Eight-year-old Juan de Dios Torres, whose five-year-old sister Zoe Zuleica Torres went missing in December 2016 on the outskirts of the northeastern city of San Luis Potosí, participates along with his mother in the brigade searching for the remains of missing people in the northwestern state of Sinaloa. Credit: Marcos Vizcarra/IPS

By Daniela Pastrana
NAVOLATO, Mexico, Feb 1 2017 (IPS)

Juan de Dios is eight years old and is looking for his younger sister, Zoe Zuleica Torres Gómez, who went missing in December 2015, when she was only five years old, in the northeastern state of San Luis Potosí. He is the youngest searcher for clandestine graves in Mexico.

With pick and shovel, in the last week of January he joined the Third National Brigade for the Search for Disappeared Persons, which on Monday Jan. 30 found the remains of a body in a grave hidden in a corn and sorghum field on the communal land in Potrero de Sataya, in the municipality of Navolato, in the northwestern state of Sinaloa.

It is the second body found by this brigade, made up of a handful of women and men who search in the ground for signs of their children, siblings and parents gone missing during the years of the so-called war against drug trafficking, together with human right defenders and Catholic priests.

“A problem that has not been recognised cannot be solved, nor can it heal,” said Juan Carlos Trujillo Herrera, who is behind the creation of the brigades, told IPS during the brigade’s work in Sinaloa.

“All the public prosecutor offices in the country are saturated with this issue, there is no structure in place that would allow us to think that the institutions are going to work. That is why we have had to go out to look ourselves for our family members,” insisted Trujillo, who is searching for four disappeared siblings.

On taking office in December 2006, right-wing president Felipe Calderón (2006-2012) militarised the security of the country to combat the drug mafias and threw Mexico into a spiral of violence from which it has not escaped.
One aspect reflects the seriousness of the problem: before that year, the Mexican government identified seven major drug cartels. Ten years later, there are nearly 200 organised crime groups operating in the country, according to information published this month by the Drug Policy Programme of the Centre for Economic Research and Teaching (Cide).

The data from Cide, one of the country’s most prestigious educational institutions, also registers at least 68 massacres in that period of time.

In 10 years, the so-called war on drugs launched by Calderón has left more than 177,000 murder victims, 73,500 of them during the administration of his successor, the also conservative Enrique Peña Nieto.

It has also left at least 30,000 missing people, although registers on disappearances vary greatly among the different authorities and civil society organisations.

In 2011, the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity headed by the poet Javier Sicilia brought to the forefront the issue of forced disappearance, reporting hundreds of cases in this country of 122 million people.

But it was in October 2014, with the forced disappearance of 43 rural student teachers in Ayotzinapa, in the southwestern state of Guerrero, and in January 2016, when five young people were detained and “disappeared” by state police in Tierra Blanca, in the state of Veracruz, that the country discovered that many of the disappearances attributed to organised crime were actually carried out by the authorities.

“That is why they did not look for them,” said Miguel Trujillo, Juan Carlos´ younger brother.

Since then, groups of family members who, desperate because of the absence of the state, started their own searches, have mushroomed around the country.

To do this, they train: they take courses in forensic anthropology, archeology, law; and they gear up: they buy caving equipment, they get trays to find small bones; they form crews and have become experts in identifying graves and bones.

The first brigades were organised in March 2016 in Veracruz, a state in eastern Mexico where several clandestine graveyards have been discovered, where the remains of160 people have been found so far.

There are now at least 13 brigades in the country. And since Jan. 24, different groups have gone out into the field in Tamaulipas, Veracruz and Sinaloa, where people belonging to brigades from five states arrived for a 12-day collective search.

“There are two different kinds of searches, for people who are alive or for people who are dead. I think this is where we’re failing, because we also have to look for people who are alive, but the thing is that nobody was doing this,” said Juan Carlos Trujillo.

The groups are supported by civil society organisations, such as the Marabunta Peace brigade, a group of young people from Mexico City who provide security for the families.

“It is very hard for young people to deal with these realities, for them to not get disillusioned with humanity, but escorting the groups gives them hope. Because when they realize that they are able to help, they find hope and they reaffirm themselves as builders of peace,” Miguel Barrera, the head of Marabunta, told IPS.

Sinaloa is the land of the cartel created by the powerful drug lord Joaquín “el Chapo” Guzmán, who was extradited to the United States on Jan. 19.

The brigade has made two findings: the one in Potrero Sataya and another in the municipality El Quelite, 10 km from port Mazatlán. The little boy from San Luis Potosí came with his mother, to help search for human remains.

“This is something we have to do because the government is not doing it and it was never going to,” said Mario Vergara, who founded the group The Other Disappeared from Iguala, the municipality where the students from Ayotzinapa disappeared, and now helps brigades all over the country.

“We are making progress in terms of organisation and we are going to continue. The people that remain in each state are going to learn how to coordinate to carry out better searches; we need to replicate the model in each state and engage the governments to help the search groups,” said Miguel Trujillo.

“Forced disappearance, a strategy of terror” reads a sign with the Mexican flag, held by a family member during a Feb. 19 ceremony to celebrate the 15th year anniversary of HIJOS, one of the first organisations created by the families of ‘desaparecidos’ to search for their loved ones and fight for justice. Credit: Emilio Godoy/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Feb 26 2015 (IPS)

Carlos Trujillo refuses to give up, after years of tirelessly searching hospitals, morgues, prisons, cemeteries and clandestine graves in Mexico, looking for his four missing brothers.

The local shopkeeper has left no stone unturned and no clue unfollowed since his brothers Jesús, Raúl, Luís and Gustavo Trujillo vanished – the first two on Aug. 28, 2008 in the southern state of Guerrero and the last two on Sep. 22, 2010 on a highway that joins the southern states of Puebla and Veracruz.

“The case has gone nowhere; four agents were assigned to it, but there’s still nothing concrete, so I’m forging ahead and I won’t stop until I find them,” Trujillo told IPS.

On Feb. 18, Trujillo and other relatives of “desaparecidos” or victims of enforced disappearance founded the group Familiares en Búsqueda María Herrera – named after his mother – as part of the growing efforts by tormented family members to secure institutional support for the investigations they themselves carry out.

“We want to create a network of organisations of victims’ families,” the activist explained. “One of the priorities is to strengthen links and networking, to ensure clarity in the search process, and to share tools. The aim is for the families themselves to carry the investigations forward.”

The group is investigating the disappearance of 18 people. Prior to the creation of the organisation, some of the members found six people alive, in the last two years.“Each one of us started with our own particular case. We didn’t understand what disappearance was; we had to learn. We didn’t know we had a right to demand things. The search started off with problems, no one knew how to work collectively, and we gradually came up with how to do things.” -- Diana García

With determination and courage, the family members visit morgues, police stations, prisons, courtrooms, cemeteries and mass graves, trying to find their lost loved ones, or at least some clue that could lead them in the right direction.

The group grew out of the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity, which in 2011 brought together the families of victims of the wave of violence in Mexico, and held peace caravans throughout the country and even parts of the United States, where the movement protested that country’s anti-drug policy.

Enforced disappearance became a widespread phenomenon since the government of conservative Felipe Calderón (2006-2012) declared the “war on drug trafficking.” His successor, the conservative Enrique Peña Nieto, has not resolved the problem, which has become one of the worst tragedies in Latin America’s recent history.

But the phenomenon has only drawn international attention since the disappearance of 43 students of the Ayotzinapa rural teachers’ college, which exposed a cocktail of complicity and corruption between the police and the mayor of the town of Iguala and a violent drug cartel operating in Guerrero.

Thursday marks the five month anniversary of their disappearance.

The families have not stopped their indefatigable search for the students, even though the attorney general’s office announced a month ago that they were killed by the organised crime group “Guerreros Unidos” and their bodies were burnt.

The humanitarian crisis prompted the United Nations Committee on Enforced Disappearances to demand on Feb. 13 that Mexico pass specific laws to combat the problem, create a registry of victims, carry out proper investigations, and provide justice and reparations to the victims’ families.

Mexico’s office on human rights, crime prevention and community service has reported that in this country of 120 million people, 23,271 people went missing between 2007 and October 2014. However, the office does not specifically indicate how many of these people were victims of enforced disappearance, as opposed to simply missing. Human rights organisations put the figure at 22,600 for that period.

Most enforced disappearances are blamed on drug cartels, which dispute smuggling routes to the lucrative U.S. market, in some cases with the participation of corrupt local or national police. The victims are mainly men from different socioeconomic strata, between the ages of 20 and 36.

“Each one of us started with our own particular case,” Diana García, whose son was disappeared, told IPS. “We didn’t understand what disappearance was; we had to learn. We didn’t know we had a right to demand things. The search started off with problems, no one knew how to work collectively, and we gradually came up with how to do things.”

Her son, Daniel Cantú, disappeared on Feb. 21, 2007 in the city of Ramos Arizpe in the northern state of Coahuila.

García, who has two other children and belongs to the group Fuerzas Unidas por Nuestros Desaparecidos en Coahuila, is convinced that only by working together can people exert enough pressure on the government to get it to search for their missing loved ones.

With the support of the Centro Diocesano para los Derechos Humanos Fray Juan de Larios, a church-based human rights organisation, a group of family members of victims came together and founded Fuerzas Unidas in 2009, which is searching for a total of 344 people.

The organisation successfully advocated the creation of a new local law on the declaration of absence of persons due to disappearance, in effect since May 2014, as well as the classification of enforced disappearance as a specific crime in the state of Coahuila.

Other groups have emerged, such as Ciencia Forense Ciudadana (Citizen Forensic Science), founded in September to create a forensic and DNA database.

“The initiative is aimed at a massive identification drive,” one of the founders of the organisation, Sara López, told IPS. “To do this we need a registry of victims of disappearance, a genetic database, and a databank for what has been found in clandestine graves.”

The project plans to cover 450 families affected by enforced disappearance and to reach 1,500 DNA samples. So far it has gathered 550, and it has representatives – victims’ relatives – in 10 of the country’s 33 states.

On Feb. 16, Ciencia Forense identified the remains of Brenda González, who went missing on Jul. 31, 2011 in Santa Catarina, in the northern state of Nuevo León, with the support of an independent forensic investigation carried out by the Peruvian Forensic Anthropology Team.

“With the organisation that we just created, we will also try to provide a broad assessment of the question of enforced disappearances,” Trujillo said.

Human rights organisations say that until the case of the missing Ayotzinapa rural teachers’ college students erupted, the authorities did very little to combat the phenomenon, and failed to adopt measures to comply with sentences handed down by the Inter-American Court on Human Rights.

The plight of the families is described in the song “Desaparecido” by French-Spanish singer-songwriter Manu Chao, dedicated to the thousands of victims of enforced disappearance in Latin America and their families: “I carry in my body a pain that doesn’t let me breathe, I carry in my body a doom that forces me to keep moving.”

And their lives are put on hold while they visit registries, fill out paperwork, lobby, take innumerable risks, and rack up expenses as they search for their loved ones and other desaparecidos.

“For now, I’m not interested in justice or reparations,” said García. “What I want is to know the truth, what happened, where he is. I’m looking for him alive but I know that in the context we’re living in there may be a different outcome. It’ll probably take me many years and I am desperate, but I continue the struggle.”

Her organisation, Fuerzas Unidas, drew up a plan that includes the analysis of crime maps, a genetic registry, awareness-raising campaigns, and proposed measures to hold those responsible for botched investigations accountable.

“The families are more familiar with the situation than anyone else, they know what has to be done. The problem is that we are overwhelmed by the magnitude of the phenomenon in Mexico,” said López.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

“Help us find them” reads a sign with photos of victims of forced disappearance, put up by their families. Credit: Daniela Pastrana/IPS

By Daniela Pastrana
MEXICO CITY, Jun 6 2013 (IPS)

Mexican police officer Luis Ángel León Rodríguez disappeared along with six other officers and a civilian on Nov. 16, 2009, in the western Mexican state of Michoacán. Six days later, his mother, Araceli Rodríguez, began her ceaseless search.

In the past three and a half years, she has knocked on every door, heard from her son’s killers how his body was dismembered and buried, supposedly under an avocado tree, and helped excavate twice in a fruitless search for his and the others’ remains.

But in April an official citation was delivered to her house from the internal affairs department of the federal police, summoning León Rodríguez to appear on May 15 “without his uniform and service firearm” and “with a lawyer” to respond to charges of dereliction of duty and abandoning his post.

His mother showed up with the same photo that she has taken to protest marches and caravans by the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity, to meetings with then conservative president Felipe Calderón (2006-2012), and to a number of interviews.

“Here is my son, in uniform, because I couldn’t take it off; without a gun; and with his lawyer, me. Can I bring charges against you, who lost my son?” she told the police representatives.

The head of the internal affairs department, Paul Aguilera, said the police do not have a complete up-to-date database making it possible to follow the precise circumstances of each officer, and that his office has 16,000 cases pending.

“What they did to me was cruel, and the worst thing is that if this can happen in my case, which is so visible, what about the thousands of others who have not drawn so much attention?” Rodríguez remarked to IPS.

Local and international human rights groups have been sounding the alert about the humanitarian tragedy in Mexico, where tens of thousands of people have been killed and forcibly disappeared since Calderón involved the military in the war on drugs. The violence has not let up since conservative President Enrique Peña Nieto took office in December.

There are 26,000 missing people in Mexico, according to a list released in February by the interior ministry. But the list does not include, for example, 86 of the 140 cases of forced disappearance documented by the New York-based Human Rights Watch in the report “Mexico’s Disappeared: The Enduring Cost of a Crisis Ignored”.

Nor does it include the victims of cases made public by the Movement for Peace in 2011, like those of environmental activists Eva Alarcón and Marcial Bautista, chess player Roberto Galván, or Yahaira Guadalupe Bahena, whose mother has held two hunger strikes to demand answers.

In a Jun. 4 report, “Confronting a nightmare: Disappearances in Mexico”, London-based rights watchdog Amnesty International talks about a “pattern of systematic disappearances and enforced disappearances largely ignored by the previous administration.”

It says “Some are the victims of enforced disappearances in which public officials are implicated. Others have been abducted by private individuals or criminal gangs.”

The rights group says that during several visits to Mexico since 2010, it documented 152 cases of disappearance, and adds that evidence of involvement of public officials was found in 85 of the cases.

It mentions cases of people apparently abducted by criminal groups for their professional skills, such as nine telephone engineers who went missing in June 2009 in the northern state of Tamaulipas.

But the available information is just the tip of the iceberg that the government of Peña Nieto risks crashing into.

Investigative reports by the daily newspaper Milenio published in October 2012, based on municipal reports, found that during the Calderón administration, at least 24,000 unidentified bodies were buried in common graves.

In Mexico there is no protocol for collecting information on missing persons, or for medical examiners to register information. Each state has its own system for identifying bodies, and the files on most unidentified corpses buried in common graves are, in the best of cases, incomplete, lacking fingerprints, photographs, dental X-rays or DNA samples. In other cases, the information in the files actually turns out to be wrong. And in some cases, unidentified bodies are even cremated.

There are only 25 forensic anthropologists in this country of 117 million people, and many mortuaries have no DNA lab. There are no standard procedures in place for exhuming and identifying bodies.

The government refuses to acknowledge that there is a humanitarian tragedy. But on Feb. 21 it signed an agreement with the International Committee of the Red Cross for advice on the creation of a protocol for the search for missing persons.

There are cases like that of Bárbara Reyes, who disappeared at the age of 17 in August 2011, and whose remains were found 18 months later in a common grave. To find her body, trenches were dug along 64 metres over the space of three days. “I only recovered my daughter’s bones,” her mother, Lourdes Muñiz, told IPS.

Alejandra Viridiana was kidnapped in November 2011 from a bar on the outskirts of Mexico City. After searching through morgues far and wide, her mother, Beatriz Mejía, finally found her last month – in the morgue where she had initially reported her daughter’s disappearance.

The young woman’s body had been there two months, from December 2011 to January 2012, on the list of unidentified bodies.

“They had her there for two months and put her in a common grave. Two months when I went there practically every day to ask if they had any news! How can that be?” Mejía complained.

There are innumerable stories of families who incessantly make the rounds of cemeteries and mass graves seeking bodies buried as “NN” or Jane or John Doe or who fight to revive investigations that have been shelved.

“They told me they had no more leads to follow and that they had shelved the case,”
Brenda Rangel told IPS. Her younger brother, Héctor, disappeared in November 2009 with two other people in the northern state of Coahuila.

In response to the pressure from the families, the government announced May 17 the creation of a specialised unit to investigate and search for missing people, under the attorney general’s office.

But the unit, which has begun to operate, was only assigned 12 investigators.

To complete the bleak outlook, the crisis of forced disappearances has reached the capital, which up to now had seemed off-limits to the worst displays of violence.

On May 26, 11 young people from the poor suburb of Tepito were kidnapped from a bar in the centric tourist area of Zona Rosa. The police still have no leads.

Artists and activists embroidering for peace in Coyoacán square. Credit: Daniela Pastrana/IPS

By Daniela Pastrana
MEXICO CITY, Nov 29 2012 (IPS)

Each scarf represents a life cut short. Each stitch, a tear. Each thread, a cry of frustration about death and impunity.

The Mexican hands embroidering for peace belong to mothers searching for missing sons and daughters, people demanding justice for their brothers and sisters, and students, teachers, activists and artists showing their solidarity.

Conservative Mexican President Felipe Calderón, who hands over power on Saturday Dec. 1 to Enrique Peña of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), is facing criticism from activists regarding his human rights record.

But one protest stands out for its moral force: a string of thousands of white scarves embroidered with the names and stories of people who have been killed or have gone missing in Mexico since Calderón began to wage his war on drugs after taking office in December 2006.

“We want to send off Calderón with the pain that he has caused thousands of families,” one of the organisers of the embroidery project, Leticia Hidalgo from the northern city of Monterrey, told IPS. “Because (the measures taken by his government) totally destroyed my family, and changed our lives, and only the love for my son has kept us going.”

Her son Roy Rivera, a philosophy student at the Autonomous University of Nuevo León, was kidnapped on Jan. 11, 2011. His family paid the ransom, but he never returned. He was just about to turn 19.

Hidalgo embroidered on her scarf: “My boy, I put you in the hands of God. We’re waiting for you to come back soon, very soon. Stay strong. Your mama and Richi.”

The white scarves memorial will be set up in the Alameda Central, a park in Mexico City, with the scarves embroidered by hundreds of hands over the past 15 months in dozens of towns and cities around the country and abroad.

Some carry painful messages from parents and other family members. Others tell stories salvaged from oblivion by anonymous hands.

“15th of January. NL. Two women lose their lives in a shootout in Balcones Altavista. Embroidered by: Another woman”, reads one scarf hanging in Coyoacán square in the capital.

The idea of embroidering scarves as an act of protest came from Fuentes Rojas (Red Fountains), a group of artists who have dyed the water in fountains red to protest the blood shed by the government’s militarised security strategy.

The activists first began to embroider scarves in their meetings. In August 2011, during a day of artistic and cultural activities organised by the Movement for Peace and Justice with Dignity, they held their first collective embroidering session in the Zócalo, Mexico City’s central square.

After that, they held such gatherings every Sunday in Coyoacán square, in the south of the capital, and next to the Torre Latinoamericana in central Mexico City.

“We wanted to raise public awareness about this enormous tragedy, using the symbolic gesture of stitching up these broken stories that have been caused by the violence,” Elia Andrade, an artist, told IPS.

“We embroider for everyone, and what we put on the scarves is basically the information that we manage to find: the name, how and when they died, and who made the scarf. But it’s completely different when it’s stitched by a family member,” she said.

“That’s why every group started to do things a little differently, when the idea caught on and began to spread.”

For example, the women in Nuevo León, one of the Mexican states with the largest number of victims of forced disappearance, switched from red thread representing people who were killed, to green thread, to represent their missing sons and daughters.

“Green is the colour of hope, that we are going to find them,” said Hidalgo, who has been meeting with a group of women since March to embroider outside the Monterrey city hall. They now have 200 scarves embroidered, because every week, new people show up, who are searching for a missing loved one.

One of the biggest and most active groups is in Guadalajara, the capital of the western state of Jalisco.

“Embroidering a scarf is an act of love, of acknowledgement,” Teresa Sordo, one of the organisers of the group that meets every Sunday in Guadalajara’s Rojo park, wrote in the blog “Bordamos por la paz” (Embroidering for peace).

Many of the names and stories embroidered on their scarves are taken from a list titled
“Menos días aquí” (Fewer Days Here), an initiative of the group Nuestra Aparente Rendición (Our Apparent Surrender) which, based on newspaper reports, has started counting the number of people killed in the country every day.

“We embroider, perhaps, because a few hands can transform things and we need to transform them into beautiful things because so many hands are already doing appalling, unmentionable, incomprehensible things,” Sordo wrote.

Indigenous people forced to flee the community of San Juan Copala, in the southern state of Oaxaca, embroidered scarves for 28 of their people who were killed. Several native communities in Michoacán also sewed scarves for their dead.

In Guatemala and Nicaragua, scarves were stitched for the 72 migrants slaughtered in Tamaulipas in August 2010.

And in Mexico City, scarves were embroidered for the 49 children who died in a June 2009 fire in a day care centre in Sonora.

Other hands have started to embroider in Coahuila, another one of the states with the highest numbers of missing persons, and in Morelos, Puebla, Chihuahua, the state of Mexico, as well as countries like France, Germany and Japan.

The white scarves will form a memorial – a request that the victims expressed to Calderón during public talks s he held with representatives of the peace movement in June 2011.

But the only result of the talks was the construction of a mausoleum for soldiers killed, and a controversial construction that the government calls the “Memorial for Victims”, built in the Campo Militar, a military installation in Mexico City.

With skilled hands, María Herrera from Michoacán sews in red thread the name of one of the thousands of people killed during the six-year term of Calderón, who belongs to the National Action Party, which 12 years ago put an end to seven decades of government by the PRI, the party that is now returning to power.