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Almost 100,000 people have disappeared in Mexico, according to to the country’s National Research Commission, which maintains an existing file since 1964.
It is believed that most were killed by drug cartels, their bodies thrown into shallow or burnt graves.
Researchers have learned over the past decade, since the height of the Mexican drug war in 2006-2012, that gangs often use the same places over and over again, creating gruesome death fields.
“The disappearance is perhaps the most extreme form of suffering for the relatives of the victims,” said Angélica Durán-Martínez, professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, and expert on violence in Latin America. The New York Times.
Karla Quintana Osuna, a Harvard-trained lawyer who previously worked at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, is leading a new initiative at the National Research Commission to find reliable answers.
“The challenge is abysmal, it is titanic,” said Quintana. “As long as there is no justice, a clear message is being sent that this can continue to happen.”
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The problem has been going on for so long – and it is believed that so many have ended up in underground graves – that now some children have grown up and are seeking their own. faded away parents.
“Every day, every day across the country, disappearances continue to be reported,” said César Peniche Espejel, attorney general of Chihuahua, one of Mexico’s most violent states. “This is what the federal government was unable to tackle.”
Durán-Martínez added that there is no solution due to the double problem of organized crime and the involvement of the state security apparatus in bloodshed.
Many of the missing have been kidnapped and presumably killed by drug cartels or kidnapper gangs, but authorities and police are also suspected in some cases.
The total number of people missing in Mexico since 2006 and never found stands at nearly 87,855, the government said in a report released earlier this year.
There are three golden rules that Mexican search groups follow:
- Human remains are not called corpses or bodies. Researchers call them “treasures” because they are precious to grieving families.
- Researchers typically call law enforcement when they think they’ve found a burial, mainly because authorities often refuse to do slow but critical DNA testing unless the remains are professionally exhumed.
- Searches are not conducted to find the perpetrators, only to find loved ones.
The researchers hoped the third rule would protect them from retaliation.
For a long time, this has meant that researchers, and the police who often accompany them, focus on finding graves and identifying the remains, not collecting evidence of how they died or who they died. killed. Research groups sometimes even obtain anonymous information on where the bodies are buried, knowledge likely only available to the killers or their accomplices.
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Noemy Padilla Aldáz has spent the last two years in search of his son, Juan Carlos.
“It’s a horrible uncertainty that I don’t wish on anyone,” the mom said.
20 year old man faded away one morning after finishing a night shift at a local taqueria.
“If I knew he was dead then I would know he was not in pain,” she said. “But we don’t know, and it’s like torture, not to know.”
Mom refuses to give up looking for her missing son.
“Sometimes I think he might still be alive, other times I think he isn’t,” she said. “But I still have hope.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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