Americans found quickly; Mexico’s missing still lost
MEXICO CITY — When four Americans were kidnapped in the border city of Matamoros, authorities rescued the survivors within days, but thousands of Mexicans remain missing in the state long associated with cartel violence.
Mexican authorities quickly blamed the local Gulf cartel for shooting up the Americans’ minivan after they crossed the border for cosmetic surgery Friday. They found the Americans early Tuesday after a massive search involving squads of Mexican soldiers and National Guard troops.
By contrast, more than 112,000 Mexicans remain missing nationwide, in many cases years or decades after they disappeared. Although a convoy of armored Mexican military trucks extracted the Americans, the only ones searching for most of the missing Mexicans are their desperate relatives.
“If these people had been Mexicans, they might still be disappeared,” said Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, an associate professor at George Mason University.
The rescue of the Americans provoked a special kind of fury in Tamaulipas, a border state long dominated by the warring Gulf and Northeast cartels, where the Network of Disappeared activist group estimates that 12,537 people remain missing.
Delia Quiroa, from the nearby city of Reynosa, has been looking for her brother Roberto for nine years.
Despite carrying out their own searches and pressuring authorities to investigate, the family knows nothing about his whereabouts.
Quiroa said that the families of the missing “celebrate and give thanks to God that they found these four U.S. citizens,” but said “we wish the government would search for our disappeared with the same zeal and diligence.”
“We feel complete indignation, desperation, anguish, impotence and grief,” Quiroa said, because of “authorities’ failure to act when Mexican families suffer the disappearance of a relative.”