Not Dead. Not Alive. Just Gone.

the rest, allowing him to go on the raid of the ranch where he knew, deep down, both girls were buried — two bodies among the thousands lost in the state of Veracruz, among the tens of thousands nationwide.

Ms. Delgadillo’s grandchildren — Yunery’s little girls — slept in the second bedroom. Mr. Saldaña finished packing.

“I don’t think we will need this today,” he said, grabbing a long metal spike, a crude tool they often used to find mass graves. “I think others will bring theirs for the search.”

They left before sunrise that June morning, hopeful and afraid of what they might find.

Officially, the Mexican government acknowledges the disappearances of more than 30,000 people. But the truth is no one knows the true number. In the last year alone, the remains of nearly 300 bodies have been unearthed from clandestine graves in Veracruz, unidentified fragments that only begin to tell the story of what has transpired in the state, and more broadly the nation, over the last decade.

“There are an infinite number of people who are too scared to even say anything, whose cases we know nothing about,” said the state’s attorney general, Jorge Winckler.

Not that the state could handle many more. In March, Veracruz announced that it didn’t have money to do DNA tests on the remains that had already been found, leaving parents like Mr. Saldaña to panhandle in the street to raise it themselves.

Overwhelmed, the state also decided to temporarily halt all new searches for clandestine graves. There was simply nowhere else to put the bodies.

“The entire state is a mass grave,” the attorney general said.

For more than a decade, cartels across Mexico have taken out their rivals with utter impunity, tossing their remains into unmarked graves. Soldiers and law enforcement officers often adopt the same approach, leaving many families too terrified to ask for help from a government they see as complicit.

It is both highly efficient and cruel: Without a body, there is no case. And the disappearances inflict a lasting torture on enemies — robbing them of even the finality of death.

“The cruelest thing about a disappearance is that it leaves you with this desperate hope that your child might actually still be alive somewhere,” said Daniel Wilkinson, a managing director at Human Rights Watch. “You’re trapped in this horrific limbo where you can’t mourn or move on because that feels like betrayal, like you’re killing off your own child.”

In the summer of 2013, Mr. Saldaña’s marriage was being torn apart by loss. In the two years since Karla’s disappearance, he had spent every day planning his next search for his daughter, his next interview with her friends, his next stakeout of the men he thought responsible. His wife at the time, who was not Karla’s mother, couldn’t take it. After more than a decade together, they split.

Mr. Saldaña has fathered nine children, with multiple women. Karla had disappeared with one of his estranged children, Jesus. The half brother and sister were close, though Mr. Saldaña rarely saw him, thanks to an ugly separation with his mother.

Jesus and Karla had gone out together that night, November 28, 2011. They enjoyed the night life, though the clubs and bars were often populated with members of organized crime. The two were last seen in her car. It was recovered two days later in the possession of an off- duty policeman.

Mr. Saldaña wonders whether some cartel member tried to pick up Karla at a bar that night, or whether she and Jesus witnessed something they weren’t supposed to.

Mr. Saldaña joined a collective of families and began attending meetings. To search for a missing loved one in Mexico is to inhabit a life of desperate entrepreneurialism. Families, resigned to looking on their own, build coalitions, pressure and cajole officials, and cling to every shred of hope.

Mr. Saldaña threw himself into it, combing areas where criminals may have murdered people, organizing free DNA tests and raising money to pay for it all. He and others scouted out suspicious plots of land, looking for signs of slightly upturned earth. When they found one, they hammered long metal crosses two meters into the ground, then wrenched them out to sniff for the smell of decay. This is how the poor search for their dead.

During his first year with the collective, Mr. Saldaña met Ms. Delgadillo, a 43-year- old mother of four. She and Mr. Saldaña had an especially haunting bond: Their children had disappeared less than a day apart — abducted, they believed, by the same group of criminals.

Mr. Saldaña had scoured Veracruz for details of the criminal oper- ation. A friend of Karla’s told him of a ranch where cartel members were believed to dissolve their victims in acid. He felt, somehow, that this was where their children had been taken. “We were friends and companions in this fight,” Mr. Saldaña said. “But we decided to spend our lives together and live this struggle united.”

On his birthday — May 24, 2015 — he moved in with her.

The convoy to the ranch left at 6:30 a. m. sharp, a procession of camouflage trucks bearing marines, police officers and officials. Mr. Saldaña and Ms. Delgadillo trailed in a small van transporting the families.

They drove for nearly an hour. Past a creek flowing over an unpaved road, the vehicles came to an entrance. The ranch had been abandoned. But only recently. The team — a mix of forensic scientists, police officers and investigators — discovered healthy horses, cattle and well-tended sheep roaming around.

The couple wandered the grounds. They stumbled on a large metal bin filled with dirt and random pieces of clothing, perhaps, they thought, the belongings of captives.

Having been the engine behind the entire raid, Mr. Saldaña barked orders. The officials grew weary of his commands. He was pointing to undisturbed earth, where the police dogs caught no scent.

“I’m not simply looking for the remains,” he shouted. “I know you want to find body parts, but I have information that our kids were probably dissolved in acid or burned.”

“I’m looking for buried clothing,” he said, “and ashes.”

The next day, they continued searching. A cinder block room contained a soiled mattress and chains — some grisly torture chamber, the couple imagined. Nearby was a stack of women’s undergarments tied together.

Mr. Saldaña and Ms. Delgadillo continued down the hill for another kilometer. He carried a metal stick with a hook, to pry loose items from the soft earth. His hook snagged a piece of clothing, and then another, and another. He called for help.

The forensic specialists took over, drawing a circle around the spot. They dug. An hour later, a pile of 500 items sat before them: baby outfits, women’s blouses, jeans and shoes.

A profound sadness settled over Mr. Saldaña. He took no comfort in finding the clothes that he had chastised officials to look for, no comfort in being right. It only reminded him how far they were from finding Karla, Jesus and Yunery.

“I wonder if this clothing might be as close as we ever get to our children,” he said to Ms. Delgadillo. “That its very existence means we may never reach them.”

They found nothing else.