President accuses press, volunteer searchers for missing people of ‘necrophilia’

THE ADMINISTRATION of Mexico’s president has accused the press and volunteer searchers who look for the bodies of missing people of “necrophilia ,” comments that drew criticism this week.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is known for insulting people he views as opponents. But a pre-taped segment prepared by state-run television that was aired Wednesday at his morning press briefing used unusually crude language.

It accused reporters and volunteer searchers of suffering “a delirium of necrophilia” for having reported on a suspected clandestine crematorium on the outskirts of Mexico City.

Authorities have denied that any human remains were found there, and López Obrador has often suggested that any report regarding Mexico’s rampant violence is a politically motivated attack on him. Necrophilia is a term used to describe an erotic attraction for corpses.

The attack appeared aimed at Ceci Flores, who has spent much of the last decade looking for the bodies of her two missing sons without much help from the government. Flores announced the find of the purported crematorium last week; she has long accused the government of ignoring the plight of Mexicans over the country’s more than 100,000 missing people.

“When would you ever imagine a president using all the power of the government to depict a mother searching for her sons as the enemy?” Flores said late Wednesday.

“If anyone is suffering from delirium it is them, they have ‘necrophobia’, they prefer not to see the dead, not to see the disappeared and ignore the painful reality,” she said.

López Obrador’s spokesman and his press office did not respond to requests for comment on whether the statement in the video reflected his own personal thinking. But the president has regularly called those who complain of Mexico’s gang-fuelled violence “vultures” or people “trying to profit from pain”.

The Mexican government has spent little time looking for the missing, so the volunteers conduct their own hunts for clandestine graves where cartels hide their victims, often acting on anonymous tips and plunging steel rods into the earth to detect the odour of decay.

Police tape off the area where volunteers said they have found a clandestine crematorium in Tlahuac, on the edge of Mexico City, Wednesday, May 1, 2024. Ceci Flores, a leader of one of the groups of so-called “searching mothers” from northern Mexico, announced late Tuesday that her team had found bones around clandestine burial pits and ID cards, and prosecutors said they were investigating to determine the nature of the remains found.

AP PHOTOS Women carry digging tools at the site where their search team said they found a clandestine crematorium in Tlahuac, on the edge of Mexico City, Wednesday, May 1, 2024. At left is Jacqueline Palmeros who has been searching for her disappeared daughter since 2020 in Mexico City, and at right is María de Jesús Soria whose daughter disappeared in Veracruz in 2016, and whose remains were turned over to her in 2022.