Last September, in this same space, it was noted that the Mexican state had ignored the deadline to respond to the Committee on Enforced Disappearances (CED) regarding the crisis of forced disappearances. We see, we measure, we name; as if with that we have taken responsibility. Sontag describes it as a characteristic of ordinary people; however, the government's response last week to the report of the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances (CED), demonstrates how this logic is replicated, exactly, at an institutional level. Since last June, the body activated Article 34 of the International Convention to elevate Mexico's case to the General Assembly, stating that enforced disappearances constitute crimes against humanity. The government argues that it sees, measures, names, and that it even modifies the legislation on the matter. Even so, the listed actions are presented as a refutation of a crisis for which there is no certainty of progress. And yet, that same registry does not distinguish how many of those cases are enforced disappearances – the central shortcoming that the CED points out. The CED was explicit on the point that the government used as a shield, as it found no evidence of a deliberate federal policy to commit enforced disappearances. In that communiqué, the argument of Susan Sontag is present. Mexico lists its advances in the matter: the reforms of July 2025, the National Search Alert, the mandatory opening of files from the first report, the Unique Identity Platform, the strengthening of the National Forensic Data Bank. It indicates that the problem is that the state is unable to stop the disappearances. Sontag calls this “compassion fatigue,” the mechanism by which seeing horror without context or responsibility produces the illusion of having addressed the problem. A data point that the government cannot refute because it is its own. She posits it for all people, for those of us who see images of war, reports on massacres, know the numbers of reported dead, and yet, we eat breakfast, we work, we sleep. She clarified that the state's responsibility is also accredited by the participation of local authorities and by the complicit inaction in the face of organized crime. For us who, despite knowing such suffering, our days continue with normality. The American author finds this attitude in democratic societies, through what she calls “institutionalized tolerance for documented horror,” where giving an account of suffering produces the sensation of having addressed the problem, without solving it. Six months later, the government issued a two-page communiqué rejecting the report. Just this past April 2, the Secretary of the Interior (SEGOB) and the Secretary of Foreign Relations (SRE) signed a joint position and discredited the CED's report “for being biased and not taking into account the observations, analysis, and updates presented by the Government of Mexico.” Five days before the rejection communiqué, on March 27, President Sheinbaum had presented her own report: 130,000 active cases in the National Registry of Missing Persons. The April 2 pronouncement confirms that we will continue to wait for the gap to close. She explains that the mechanisms of registration and visibility – commissions, reports, statistics – become ways of processing horror without transforming it. “How much consciousness of suffering is compatible with continuing to live normally?” – Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others. With that question, Susan Sontag closes Regarding the Pain of Others in 2003. The pronouncement of SEGOB and SRE operates this way, since enumerating equals, in that logic, having taken responsibility. The inaction in the face of documented suffering, wrote Sontag, is a consequence of the distance between the observer and the sufferer. Only political will can resolve these distances. In Mexico, an additional variant is added: the one that separates the sufferer from the one who has the obligation to act.
