Disappearing in search of the missing: the double tragedy of thousands of Mexican families

By Jennifer Gonzalez Covarrubias

In search of earthen wells revealing rotten corpses, María Herrera, a 70-year-old woman, sweeps dried leaves on a hill in the Mexican city of Huitzuco I hope to find at least one remnant of their four missing children.

"Remember that the bodies release gases and cause the elevation of the earth, then, when they decompose more, they examine the subsidence ", indicates, with a broken voice, a hundred people who track underground graves with the help of picks and picks and who are part of an independent brigade in the convulsive state of Guerrero (south).

Official reports of faded away in Mexico increases vertiginously since December 2006, on the side of militarization the fight against drug trafficking, and altogether more than 40,000 today.

Statistics include two or more people from the same family abducted at the same time.

But there is an even more tragic subgroup: those who have disappeared
in search of their previously abducted parents.

María Herrera, a gray-haired woman with small black eyes, This is the most visible face of those twenty families who died alive more than once.

He had eight children in Pajuacarán, Michoacán (West), where they only survive agriculture or emigrate to the United States, but they have changed their history. They ventured into selling crockery and then trading in gold all over the country..

On one of his routine trips company, in August 2008, his youngest children, Raúl, 19, and Jesús Salvador, 24, arrived in Guerrero when there was a bloody settlement of accounts between drug traffickers.

"My brothers, not knowing this information, come to Atoyac de Álvarez", Guerrero, with five employees and about 90,000 dollars at the exchange rate of the moment in cash and gold, says Juan Carlos, another of Herrera's children.

Suspects that a local cartel confused them with criminals from a rival group and they were arrested in collusion with the local police.

Despite the risks, the family started looking for their own: recruited private investigators, knocked on the doors of the government. Nothing worked and the father, Guillermo Trujillo, died of a cerebral infarction in February 2009.

The tragedy is aggravated when they ran out of money then Luis Armando and Gustavo, aged 25 and 27, parents of three children, decided to resume the gold trade.

"We are going to work to find our brothers because the same crime is taking them to different regions and hope we find them again," Gustavo told her mother, she recalls.

On September 22, 2010, Gustavo Trujillo Herrera contacted his wife of Poza Rica, Veracruz. It was the last day they heard from him and his brother Armando.

They discovered that shortly after this phone call, they had been arrested by the police. Juan Carlos believes that when the uniforms discovered that they were looking for their brothers and decided to "make them disappear".

Ms. María and her four other children, including a woman, they moved to the center of the country to focus on investigations. They left the family home and in the vast dining room in which he dreamed of always eating their eight children, their daughters-in-law and their grandchildren.

He even asked the help of former president Felipe Calderón (2006-2012) during a public ceremony. With time, he lost all hope of finding them alive.

Years later, in 2016, he made his first follow-up in Veracruz.
Since then, he has learned the techniques of body search advised by forensic anthropologists, such as the nailing of iron T-shaped stems to find out if there are noxious gases in the soil due to decomposition.

Mexico is "a huge underground grave," acknowledges the undersecretary for human rights, Alejandro Encinas. Official figures indicate that a thousand illegal graves have been discovered and that about 26,000 bodies located in morgues have not been identified, according to President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

His government announced this month a plan for missing persons, which includes the creation of a new forensic institute.

"We will continue to searchbut by God, to identify those we have already found"Herrera asks.

The tragic list of Maria's losses, which now he is dedicated to selling dolls and uniforms in his poor houseThis almost increased six months ago when a stranger tried to attack with a pistol against Juan Carlos, 41, who managed to escape by jumping off the patio fence. his house.

The extent of the case the old woman motivated a judge to order the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to accept the jurisdiction of the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances.

One of the days of the Fourth National Missing Persons Research Brigade, in which the woman participated between January and February, was held on a hill known as Antena de los Timbres. , in Huitzuco.

It is the same city to which the corrupt police belonged involved in the resounding demise of 43 students in September 2014.

Guarded by federal police in armed vans, relatives found a corpse who later examined experts.

With renewed faith, Herrera inspected with his staff in groves of long spines. By the way, he found a whitish rock formation that shone under the intense sun.

"I thought it was a bone, but it's a stone," he murmured before throwing it, disappointed.

The family members concluded this day with rebellious bowels and no other conclusion, but the brigade found seven corpses and about 100 human remains between January 20th and February 2nd.

"Every time we climb in such an inhospitable place, it means suffering … Who heard their cries of pain? Who heard his last words? There was no one, no one to listen to them "Herrera said in the stuffy crying.