Thousands remain missing in Mexico
Mysteries forcing their families to grasp for answers
TIJUANA, Mexico — Humberto Daniel Ramirez Hernandez was last seen on a Tijuana street corner where he was smoking a cigarette in front of a small convenience store near his home nearly two years ago.
His disappearance is just one example of a much larger problem. According to the most recently released government figures, more than 73,200 Mexicans are missing.
They’re known as los
desaparecidos — those who have vanished without a trace.
Family members and others say Mexico’s staggering roster of missing persons reflects at least official indifference on the part of authorities, and in some cases, complicity.
The most high-profile case is that of the 43 young male students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers College, a small college in southern Mexico with a tradition of left-wing activism.
On their way to a protest in Mexico City, the group disappeared from Iguala, Guerrero, in September 2014, after a confrontation with government security forces, who were acting in concert with local politicians and organized crime, according to Mexico’s federal government.
In June 2020, Reforma reported the Attorney General of Mexico announced the arrest of the cartel leader who allegedly ordered the students’ assassination. Arrest warrants were issued this week for local police, federal police and members of the army, according to Mexico News Daily.
Most of the victims’ remains were never found. But the search for the missing students in the rural hills of Guerrero turned up hundreds of other bodies, inspiring people across the country to form loose political and social alliances and search for the remains of their own missing loved ones.
In Tijuana, that movement predates the Ayotzinapa case.
One father’s desperate search for his kidnapped son in 2007 led to the discovery of abandoned properties where a Tijuana bricklayer named Santiago Meza, also known as “El Pozolero,” dissolved as many as 650 bodies in caustic acid for the Arrellano Felix cartel.
He left their remains — mostly just tiny fragments of bones and teeth that did not dissolve in the acid — in partially-constructed houses he worked on as a mason.
“We had to do the hard work of converting ourselves into investigators not for our own will, but forced by circumstances, when the authorities did not do their proper job. We had to enter (the properties) ourselves, apart from authorities, to discover these units,” said Fernando Ocegueda, the father who discovered the properties and founded the group United for Baja California’s Disappeared, which organized a dozen different parent collectives.
Since then, family members have been risking their own safety to search for their missing relatives in Tijuana. They form into groups both for protection and for political purposes, so as to lobby state officials in greater numbers.
In Baja California, such parent groups have located the bodies of 109 missing people so far in 2020 — all buried in clandestine gravesites in rural hillsides across the state, according to Fernando Ortegoza, the president of MOVED, an umbrella group of collectives that represents about 120 parents.
Ocegueda’s 2007 discovery drew international law enforcement attention and brought answers to hundreds of families. But the disappearances in Tijuana continued.
Ramirez, a 21-year-old factory worker, was a new father when he disappeared in 2019.
His family had recently relocated from Jalisco for work, according to his mother. Ramirez, his wife and then-6-month-old baby daughter settled four months prior in the Vinedos Casa Blanca neighborhood of southeastern Tijuana, where the rent is cheaper, but crime is much higher.
His mother, Maria Dolores, says Baja California state law enforcement authorities have been reluctant to investigate her son’s missing-persons case. So she’s been gathering clues herself.
She has video from a home surveillance camera across the street from where he disappeared, statements from the store clerk who reportedly saw him last and records from the border factory where he worked.
But she can’t access her son’s bank records without police intervention.
“(Police) haven’t given me a response about my son’s bank card. He had an account. I want to know if there were any charges. I want to see the bank statement,” she said last week outside an abandoned property in Colonia Campos, a neighborhood in eastern Tijuana. “They told me the bank hasn’t responded to their requests.”
Dolores said even though her son disappeared on Jan. 28, 2019, the plastics manufacturing factory where he worked inexplicably has records showing that he continued showing up for work through Feb. 4.
“You’re not an investiga tor and neither am I, but we both can see, ‘Wow, that maybe seems important. Like a possible line of investigation,’ ” she said. “But as far as I know, (the police) haven’t even asked about that.”
Eson Multiwin, the Taiwan-based maquiladora where Ramirez worked, did not respond to a request for comment, nor did it confirm Ramirez’s last documented day of work.
A spokesman for state police, which runs the team that investigates kidnapping, did not respond to questions about the case.
Like the vast majority of other parents searching for their missing children, Dolores said she doesn’t know why authorities haven’t responded to her about the bank statements or other clues in her son’s case.
She only knows kidnappings and disappearances in Tijuana are commonplace, and no one ever gets caught.
David Contreras, a retired detective sergeant who served for 27 years with the San Diego Police Department — much of it on the border-liaison team gathering intelligence in Mexico — estimated nearly a quarter of the municipal police he encountered participated in corrupt activities.
Most of it involved small bribes or other minor offenses, not major crimes.
Still, Contreras, who has worked as a private investigator in Tijuana negotiating ransom payments for kidnapped family members, said “it’s not uncommon” for Mexican law enforcement to be involved in kidnappings.
“If we’re talking about wealthy and successful businesspeople in Tijuana, and they don’t trust law enforcement with their missing-persons case, then what happens with common folk who can’t afford to hire a foreign company from the U.S. or Israel to negotiate the return of their loved one?” he said.