Haunted by loss, and chasing ghosts in Mexico
Over 30,000 missing men, women, children silent victims of drug war
XALAPA, Mexico — At 5 a.m., the couple stirred to the buzz of a cellphone alarm. They had hardly slept — Carlos Saldaña had been in the hospital the night before, betrayed by his fragile stomach.
He had prayed that the pain would subside, that God would give him strength. Today was the raid, the culmination of years of tracking the cartels, of lonely reconnaissance missions to find where they had discarded his daughter.
For so long, he had begged officials to do something, anything. Now, he wondered if he could even walk.
“Why tonight, God?” he had murmured in the hospital, doubled over.
He had spent the last six years searching for his daughter Karla, charging through every obstacle with an obsession that bordered on lunacy — cartel threats, government indifference, declining health, even his other children, who feared that his reckless hunt had put them in danger.
Vicky Delgadillo watched as he eased out of bed and grabbed a cane. She had a missing girl as well, Yunery, whom Saldaña now thought of as his own. For the last two years, the couple had shared
a home, a life and a love born of loss. She understood the raw fixation that defined his life. It defined hers too.
Before dawn, their prayers were answered. If not fully recovered, Saldaña was at least well enough to go on the raid of the ranch where he knew, deep down, both girls were buried — two bodies among the thousands lost in Veracruz state, among the tens of thousands nationwide.
They left before sunrise that humid June morning.
‘Entire state is a mass grave’
Officially, the Mexican government acknowledges the disappearances of more than 30,000 people — men, women and children trapped in a liminal abyss — neither dead nor alive, silent victims of the drug war.
But the truth is no one knows how many people are missing in Mexico.
Not the government, which does not have a national registry of the missing. Not the families caught in emotional purgatory. Not the authorities in states like Veracruz, where Karla and Yunery disappeared in a single 24-hour stretch.
When the new governor of Veracruz began his term in December, the state’s official figure for the number of missing was in the low hundreds. Upon the most basic review, the governor revised it — to nearly 2,600.
In the past year alone, the remains of nearly 300 bodies have been unearthed from clandestine graves in Veracruz.
In March, Veracruz announced that it didn’t have money to do DNA tests on the remains that had been found, leaving parents like 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,” said Jorge Winckler, the state’s attorney general.
For more than a decade, cartels across Mexico have taken out their rivals with utter impunity, tossing their remains into unmarked graves across the country. 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 can be no case.
“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.
Karla disappeared with one of Saldaña’s estranged children, Jesus. They had gone out together that night, Nov. 28, 2011, to a party. The two were last seen in her car. It was recovered two days later in the possession of an off-duty policeman.
Saldaña began 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 6 feet into the ground, then wrenched them out to sniff for the smell of decay. This is how the poor search for their dead.
A friend of Karla’s told Saldaña 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.
The dirty war, then and now
Mexico amassed some 1,200 disappearances during the 1960s and 1970s at the hands of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which ruled for nearly 70 years and governs again today. Historians call this period of disappearances the dirty war.
But unlike other Latin American countries, Mexico never really investigated its atrocities. While truth commissions and exhumations of mass graves sought to exorcise the sins of past regimes elsewhere in the region, government responsibility in Mexico largely stayed buried. Attempts in the early 2000s fell apart, leading to few arrests or prosecutions.
The disappearances continued, in a new form. The numbers were small, the cases isolated and the purpose distinct from earlier iterations. It was not political but criminal.
This time, the disappearances were carried out by organized crime as it battled for territory in the lucrative drug trade. Along the border with Texas, the numbers slowly ticked higher. The government eventually launched a war against organized crime in 2006. And as the violence mounted, so did the disappearances.
The search at the ranch
The ranch, meandering over expansive terrain, had been abandoned. But only recently. The team — forensic scientists, police officers and investigators — discovered healthy horses, cattle and well-tended sheep roaming around when they arrived.
The couple stumbled on a large metal bin filled with dirt and random pieces of clothing, perhaps, they thought, the belongings of captives.
The next day, they continued searching but came away with more questions than answers. A cinder block room contained a soiled mattress and chains — some grisly torture chamber, the couple imagined. Nearby, a stack of women’s undergarments — bras and panties — tied together.
“No one would even hear if someone was screaming at the top of their lungs from here,” Saldaña said.
After an hour of digging, a pile of 500 items sat before them: baby outfits, women’s blouses, worn-out jeans and shoes.
The clothes only reminded Saldaña how far they were from finding Karla, Jesus and Yunery.
A new law
In Veracruz, the missing are also recorded in small black books, where their names and details are lost to the modern age.
The state’s forensic laboratory chief, Rita Adriana Licea Cadena, pulled out a ledger. In it, she said, were the names of thousands of individuals who had turned over their DNA in the hope that it might match some of the remains disinterred from mass graves across the state.
But no one had been able to computerize the records, which were drawn from 2010-13. In notebook form like this, the data was virtually useless.
Public pressure after 43 college students vanished in 2014 helped lead to a new law, enacted this month, to combat disappearances.
But, “the challenge will be implementing the law,” said Juan Pedro Schaerer, director of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Mexico, who helped shape the legislation.
On paper, the Law Against Forced Disappearances creates a national registry of the missing. It should also bring more resources, for forensic investigations and the management of precious DNA information.
Raised hopes, and dashed ones
In April, the couple had been scouring the state, as usual, asking to review case files, poring over the descriptions and pictures of missing persons. Suddenly, they got a hit.
The girl was short, with the same hair color and complexion as Yunery. Delgadillo begged authorities to exhume the body for a DNA test.
“It wasn’t my daughter,” she said, sobbing lightly. “But still I feel a sense of peace, that another family has their daughter back, that they can stop looking.”
As a couple, Saldaña and Delgadillo have decided to adopt a new approach to mourning. Instead of learning to live without their children, they are trying to live with them. To celebrate them every day.
In a recent dream, Saldaña confronted the men responsible for Karla’s abduction. With an arsenal of automatic weapons, he fought them like an action hero, leaving no survivors.
In the dream, he said, it was up to him and no one else. No failing system, numb to his pleas. No crooked cops or courts that so often failed to reach convictions in Mexico. Only justice.
“If you kill them,” he said, “at least it’s over.”