‘The disappeared’: searching for 40,000 missing victims of Mexico’s drug wars
As he set off into the wilderness under a punishing midday sun, Jesse Barajas clutched an orange-handled machete and the dream of finding his little brother, José.
“He’s not alive, no. They don’t leave people alive,” the 62-year-old said as he slalomed through the parched scrubland of tumbleweed and cacti where they had played as kids. “Once they take someone they don’t let you live.”
It has been six months since José Barajas was snatched from his home near the US border, for reasons that remain obscure.
“I think he was working so hard that he forgot his own safety, you know?” Jesse said as he recounted how his 57-year-old brother was dragged from his ranch and joined the ever-swelling ranks of Mexico’s desaparecidos – now estimated to number at least 40,000 people.
Jesse, the eldest of seven siblings, said US-based relatives had implored José to join them north of the border as the cartels tightened their grip on a region notorious for the smuggling of drugs and people.
“We told him how big a monster is organised crime. It is a huge monster that nobody knows where it is hiding,” he said.
But José – who had built a successful business making decorative concrete columns for ranches and was in the process of erecting a new house – was adamant he would abandon neither his workers nor his homeland.
“He was a man that believed in Mexico,” said Jesse, who left Mexico as an undocumented migrant aged 14 and is now a US citizen. “He chose to stay here because he thought that he could change things, you know?”
The disappeared are perhaps the dirtiest secret of Mexico’s drug conflict, which has shown no sign of easing since leftist leader Andrés Manuel López Obrador took power last December promising a new era of peace.
In August Mexican authorities, who after years of public pressure are beginning to demonstrate greater interest in investigating such crimes, acknowledged over 3,000 clandestine burial sites. More than 500 had been discovered since López Obrador took power.
One as-yet undiscovered grave is thought to guard the remains of José Barajas. And one recent morning his family set off to find it, in the company of a government forensic team and – a heavily armed federal police escort.
“It just sucks not knowing where he’s at,” said the missing man’s 28-yearold son, who is also called José and had travelled from California to join the search.
The mission – one of the first conducted in conjunction with a newly created state search commission – began shortly before noon as searchers formed a human chain to comb a stony heath east of José’s ranch.
Jesse struck out ahead, pausing occasionally to skewer the ground with his machete. After puncturing the earth, he would raise the blade’s tip to his nose in the hope of detecting the sickly scent that might reveal the whereabouts of his brother’s corpse. Other searchers probed soft patches of soil with T-shaped steel rods.
Minutes later, Jesse spotted a black bomber jacket, half buried in the soil. He quickly decided it was not his brother’s but photographed the garment with his smartphone: “Maybe somebody is looking for somebody with this jacket, huh?”
As Jesse marched on – shadowed by a rifle-toting police agent – the hidden perils that lay behind his brother’s disappearance became clear.
Pickup trucks, apparently sent by cartel bosses to monitor the search party, rattled past on the country lane down which José’s abductors fled.
“These assholes are halcones,” Jesse complained, using the Spanish slang word for lookouts.
Unsettled by their presence, Jesse radioed another nearby search team to request a protective roadblock.
“They’re spying on us … watching our movements to see what we are looking for and what we are doing,” the police officer said.
Nerves jangled as the hawks continued to circle. “The criminals here are very bloody. They are beyond limits,” Jesse murmured as the police agent trained his gun on the road.
Twenty tense minutes later, reinforcements arrived. But the drama was not yet over. As Jesse clambered into the open back of a police vehicle two shiny SUVs appeared on the horizon and sped down the sun-cracked asphalt towards the group, before being forced to stop.
As the police car’s occupants braced for a gunfight, two men descended from the first SUV and exchanged a few inaudible words with the federal agents before the second car was allowed to pass unmolested.
The identity of its occupants remained a mystery. But as the vehicle raced away it left the unshakable impression that a local crime boss had been inside – and a serious confrontation narrowly avoided.
“We’re in a hostile place – and it’s not Iraq,” Jesse said as the team regrouped, heaving a collective sigh of relief.
After a lunch of energy drinks and granola bars, the hunt for José resumed.
“All we want to do is give him a proper burial, like every human,” the missing man’s son as a sniffer dog joined the search.
José’s son said relatives had not told his 92-year-old grandmother, who suffers from Alzheimer’s, what had happened and had yet to fully comprehend it themselves. “I guess we have to be OK with not being OK,” he said.
Once his father was found, José said the family would sell up and cut ties with the land his father had so loved. “It’s not the same any more, you know what I mean?”
Three hours later, nothing had been found but coyote bones and clothes ditched by migrants as they trekked towards the US. Back at his brother’s ranch, Jesse busied himself handing out burritos and spicy nachos to the famished searchers.
Fernando Ocegueda, the activist who had organized the mission, insisted searchers should keep faith. “Once we spent 15 days searching and found nothing – and on the last day we found three bodies.”
“This kind of activism is about patience, not speed,” Ocegueda later added.
Two days later, after a second fruit
less hunt near the ranch, the Barajas family headed south to join another search, though this time not for José.
Outside a police station in the coastal town of Ensenada they met dozens of mostly female searchers – members of a local “collective”hoping to find their loved ones.
As the group explored its first location – a rocky wasteland behind the town’s country club – terrible stories of violence, fear and grief emerged.
“It was my nephew. They took him 18 days ago,” said one thirtysomething woman, who – like all of the collective’s