Mexicans adorn Christmas balls with faces of the disappeared, demand justice

Mexico City, Dec 15 (EFE).- Mexican people decorated 500 Christmas balls with the faces of their beloved ones who went missing to call for action to find the over 90,000 people who have gone missing in Mexico.

  “This is an act of memory,” Tranquilina Hernández, whose daughter Mireya Montiel disappeared in 2014, told Efe.

 “We know that at this time all families have an empty table, an empty chair, a space that we do not know how to fill (…) this act of memory is to bring them back to us,” she added.

The Christmas balls are a way to show Mexican authorities that the phenomenon “is not fictional, it’s real,” Hernandez said.

The spheres, adorning the main square of the Iztacalco municipality in Mexico City, are made of wood and carved by hand by relatives of the disappeared from different parts of the country.

During the inauguration of the initiative, representative of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Alan Garcia, urged authorities to take action and “strictly comply with their obligations”.

Over 95,000 people in Mexico have gone missing since 1964, most of which since the beginning of the military war on drug trafficking in 2006, according to data from National Search Commission (CNB) shows. EFE

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