ross douthat disappeared

They lie in clandestine graves strewnacross the desert, mingled in communalpits, or hacked to pieces and scatteredon desiccated hillsides.

They are buried without names. Oftenall that’s left, once their bodies are gone,are the empty casings of a person: abloodied sweatshirt, a frilly top, a tat-tered dress.

All over Mexico, mothers wander un-der the scorching sun, poking at theearth and sniffing for the tell-tale scentof decomposing flesh, hoping for a scrapthat points toward their missing sons ordaughters.

For most, the answers never come.A New York Times photographer doc-

umented their search and the clothingthat was found with unidentified bodiesafter it was laid out by forensics labworkers.

“It’s a horrible uncertainty I don’twish on anyone,” said Noemy PadillaAldáz, who has spent two years lookingfor her son, Juan Carlos, who was 20years old when he vanished after finish-ing his night shift at a local taqueria.

“If I knew he was dead, then I wouldknow that he’s not suffering,” she said.“But we don’t know, and it’s like torture,that not knowing.”

Mexico is nearing a grim milestone:100,000 disappeared people, accordingto Mexico’s National Search Commis-sion, which keeps a record that goesback to 1964.

In a country wracked by a drug war

without end, death can feel pervasive.Murder rates climb inexorably, now top-ping 30,000 a year. Macabre images ofbodies strung up on bridges or tossed onroadsides appear on newscasts. Torturetechniques get nicknames.

But disappearance can be the cruelestblow. It deprives a family of a body tomourn, of answers — even of the simplecertainty, and the consolation, of death.

The missing haunt Mexico’s collectivememory, a crushing testament to the in-

ability of government after governmentto stanch the bloodshed and bring crimi-nals to justice.

“Disappearance is perhaps the mostextreme form of suffering for the rela-tives of victims,” said Angélica Durán-Martínez, a professor of political scienceat the University of Massachusetts,Lowell, and an expert on violence in Lat-in America.

The faces of the disappeared loom,larger than life, on banners and postersin public squares across Mexico, overmessages from relatives pleading forany information about their fates.

But even when remains are found, thetask of identifying the dead can be ardu-ous, at times taking investigatorsmonths of digging through the brushand combing through dirt for tiny frag-ments of bone, many of which can be toosmall or worn to help identify the body.

According to Ms. Durán-Martínez, thecrisis of the disappeared in Mexicospeaks not just to the prevalence of or-ganized crime, but also to the propensityfor state security forces to be engaged inthe violence.

Among the most widely known exam-ples: the 2014 disappearance of 43 stu-dents from a rural teachers’ college inthe town of Ayotzinapa in GuerreroState in southwestern Mexico. An inves-tigation under Enrique Peña Nieto, thepresident at the time, blamed a localdrug cartel and the municipal police.But that explanation has been widelycondemned by international experts, in-cluding the United Nations, which found

100,000 DISAPPEAREDAcross Mexico, mothers hunt for scrapsthat point toward their sons or daughters

MEXICO, PAGE 4

Clothing from an unidentified body found in Chihuahua, one of the states most affectedby the violence of Mexico’s long drug war. Over 30,000 Mexicans are killed each year.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY FRED RAMOSARTICLE BY OSCAR LOPEZ

..

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The movie runs at 2 hours 56 minutes, agovernment-sponsored, action-filledand patriotism-packed drama that costmore to make than any Chinese film be-fore it. It seems to be just what audi-ences in China wanted.

“The Battle at Lake Changjin,” ablockbuster that depicts an against-all-odds defeat of the United States duringthe Korean War, has been smashing boxoffice records since opening last weekon the eve of China’s annual October hol-iday, known as Golden Week.

As a barometer of Chinese politicsand culture, it feels very much a movieof the moment: aggrieved, defiant andjingoistic, a lavishly choreographed callto arms at a time of global crisis and in-creasingly tense relations with the

world, especially the United States.The villains are American soldiers

and commanders, including a reason-able impersonation of Gen. DouglasMacArthur. The heroes are the Chinese“volunteers” hurled against what wasthen viewed as the world’s most invinci-ble army.

The battle, better known in the UnitedStates as the Battle of Chosin Reservoir,drove the Americans and their allies outof North Korea in the winter of 1950, set-ting the stage for the stalemate thatended with a cease-fire three years later.It has entered Communist Party lore asan unvarnished triumph in the infancyof the People’s Republic of China,though it came at a terrible cost for theChinese people.

On its second day in cinemas, Friday,Oct. 1, it broke China’s single-day box of-fice record, raking in more than $60 mil-lion. By Tuesday, it had grossed morethan $360 million, according to Maoyan,which tracks ticket sales, putting it on apace to be among the most successfulChinese films ever made.CHINA, PAGE 2

For the holidays, Chinese relive a U.S. defeat

“The Battle at Lake Changjin,” a big-budget Chinese government-sponsored KoreanWar movie, is said to have grossed more than $360 million since opening last week.

GETTY IMAGES

Striking box-office gold at a time when tensionswith America run high

BY STEVEN LEE MYERSAND AMY CHANG CHIEN

The New York Times publishes opinionfrom a wide range of perspectives inhopes of promoting constructive debateabout consequential questions.

In Germany, where one in four jobs de-pends on exports, the crisis gummingup the world’s supply chains is weighingheavily on the economy, which is Eu-rope’s largest and a linchpin to globalcommerce.

Recent surveys and data point to asharp slowdown of the German manu-facturing powerhouse, and economistshave begun to predict a “bottleneck re-cession.”

Almost everything that German fac-tories need to operate is in short supply— not just computer chips but also ply-wood, copper, aluminum, plastics andraw materials like cobalt, lithium, nickeland graphite, which are crucial ingredi-ents of electric car batteries.

The auto industry has been hit thehardest. Opel, a unit of Stellantis, thecompany that owns Jeep and Fiat, saidin September that it would shut down afactory in Eisenach until next year be-cause of a shortage of semiconductors.The plant’s 1,300 workers will be fur-loughed.

More than 40 percent of German com-panies said in an August survey by theAssociation of German Chambers of In-dustry and Commerce that they had lostsales because of supply problems. Eu-ropewide, exports would have been 7percent higher in the first six months ofthe year if not for supply bottlenecks, ac-cording to the European Central Bank.

While every economy in the world issuffering from shortages, Germany isparticularly sensitive because of its de-pendence on manufacturing and trade.Nearly half of Germany’s economic out-put depends on exports of cars, machinetools and other goods, compared withonly 12 percent in the United States.

Because Germany is a nation of fac-tories, “the impact is dramatic,” said Oli-ver Knapp, a senior partner at RolandBerger, a Munich-based consultancy.

The country is also facing a period ofpolitical uncertainty. Elections lastmonth left no party with a clear major-ity, and there is a risk that whatever co-alition government emerges will lackenough cohesion to act decisively.

The slowdown has turned the Ger-man economy into a test case of howcompanies can become less vulnerableto power shortages in China or shipsstuck in the Suez Canal.

Already many firms are increasingtheir inventories of parts, ordering rawmaterials further in advance and find-ing creative — some might say desper-ate — ways to keep products moving outthe factory gates. Traton, Volkswagen’struck unit, said last month that it was GERMANY, PAGE 9

Supply crisissqueezes Germany’seconomyFRANKFURT

Dependence on trade and manufacturing hasleft it especially vulnerable

BY JACK EWINGLast fall, before the U.S. presidentialelection, Barton Gellman wrote anessay for The Atlantic sketching out aseries of worst-case scenarios for thevoting and its aftermath. It was essen-tially a blueprint for how Donald Trumpcould either force the country into aconstitutional crisis or hold onto powerunder the most dubious of legal aus-pices, with the help of pliant Republicanofficials and potentially backed bymilitary force.

Shortly afterward I wrote a columnresponding, in part, to Gellman’s essay,making a counterargument that Trumpwasn’t capable of pulling off the com-plex maneuvers that would be requiredfor the darker scenarios to come to pass.

Whatever Trump’sauthoritarian inclina-tions or desires, Ipredicted, “any at-tempt to cling topower illegitimatelywill be a theater of theabsurd.”

That column wastitled “There Will BeNo Trump Coup.”Ever since Jan. 6, it’sbeen held up as an

example of fatal naïveté or click-happycontrarianism, whereas Gellman’sarticle is regularly cited as a case ofprophecy fulfilled. In alarmed commen-tary on Trumpism like Robert Kagan’sepic recent essay in The WashingtonPost, the assumption is that to havedoubted the scale of the Trumpian perilin 2020 renders one incapable of recog-nizing the even greater peril of today. Ina paragraph that links to my fatefullytitled column, Kagan laments the fatallure of Pollyannaism: “The same peoplewho said that Trump wouldn’t try tooverturn the last election now say wehave nothing to worry about with thenext one.”

One odd thing about the underlyingargument here is that in certain waysit’s just a matter of emphasis. I don’tthink we have “nothing to worry about”from Trump in 2024 and I didn’t arguethat he wouldn’t try (emphasis on try) tooverturn the election in 2020. I agreewith Kagan that the success of Trump’sstolen election narrative may help himwin the Republican nomination onceagain, and I agree with him, as well, thatit would be foolish not to worry aboutsome kind of chaos, extending to crisis

The threatof Trumpisn’t fading

OPINION

Should allAmerica’spoliticalchoices beorganizedaround theformerpresident?

DOUTHAT, PAGE 14

Ross Douthat

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