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.
In March, Veracruz announced that it didn’t have money to do DNA tests on the remains that had been found, leaving parents such as 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 officers often adopt the same approach, leaving many families too terrified to ask for help from a government they see as complicit.
Karla disappeared with her brother Jesus, one of Saldaña’s estranged children. 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 might have murdered people, 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 Vicky Delgadillo and Carlos Saldaña leave their home in the early morning hours to search a ranch where they believe their missing children are buried.
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
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. Though 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. This time, they 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.
In 2012, leaked documents showed that the government believed there to be a total of 25,000 people missing across the country, perhaps the first time any official recognition of the problem surfaced. This year, the tally climbed to nearly 33,000.
Search of the ranch
The ranch, meandering over expansive terrain, had been abandoned. But only recently. The team from finding Karla, Jesus and Yunery.
Authorities gave the families one more day to search the property, a stretch of land that would take 10 times that many people a week to cover.
They found nothing else. 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. In notebook form like this, the information is 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.
In April, Saldaña and Delgadillo 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.”