfortunately not available in English… yet. But who knows? maybe with a little a magic…
