FAMILIES OF THOSE MISSING IN MEXICO DESCRIBE THE PUSH TO KEEP SEARCHING
More than 79,000 have vanished; loved ones take lead to find them
They are called los desaparecidos — the disappeared.
The term gained popularity among extralegal military and police forces in Argentina in the mid-1970s, describing people taken by government-backed armed forces. They vanished without a trace into a world void of human and legal rights.
Today there is a different war being waged in Mexico, and a new class of los desaparecidos.
More than 79,000 people have disappeared in that country, the vast majority since 2006 when former president Felipe Calderón launched Mexico’s war on drugs. Tijuana, a sprawling metropolis of 2.1 million people, became a front line as cartels fought to secure lucrative traf
ficking routes into the United States. More recently, neighborhoods on the city’s outskirts have been drawn in as low-level drug dealers fight and die for the right to sell methamphetamine on local street corners.
In Baja California this year alone, more than 1,700 people
have been killed in the resulting violence, and hundreds more have disappeared. Many were gunned down and left in the streets, but many others have simply disappeared.
Desperate to find lost loved ones, parents formed collectives
to pressure the government to investigate. When met with what they say is official indifference or outright resistance, the collectives purchased shovels and other tools and began conducting their own searches in clandestine mass graves and abandoned properties.
The collectives’ existence is a testimony to Mexico’s national tragedy and the dysfunction of its justice system. The parents take anonymous tips and run down leads — work they say local detectives are too afraid to do. Sometimes they have to align themselves with criminals to collect information from those who have been involved in the crimes but who are too afraid to speak with authorities.
The San Diego UnionTribune’s Wendy Fry and Alejandro Tamayo spent the past several months with parents and family members, and interviewing state and national officials in Mexico, to produce a series of articles about the parent collectives. The latest result of that work is a video documentary. Visit SanDiegoUnionTribune.com/MissingInMexico to watch the documentary online.
Here are some of the people interviewed for that documentary, telling in their own words the stories of the search for the missing.
Jesse Varajas 63, Riverside (Missing brother)
My name is Jesse Varajas. I live in Riverside, California. I’m president of my collective, Buscando a Tolano. Tolano is my brother. We do searches for missing people in Tijuana and other parts of Baja like Tecate, Ensenada and Mexicali.
They broke into my brother’s home in Tecate with high-powered rif les. There was a struggle, and we know that he was harmed. His truck doors were opened like he was trying to leave. There was some blood on the ground, but not a lot of blood like he got killed there. There were drag marks in the dirt on the ground, like you could see the fingernail claw marks like he was clawing the ground to try to stay and they drug him by feet. And then he was gone.
When my brother got taken from his house in April of last year (2019), I was very surprised to learn that there (were) so many other people missing in Mexico. We’ve had situations where we’ve been out on a search and we’ve had armed trucks surround us, intimidating us. They want you to leave their territory. You can see that they are watching you and it’s pretty intimidating.
Santa Veronica is a small community where we’ve done two searches. We can’t do much right now because there’s a very high level of crime there. There’s a lot of criminals and it’s very dangerous at this point. Even if we go with the authorities, it is still very dangerous.
When there’s new victims that join our group, we usually give him a briefing before we go. Sort of like a small training on what to expect because they need to know what is going to be happening. And what to do in case somebody starts shooting. They need to know not to walk away from the group.
It gives you a satisfaction of helping people. It gives you something that I wasn’t looking for. I was looking for my brother and I am looking for my brother. But now, they all became my brothers. They all became my own brothers, my own sisters, my own sons.
Barbara Martinez 40, Tijuana (Missing son)
My son, Cesar Ezequiel Rico de la Cerda, was taken from our home in the Urbi Villa del Prado Section 2 neighborhood in October 2018. After he disappeared, I started having nightmares, picturing him stuck underground and staring up at me.
When I would go out to search for him, I would stream my searches live on Facebook. Someone contacted me on Facebook who was supposedly involved in Cesar’s disappearance and told me I was looking in the wrong places because my son was buried underneath a house in Tijuana.
When I went to CAPEA (a missing-persons agency) they judged me very harshly, like they judge all the moms.
They say, “If you didn’t know how to raise your son, and now you come here asking for help in searching for him when sooner or later you knew things were going to end up like this.” As a family member, they revictimize you because you’re already in pain, not knowing where your son is, and really it’s a psychological strategy because you already feel like it’s your fault, so you don’t want to finish the interview with the police agent.
I had a witness that was willing to testify about where the body of my son was located. Unfortunately, right before the date he was scheduled to give his testimony, they killed him. So, that, for me, was very painful. Because I thought he was the only person that could tell me where my son was, and they had taken his life. I am convinced that they killed him because he was willing to testify. Us finding the bodies wouldn’t have been convenient to those who killed him, so what did they do, they just took another life.
Sometimes I hear the voice of my son, telling me, “You have to keep going. You are stronger than you know and you have to find me. You are going to find me.” So, I have to keep going. When they threaten me, it’s like they’re putting gasoline in a car, and vrrroooom, it just fires me up and gives me more strength. I am going to keep searching for my son.
Karla Quintana 41, Mexico City National Commissioner, National Search Commission
I think we should start by pointing out that we have almost 80,000 people missing in Mexico since 1964, but most of them, probably 95 percent of them have been missing or went missing since 2006. So we have almost 80,000 people missing.
We find people every day … People alive. We find lots of people that are alive. If you see the numbers that are public, even if I tell you there are 80,000 people missing we also have 120,000 people that have been found alive. So
we’re talking about a 200,000 figure total, but the big crisis that we have in Mexico is that we still have thousands of people missing.
In this year alone, we’ve conducted 630 searches across the whole country. We were just here in Baja California about a month and a half ago ... We are in constant collaboration and coordination with state authorities.
This has been a priority for the president (Andrés Manuel López Obrador) and the federal government for two years. The National Search Commission had already been created but this administration gave it a very important boost in terms of resources. This is the first time that not only on a national level, but on an international level, it is being recognized that there is a disappearance crisis that is growing in Mexico.
Eddy Carrillo 46, Tijuana (Missing son from Los Angeles)
June 1, 2019. That’s the date my life dramatically changed. My son is a resident of Los Angeles. He came to Tijuana to visit his mother and brothers. He was out with his friends, but he never arrived home to his mom’s house. He was 20 years old.
Since then, I’ve desperately searched day and night in Tijuana and other cities in Mexico. And I created the collective “Todos Somos Erick Carrillo” as a place to collect anonymous tips to help other family members find their missing loved ones. I moved from San Diego to Tijuana so I can continue the search.
I have to locate my son as God commands me, and I will locate him. This is a very difficult situation for a father to have a son missing.
Maria del Pillar Chavez Lares
49, Tijuana (Missing son)
My son is named Marco Antonio Lozano Chávez and he’s 32 years old. He disappeared in Tijuana, Baja California, on August 10, 2015. They took him from the Otay Módulo 1. Some people involved in organized crime took him away in a car. Since then, I’ve been searching constantly and I can’t find him anywhere.
You have already seen how all the mothers keep searching for their children. And the authorities do nothing to help us find them. It’s been five years and four months, and I’m still looking for my son. We’ve looked for him everywhere, but he hasn’t appeared. I formed the collective “Mothers Looking for their Treasures,” because us mothers have to stick together to find our disappeared children.
If you go to CAPEA and you try to record the disappearance of your son with them, you realize that it is worthless. It is not worth it to them to look for your son. They don’t see them as victims, so they don’t ever look for them.
Even when the national authorities come here to Baja California, they don’t help us or support us. They listen to us and they take photos with us, but that’s all they do. And we are left here with the uncertainty, with the fear, with the anxiety that one day we are going to have some news, but we never have any news.