“I would just like a bone of my son”: the desperate search of relatives of 95,000 disappeared in Mexico

Desperate, the mother pleads with a soldier to let her enter the field where her son’s remains could be, one of the 95,000 missing in Mexico. A bone would be enough for him to have a little peace.

Forensics are digging the earth in this wild place of La Bartolina, a hamlet in the state of Tamaulipas (northwest) where authorities have found half a ton of human remains since 2017.

But in what was once a cornfield, the woman, who lost track of her son almost a year ago, runs into police cars, protective tapes and a military man who controls the entrance.

“Answer me! You have children? Wouldn’t it hurt? (…) I would just like a bone of my son resting next to my husband, to know that it belongs to my son”, The mother insists to the soldier, who is unable to get out of his silence.

La Bartolina is a few kilometers from the city of Matamoros (border with the United States), plagued by the violence of drug trafficking and other organized crime gangs.

The National Search Commission (CNB), the official body that coordinates the tracking of the disappeared, classifies the site as an “extermination camp” due to the number of people who are believed to have been murdered and cremated there.

The mother – who avoids giving her name – is not sure that her son’s remains are in this place. But he decided to go when he learned that a group of mothers and relatives would also do so, who carried out their own searches due to the “inefficiency” of the authorities.

A way of passage for drugs to the United States and for undocumented immigrants, Tamaulipas registers 11,835 disappeared, a figure only surpassed by the 14,870 cases in the state of Jalisco. In total, Mexico counts 95,121 disappeared, according to official figures released on Friday during the first visit to the country by the UN Committee Against Forced Disappearance.

The phenomenon of the disappeared and clandestine graves is not new in Mexico or in Latin America, where the victims have been in the tens of thousands for decades due to dictatorships, guerrilla wars and organized crime.

However, the problem in Mexico has worsened since 2006 when the government of President Felipe Calderón (2006-2012) launched a military offensive that has failed to subdue the cartels.

Since then, Mexico has registered 300,000 murders, mostly attributed to organizations dedicated to multiple crimes such as drug trafficking, arms smuggling, kidnapping, extortion, migrant smuggling and fuel theft, known as “huachicol”.

“Organized crime continues to be a main cause” of violence, says Laura Atuesta, from the drug policy program of the Center for Economic Research and Teaching (CIDE).

The disappearance between individuals is “linked to the corruption of the police forces linked to organized crime,” stressed in mid-November the government’s undersecretary for Human Rights, Alejandro Encinas, before the UN Committee.

75% of the victims are men and 25% women, mostly young, according to CNB. Many are trapped in poverty that affects 43.9% of the population, some 55 million people.

In conflict zones between the police and cartels, girls are kidnapped for trafficking in persons, a drama portrayed in the film “Noche de fuego”, by the Mexican-Salvadoran filmmaker Tatiana Huezo, presented at the Cannes and San Sebastián East festivals. anus.

Letter to the Cartel

A lead sun punishes La Bartolina. María Isela Valdez, 58, who heads the group of mothers in search of their children, is angry with the security forces that prevent her from passing.

“Why weren’t the National Guard, the Army and the Navy here when they were brought in, massacred, tortured, buried and burned?” Asks the woman, who is looking for her son Roberto, kidnapped in the neighboring city from Reynosa in 2014.

María Isela leads the group together with her 38-year-old daughter Delia.

In June 2019, the mother knelt in front of the leftist president Andrés Manuel López Obrador crying out for help; Last July his daughter asked in a statement to the Gulf Cartel – one of those that dominates the area – a “truce” to be able to enter La Bartolina.

After that letter, sit-ins at the prosecutor’s office and trades to get security, Delia and her mother managed to get there.

“We are here for the authority to do its job, because if we leave, they do nothing,” Delia told AFP, after obtaining authorization for the members of the group to wait under a tent for information on the findings.

The journey is slow and exhausting, with temperatures up to 40 degrees Celsius barely attenuated by the slight breeze off a body of water. While waiting, snakes can be heard slithering through the trees and thorny bushes.

The area is also besieged by criminals. In fact, the second day of work ended earlier than expected due to clashes between police and gunmen in Matamoros.

Investigations there will take up to a year.

Drug war

“Families (…) continue to face a system that does not respond to them,” admits Karla Quintana, head of the CNB, which was activated in 2018.

Despite indicating progress, Quintana recalls that in Mexico 98% of crimes go unpunished and that in the morgues there are thousands of unidentified bodies because the prosecutors are overflowing.

“The big problem is being the prosecutors,” says Quintana, who at the end of September revealed the discovery of another “death camp” near Nuevo Laredo (Tamaulipas).

At the end of its visit on Friday, the UN Committee denounced an environment of “impunity”, as well as “ineffectiveness” and “discretion” in searches. A hundred people have disappeared during the Committee’s 10-day stay in Mexico, according to a member of the delegation.

President López Obrador recognizes that the problem of the disappeared is the “most painful inheritance” facing his government, which began in December 2018, and promises to fight impunity.

Since March 2019 “2,300 days of search have been carried out by the National Search Commission, together with the relatives,” according to the Undersecretary for Human Rights.

In general, these disappearances arouse indifference in Mexican society, accustomed to living with violence.

In contrast, the case of 43 students from the rural school of Ayotzinapa, in the southern state of Guerrero, caused great outrage inside and outside of Mexico. They disappeared on the night of September 26, 2014 after being detained by police allied with drug traffickers., and only the remains of three of them have been identified.

The motives for the crime, which occurred when the normalistas seized a bus to participate in a protest, are also unclear. According to one of the hypotheses, the vehicle would have been loaded with drug from the Guerreros Unidos cartel, without the young people knowing.

Killed in search

The AFP also observed search work in the city of Hermosillo (Sonora), where every week Milagros Valenzuela arms herself with shovels and picks to find her brothers Alejandro and Marco Antonio, who disappeared in 2015 and 2019, respectively.

On those days, she and the group she leads are guarded by state police. The fear is more than founded: in July his partner Aranza Ramos, 28, who was looking for her husband Brayan Celaya, was shot to death at her home in nearby Guaymas.

It is not known if the murder is linked to the search for the young woman. The UN Human Rights office asked Mexico to investigate the case.

When she found out, 21-year-old Milagros was preparing search files that she publishes on Facebook.

“A lot of things crossed my mind, because she has a two-year-old girl,” she says next to a portrait of her partner, a crucifix and a blanket with dozens of faces of the disappeared, some with the legend “Found lifeless.”

Also “I thought she was going to meet her husband again (…), the only thing she was looking for,” she continues.

The women meet early at a gas station in Hermosillo. One of them, who is looking for her son who disappeared four years ago, sees these days as a therapy against depression; others recharge in camaraderie and humor.

“And what is this for?” Asks a policeman who accompanies them, raising a pickaxe. They all burst out laughing. But good spirits quickly give way to frustration. “The hardest thing is to go with the hope that you will find it and return home empty-handed”, confesses Milagros.

His group publicly calls on criminals not to make the bodies disappear. “If you already took their lives, why do you bury them? Why do you burn them?”

She gives herself the answer. “Unfortunately the authorities say that without a body there is no crime.”

“Give it back to me”

Going with police protection does not free them from risks. During a second day of searching, Milagros is sure that in a fenced field there are remains from the fluttering of vultures.

But the agents warn of shootings in the nearby municipality of Pitiquito that have left four dead. “It gets hot there and everything gets hot,” says a policeman to Milagros, who insists on crossing the fence.

The Sonora prosecutor’s office assures that it has accompanied the search efforts since the first collective in the state was created, for which it hired specialists and forensic teams.

“The attorney general (Claudia Contreras) maintains the will and commitment to assist and support the Sonora search engines in their extraordinary work, because it is fair,” said a spokeswoman.

With permanent reports of criminal infiltration of security agencies, the work of investigators involves high risk.

The Argentine Mercedes Doretti, from the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF, independent), denounced in these days having been spied on by the defunct Attorney General’s Office of Mexico during her work on disappearances, along with a lawyer and a journalist.

Despite this, Anel Robles, Milagros’ partner, is determined to continue searching for her husband, who disappeared at the hands of the police. “If we don’t look for them, who?”.

The woman says that her young children would like to help her find him. “The child asks every day: ‘Those gentlemen who stole my dad, don’t you have their number? So they can give it back to me. ‘ (I)