Seekers of ‘disappeared’ lose lives
Mexicans looking for relatives now targeted by cartels
MEXICO CITY — The mainly female volunteers who fan out across Mexico to hunt for the bodies of murdered relatives are increasingly being killed, putting to the test the government’s promise to help them in their quest for a final shred of justice: a chance to mourn.
Those who carry on the effort have long told tales of getting threats and being watched — presumably by the same people who murdered their sons, brothers and husbands.
But now threats have given way to bullets in the heads of searchers trying to ferret out the clandestine burial and burning pits that number in the thousands. Two searchers have been slain the past two months.
Aranza Ramos had spent over a year searching for her husband, Bryan Celaya Alvarado, after he vanished Dec. 6, 2020. That day he became one of Mexico’s 87,855 “disappeared” people. Most are thought to have been killed by drug cartels, their bodies dumped into shallow graves or burned.
Searchers have learned over the last decade, since the height of Mexico’s 2006-2012 drug war, that the gangs often use the same locations, creating grisly killing fields.
It was at one such field, known as Ejido Ortiz, in the northern border state of Sonora, where Aranza Ramos had been helping search on July 15 — the day she herself was killed.
“In Ejido Ortiz several clandestine crematoriums have been found, some still smoking and burning when they were found,” Ramos’ search group said in a statement. “This ejido (collective farm plot) is an active extermination
site.”
After a day of searching — the volunteers plunge metal rods into the soil to release the telltale odor of death — Ramos returned to her home near the city of Guaymas. Just before midnight, she was abducted from her home. The killers dumped her bullet-ridden body on the roadside.
Cecilia Duarte, who has spent three years working with the search group Buscadoras por la Paz (Searchers for Peace), attended meetings with Ramos in the week before she was killed. Duarte, who found the body of her own missing son and is now searching for a missing nephew, said Ramos always tried to play it safe.
“She tried not to stand out; she wasn’t a spokeswoman,” said Duarte. Indeed, Ramos avoided attention. The Associated Press had tried
to contact her two months before she was killed, but she did not answer messages.
“Aranza posted a message the week before she died, saying she was searching for her husband, not for the suspects,” Duarte recalled.
There are three rules Mexico’s volunteer search groups follow:
Human remains aren’t referred to as corpses or bodies. The searchers call them “treasures,” because to grieving families they are precious.
Searchers usually call law enforcement when they think they’ve found a burial, mostly because authorities often refuse to conduct the slow but critical DNA testing unless the remains are professionally exhumed.
Searches are not conducted to find perpetrators, only to find loved ones.
It is the latter rule that volunteers hoped would
keep them safe from retaliation.
“As searchers, we are not seeking to find out who is guilty. We are searching for treasures,” said Patricia “Ceci” Flores, founder of Madres Buscadores de Sonora (Searching Mothers of Sonora).
For a long time, it has meant that searchers, and the police who often accompany them, focus on finding graves and identifying remains — not collecting evidence of how they died or who killed them. Search groups sometimes even get anonymous tips about where bodies are buried, knowledge probably available only to the killers or their accomplices.
But that long-standing arrangement appears to have broken down.
The day after Ramos was killed, Flores received a phone threat. “I got a call
saying, ‘You’re going to be next,’ ” Flores said. Since then, police have assigned a patrol car to stand guard outside her home in Hermosillo.
Sonora state officials have agreed to provide security for searchers deemed to be in danger. The state also agreed to assign excavation teams to potential burial sites found by searchers within three to five days. But officials seem more interested in damage control. They got the searchers to agree not to take photos of burial sites.
President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador gave a vague statement when asked about the killing of Ramos. “We are going to continue to protect all women. We condemn these crimes.”
But Ramos was not the first. On May 30, a volunteer search activist, Javier Barajas
Pina, was gunned down in the state of Guanajuato, Mexico’s most violent.
And two journalists have been killed in Sonora in the space of about two months; on Thursday, reporter Ricardo Lopez was shot to death in a parking lot in Guaymas, the same township where Ramos was killed.
Altogether, 68 human rights and environmental activists have been killed since Lopez Obrador took office.
Fear has always accompanied the searchers. They go to wild, remote, abandoned places where terrible crimes have been committed. Up to now, they mostly shrugged it off.
But Ramos’ killing changed things, said Cecilia Duarte, the volunteer with Ramo. “That did hit us hard. Some people stopped the searches.”