In Mexico, those searching for missing relatives can disappear too
HUITZUCODE LOS FIGUEROA: Maria Herrera is scraping at the earth on a hill in the town of Huitzuco, in southern Mexico, looking for the mounds or sunken spots that indicate a decaying corpse.
At 70 years old, Herrera is hoping against all odds to find her four missing sons - two who disappeared in 2008, and two who vanished in 2010 looking for their brothers.
“Every time we come to one of these nasty places, we suffer.... Who heard their screams of pain? Who heard their last words?” she said through tears as she dug in the dirt with a group of 100 other activists in the violent state of Guerrero.
The small, gray-haired grandmother is the face of a dirty secret that has haunted Mexico for years: the countryside of Latin America’s secondlargest economy is littered with bodies.
More than 40,000 people are missing in Mexico, which has been swept by a wave of violence since the government declared war on the country’s powerful drug cartels in 2006.
Herrera regularly goes out searching for her sons with other relatives of the “disappeared.”
But she is also part of a smaller, even more tragic group: some 20 families who have lost children not once but twice, when the ones who remained went looking for their missing siblings and ended up disappearing too.
Herrera’s family comes from Pajuacaran, a small town in western Mexico where most people are farmers or emigrate to the United States.
She and her husband decided they wanted something different for their eight children. They started a small business selling household goods door to door, then used the profits to launch a nationwide gold exchange.
Part of the business, she said, involved traveling the country to buy and sell gold -which is what Jesus Salvador, then 24, and Raul, then 19, were doing in Guerrero in 2008.
Traveling with five employees in an SUV carrying nearly $90,000 in cash and gold, they did not realize a bloody cartel turf war was just breaking out in the state.
“My brothers had no idea when they arrived,” said Juan Carlos, 41, their older sibling.
He and his family believe a local cartel mistook the brothers and their co-workers for members of a rival group and had some crooked cops arrest them. Such stories are not uncommon in Guerrero.