Flight of the innocents: abandoned by the Mexican state

Children suffer the worst trauma when families are expelled from their homes by armed gangs. Many families left when the gangs began forcibly recruiting boys as young as 12. The background to the story involves several different struggles for valuable territory, and thefailed war on drugs.

The Prisma has reported several times on the massacre of 43 students in Ayotzinapa in 2014, and Wilma Gomez Luengo is a Mexican film-maker who was first drawn to these issues by a deadly confrontation between students and police in 2011.

But it is the children who are the focus of concern in her new film, "Children of the Exodus''. The trauma of being driven from your family home by armed thugs and becoming a refugee will continue to mark them into adulthood. Studies have documented the effects in later life, which include depression, suicide attempts, violence in intimate relationships and post-traumatic stress disorder. And it is children from the poorest families who suffer most, especially when they see their schools and other facilities destroyed. This documentary was shown at the Visions du Reel film festival online this year.

In this email conversation with The Prisma, Gomez Luengo talks about the personal impact of this story as someone who experienced exile as a child, and describes the lesser-known background to the gang violence in Mexico, involving the failed war on drugs declared by President Calderon in 2007, and the crossover between drug trafficking and the rush for control of gold mining concessions.

This interview was published in The Prisma Multicultural Newspaper on 17th August 2020, and can be read in full with images here:

https://theprisma.co.uk/2020/08/17/flight-of-the-innocents-abandoned-by-the-mexican-state/