Category: Memory, victims and justice

Searching Mothers | NTR | Zacatecas, 2025

On hope in uncertain times

By Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez

At dusk this Saturday, the first Advent vigil begins, when Christian communities throughout the world embark on a journey, in the midst of the darkness of time, to receive the human and divine light of dignity and hope that the Messiah brings. The ancient hymn will resonate during the nighttime celebrations, Rorate caeli , whose lyrics and melody are like a lament that rises to heaven from the desolate city, crying out that “the clouds rain down on the Righteous One,” as the prophet Isaiah (45:8) implored during the exile in Babylon.

Each year, this four-week calendar leading up to Christmas is accompanied by symbols of light, greenery, carols, sweets, tenderness, and community. According to each culture, the waiting period for the Messiah's arrival evokes the awareness that "something is lacking" for the fulfillment of those desires for new times of justice, truth, compassion and peace, not only for a people who arrogantly claim to be the only chosen ones, but for all of humanity and even for the entire cosmos.

Every generation has seen terrible signs that the world is ending, whether through epidemics that make us feel how vulnerable our bodies and knowledge are; whether through wars waged by empires against emerging powers that threaten their arrogance; whether through the uncertainty of life itself, diminished by age, illness, failure, loneliness, or hopelessness.

The biblical texts that we, the believing communities, meditate on these days speak of the expectation of the messiah, first with a strong apocalyptic tone that announces the destruction of the corrupt world, reaching the entire cosmos with a catastrophe that will destroy everything because of the human pride that has taken over creation.

Then, as the date of the celebration of the Nativity of the Messiah Child, a Nazarene, approaches, the tone of the texts becomes more hopeful with the announcement of a God who is near, humanized, small, and fragile. It is the incarnate promise of a divine and human life that begins in complete vulnerability in the story of a migrant family with a newborn baby, trying to survive on the periphery of the empire and fleeing the fury of the local ruler, eventually finding refuge in Egypt, from where a definitive chapter in the history of human redemption will begin to be written.

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However, the collective depression we are experiencing today as humanity due to the escalation of hatred to extremes – which is spreading across the planet in an apocalyptic way “like a lie of Satan,” as René Girard said in an interview he gave me in 2007 in Paris (Hope as apocalypse)– this seems to render any narrative of hope for our uncertain times illusory. The genocide in Gaza continues as the climax of the Nakba or Catastrophe that began in 1947 with the expulsion of nearly a million Palestinians from their lands, paving the way for the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, this systemic violence continues today before our digital screens, met with indifference by social media and the international community. The wars in Ukraine, Congo, and South Sudan have become so “normalized” that they no longer make the front page of newspapers, much less a trending topic in the digital world. In Mexico, public indifference to urgent issues such as the crisis facing corn, lemon, and avocado farmers—caused by the violence in Michoacán—along with the persistent femicides and forced disappearances, speaks to a growing discontent among the population, expressed through strikes, road blockades, and street protests. But the masses seem numb, retreating into bubbles of entertainment and unrestrained holiday shopping, which, among other ills, leaves household finances in ruins for months and years to come.

Religious consumerism is also part of the overwhelming Christmas marketing, amidst kitschy decorations and echoes of folk crafts used to make piñatas featuring popular characters. It will certainly be present at Mexican posadas, Trump's piñata , which is sold in various markets in Mexico and the United States, will receive blows as a ritual of revenge amid laughter and boos until the cardboard breaks and the blond wicks of the tyrant fly out like shooting stars in some tenement courtyard in Mexico City, Chicago or Los Angeles for the delight of all.

A few families may perhaps rediscover the “mystical” meaning of the Advent wreath, following the Avatar of Carlo Acutis explaining Advent 2025. This video, which is circulating online, aptly explains the spiritual significance of the ritual of lighting each of the four candles during this season that prepares for Christmas. The light lit each Sunday of Advent symbolizes the "people who walked in darkness and have seen a great light" (Isaiah 9:2), which the prophet foretold to the Hebrew people devastated by the division between the small kingdoms of Israel and Judah, with their leaders corrupted by the idolatry of power, seeking alliances with neighboring Syria to defeat the rival tribe.

And like a non-place amidst so much noise, creating a void in the midst of the urban clamor, in Mexico the collectives of Searching Mothers (Searching mothers light Christmas tree) will set up Christmas trees covered with ornaments bearing the faces of those we have lost. They are today “the voice crying in the wilderness” (John 1:23) because they speak on behalf of the victims of the narco-state war and the idolatry of the necropower of our time.

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Perhaps this is where the theological core of this season lies: the absence of the Messiah is something that has inspired Hebrew and Christian generations for centuries to mobilize in order to make the messianic times present through acts of remembrance, justice and an (im)possible reconciliation.

Beyond a folkloric celebration of the coming of God-with-us, what we are about today is going to the other side of history to contemplate there, in the silence of the night, some glimmer of light that announces the arrival of the Messiah. And those who feel in every second of their lives, in every breath—like Vero and Fabiola, mothers searching for their missing children who shared their hope with us in a recent meeting in Guadalajara—the absence that hurts and motivates them to search out of love, are the ones who teach us what hope means in times of uncertainty, the heart of Advent.

Next Monday, December 1st, the documentary Re-exists 2025 will be presented online (Presentation of the documentary Re-exists 2025), prepared by Uruguayan filmmaker Juan Meza. There, some of the stories of awakening, healing, and embodiment shared by people from seventeen countries and different religious and spiritual traditions from four continents facing diverse forms of violence where it has been possible to spell out hope.

Advent is a time to continue weaving networks of combative hope , say the social movements on the peripheries of the empire, so that our world does not fall into the abyss. And it is possible to do so by listening to the people who for years and centuries have resisted and now accompany us in re-existing.

Because there will always be hope as long as there are people and communities who live the end times, so insistently emphasized by Javier Sicilia and Elías González, as the opportunity to enter into another way of existing amidst violence but pregnant with the active expectation of messianic times.

Happy Advent season!

Mexico City, November 29, 2025

Note: I would appreciate your feedback at the end of this page.

November 29, 2025
Ghandi's Dandi (Salt) March, 2012

To march or not to march, that is the question

By Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez

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In recent weeks, Mexico has been the scene of social unrest stemming from the population's weariness with the violence of drug cartels that increasingly control more and more territory. The state of Michoacán has become the epicenter of this violence against the population, particularly against avocado and lime producers who hold that cursed "green gold" in their hands.The less glamorous side of Mexico's new 'green gold'This is devastating environmental and social systems. It is an expression of the predatory economy that is part of the extractive society in which we have been trapped for decades worldwide. The political class tries in vain to promote regional development plans with great media impact, but with few results for the victims and many alliances that maintain "stability" in the region to consolidate the privileges of criminal mafias.

As analysts of similar cases of narco-economies, such as Colombia decades ago and now Mexico, had already predicted (Terrorism and organized crimeWhat is happening is an escalation of violence perpetrated by criminal networks, which first affects local populations and then rises to reach the political and business classes in order to increase profits, political power, and control over territories. Even the United States government is intimately familiar with these criminal networks and manipulates them as it benefits its role as guarantor of democracy in the world within a new "multipolar order" (Trump is making a grave strategic error if he thinks he can divide the world with authoritarian powers and achieve peace.) negotiated with the authoritarian regimes of China and Russia.

Ordinary citizens—an expression often applied today to the most dangerous professions, such as journalism and, unfortunately, academic life in universities subject to censorship—are left bewildered, defenseless, and astonished by this avalanche of insecurity, crimes in public squares, and false promises from the authorities. The churches, for their part, attempt, without much success, to promote "peace plans," or better yet, "pacification" plans, to restore the broken social fabric. As I mentioned in my previous post a few days ago... National Dialogue for Peace which the Catholic Church has been promoting for three years in an unusual alliance between the Mexican episcopate, religious orders and Christian-inspired civil organizations.

The problem that arises in initiatives coming from the political, business, and religious spheres is the subject. That is, the communities in their own places of life seem to be absent as actors in the proposals. Because what is urgent is "the refounding of Mexico from the perspective of the victims," as Javier Sicilia has insisted for the last fifteen years.Open letter from Javier Sicilia to López Obrador).

Today, perhaps, heeding the many voices that have emerged from the tragedies caused by systemic violence, we could say that it is a matter of embracing the diversity of autonomies (subjective, territorial, political, and even religious) to reclaim "the political" from below. This is the central theme of the collective book in preparation for the American publisher Orbis Books, which I am coordinating with the splendid editorial support of Nathan Wood-House and Francis Boccuzzi.

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Last Sunday I attended the march called by the Hat Movement from Michoacán, founded by the assassinated mayor Carlos Manzo. Some groups joined these protests, which took place in thirty-five cities across the country. Generation Z which represents the digital nomadic youth who have already shaken centers of power around the world, such as in Nepal and Peru. Some twenty thousand people attended in Mexico City, with a toll of more than one hundred injured (Generation Z will decide the next elections in Mexico), where there were violent disturbances at the end of the march in the Zócalo, caused by hooded people trying to enter the National Palace, where they were repelled by riot police, after they knocked down one of the immense metal fences with which the authorities had "protected" the emblematic building of the central power of the country. Eighteen people were arrested And eight of them are in pretrial detention facing charges for threatening the lives of some guards who were beaten and injured, like many other people at the march that no one talks about, some of them without having been involved in any violent action.

Although the facts and the legal procedures still need to be clarified, this growing social unrest remains, turning into indignation and peaceful, sometimes violent, protest against a government that is paralyzed, if not colluding, with the aforementioned mafias.

Last Thursday, November 20, the national anniversary of the Mexican Revolution, the protests of the Generation Z They were held again in several cities across the country, with particular anger expressed once more in the main public square of the nation's capital.

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To march or not to march, that is the question that citizens in Mexico and the world are asking themselves today as an existential, ethical, political and spiritual question to express their weariness with the multiple heads of the hydra of necropower that have taken over the world.

Political parties and churches claim to "represent" the people, but they have lost credibility. Civil society organizations have been overwhelmed by the tides of insecurity, impunity, and terror.

What is left to do amidst the ruins of a nation-state overwhelmed by the powers of today's extractive capitalism?

Marching in public squares as citizens in peaceful resistance is the path that many peoples in modern times have followed as a form of profound social transformation.

A symbol of this social journey—still alive in modern memory—is the famous Salt March Gandhi began this journey almost a century ago, in 1930, starting with a handful of eighty people, marching from Ahmedabad to the Guarat coast, gathering more people along three hundred kilometers to protest against the British Empire in a centuries-old site of oppression for India's poor. By the end of that year, sixty thousand people had joined the protest, which became the turning point that paved the way for India's independence.

In Mexico, Pietro Ameglio (Civil disobedience and other texts ) has kept alive the memory and reflection on that ethical and political act of civil disobedience, in the context of the March for Peace with Justice and Dignity initiated in April 2011. Some will say that —almost fifteen years after that outcry— Mexico is still lost, falling into the chaos of a failed state produced by necropower.

Others of us today advocate returning to the source of the "autonomies" that arise in liberated subjectivities, bodies, and territories, where human beings take root, flourish, and die to endure; this is the clue proposed by the anti-systemic thinking of the Cuernavaca School.

At its mystical core, the only way to halt the spiral of hatred is by exposing one's own body. This is how Saint Paul described it when referring to Christ: "He broke down the wall of hatred in his own body" (Ephesians 2:14). This is the quintessential messianic gesture, pristinely experienced by Jesus of Nazareth on a horrific cross imposed by the Roman Empire with the complicity of the religious authorities of the Temple in Jerusalem. A tragic destiny, but not a final one, because that offered life was transformed by his heavenly Abba and by his community of survivors into a seed of new life.

Ultimately, these are autonomous regions with a mystique of a fulfilling life, born from the excluded of all times. That is the march of dignity that never ends.

To march or not to march.

The question remains open for us today.

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Oaxaca, November 22, 2025

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November 22, 2025
Gabriel Pozo Menares | Mapuche Calendar | Wallmapu, 2011

Wallmapu News

By Carlos Mendoza Álvarez

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The light of dusk reaches Tirúa, in Mapuche lands, while Carlos, my Jesuit host who has been here for more than fifteen years (HistoriActiva Jesuit community of Tirúa), drives along the dirt road to visit friends who have opened their homes to share life in the area for years. We arrive and are greeted by the oldest daughter, along with her cats and dogs. She briefly interrupts the work she's preparing for her last semester of high school, as after graduation she plans to enroll in university to study teaching. Life goes on simply among the families who live here. Her father spent the day growing potatoes and then dedicated the afternoon to laying the floor of a new room in the house. They offer us mate as a ritual to accompany their conversation. Before leaving, the friends exchange bird food and make plans to recycle an old wooden door that will be installed in a budding eco-spirituality center.

Wallmapu (Declaration of the Department of History on the term Wallmapu) is the term that refers to the ancestral lands of the Mapuche people (The Indigenous World 2025: Chile). Today, they are dominated by the forestry industry, which has contaminated the territory with invasive species such as eucalyptus and pine to mass-produce cellulose for export to the global packaging market.

The Mapuche people today are divided between the frantic integration into the modern world of consumption on the one hand and, on the other, the defense of their territory, language, and traditional medicine under the leadership of Machi women, healers and spiritual ancestors.

On both sides of the mountain range, divided between Chile and Argentina, the Mapuche people fight for their territorial and cultural survival, in the face of the overwhelming inertia of the modern world (Chile: Resistance to the forestry model in Wallmapu, Mapuche territory). For communities assimilated into today's modern model, it seems better to eat processed foods than seaweed and shellfish as the ancients did; or to drink Coca-Cola instead of herbal teas because it gives them greater status; they prefer to be evangelical Christians or Roman Catholics rather than follow the spirituality and language of their ancestors. Ultimately, it is a matter of "integration" into the modern world, even at the price of cultural assimilation and environmental depredation, which, in its symbolic undertone, is violence against the ancestors and against Mother Earth.

Civil society networks such as “Churches and Mining”, or the initiatives for intercultural dialogue on ancient and modern astronomy promoted by some universities in the region, are modest attempts to accompany a people torn apart by internal contradictions between modernity and tradition.

Perhaps eco-spirituality is being an "articulation," among others of a more social and political nature, that allows for these intersections. Carlos told me the anecdote of a grandmother who, attending a workshop on traditional medicine and eco-spirituality, said she didn't understand anything about the intersections of the three bodies (personal, communal, and territorial) that the workshop presented, because she had been thinking throughout the entire meeting about the meaning of that strange word written on the invitation: "articulation." A term that the grandmother kept thinking about until she finally realized that it surely referred to the articulations of bones, when she felt something in her body was out of alignment, impeding her mobility and causing pain. So she concluded that the workshop was a path to healing her joints. And ultimately, that was the objective of the workshop! That grandmother had followed it in her own way, even though she was absent from the rest of the talks.

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Before arriving in Mapuche lands, I was able to speak with university students at two forums in Santiago, Chile. The first was about the work of Gustavo Gutiérrez, one of the fathers of liberation theology, on the occasion of the first anniversary of his death (Gustavo Gutiérrez International Congress). In a traditional academic format with keynote lectures and presentations, over the course of a couple of days a clearer awareness emerged among attendees about the importance of style Latin American to speak of God, intimately connected to the experience of the poor and oppressed. A wisdom that is already part of the way some Roman Catholic and Protestant Christian communities understand their faith in a liberating God and promote the transformative role of victims in their own liberation processes, leaving behind lands of slavery and embarking on paths of new life.

But we also began to see, not without some attendees' surprise, that it is necessary to open our hearts and our eyes to other exclusions, such as those experienced by women, queer/cuir people, undocumented migrants, relatives of missing persons, Afro-diasporic peoples, and indigenous peoples, to mention those who represent today's resistance to the violence that afflicts us in so many ways, with the Palestinian people today facing the genocide perpetrated by the Israeli government and its accomplices at heart.

During the colloquium, several initiatives emerged to keep the memory of the great Peruvian theologian's work alive, through the work of the archives that house the recordings of the summer courses Gutiérrez offered in Lima for several years, a valuable resource that will reveal another angle of the author's thinking. Likewise, some of us proposed to investigate the relationship between Gustavo's thought and the work of Aníbal Quijano, his compatriot, who represents one of the most important sources of decolonial thought today, along with Frantz Fanon. The confluence of both thought styles, along with Black, feminist, queer/cuir and Palestinian liberation theology, will provide us with a more pertinent theoretical framework for understanding the intersectionality of violence and ongoing resistance in order to create alternative ways of life, governance, and spirituality that inspire communities located at the fractures of humanity.

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The other meeting, held with colleagues from the Chilean Society of Theology (UCSC hosted the Annual Conference of the Chilean Theological Society), was an opportunity to think together about possible paths to hope for communities facing systemic violence.

My contribution to that annual event brought to the table the question of thinking about hope from a perspective of "combative decoloniality," like the dignified rage practiced by the Zapatista communities, or the indignation of women who face sexual or spiritual abuse in their respective religions. Because, from my perspective, it's about dismantling a vision of hope as a flight from the world in anticipation of consolation in the afterlife of eternal life.

Rather, it's about discovering and strengthening the hope that "emerges" from the fractures of humanity. It's where survivors paddle against the current of the history of oppression and privilege, inhabiting the world with practices of mutual care, in the pedagogy of embodiment, and collective healing with memory, truth, and justice, as we explored at the recent Re-existe 2025 gathering.

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The sky of Wallmapu, with the crescent moon shining brightly, is today a living metaphor for the hope that surrounds us when we hear the heartbeat of the lands and stars of the South.

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Tirúa, October 25, 2025

October 25, 2025

English