The Missing Blog www.missingblog.net

Briefing Note 1 November, 2013

Where are the Mexican Desaparecidos?

A silent humanitarian crisis linked to the war on drugs Alejandro Vélez Salas and Doria del Mar Vélez Salas

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1. INTRODUCTION “The last words my parents told me were: Kamchatka […] Then, mom and dad disappeared as if they were swallowed by a big hole on the ground; then, I only felt the frightening loneliness”. – Harry, speaking of his missing parents

Harry is not a real boy, but we are sure some boy that suffered the same fate inspired the character of Marcelo Figueras’ novel Kamchatka about the cruelty of enforced disappearance during the Chilean dictatorship. Figueras also provided the script for the movie directed by Marcelo Piñeyro that has the same title that makes allusion to the risk-based board game TEG. The movie opened in 2002 and is one of our favorites because it has found a tender and sensitive way to talk about the tragedy of enforced disappearance that took place during Pinochet’s rule in Chile.

We decided to start this article with that film recommendation because when we watched it in 2002 we thought that the harsh reality of enforced disappearance happened in another time and space, far away from Mexico. As we grew up we found out that besides Chile and Argentina, countries like El Salvador and Guatemala should also be included in the baleful map after their horrible armed conflicts of the 1970’s. Also Colombia and its tens of thousands of missing persons began to shine with its own dreadful light in front of our eyes. As we navigated through college we knew the reality of places like Chechnya, Bosnia, Algeria and Sri Lanka and we began to fill the gaps on the huge world puzzle of “the missing”. In the 1970’s, during the period known as the “Dirty War”, Mexico added its own share to that map. We naïvely thought that would be it, but we had not considered the pernicious effects of the War on Drugs, and now Mexico has silently placed itself again on the map with thousands of cases of enforced disapperance around the country. But before analyzing the contexts and conditions of today’s missing we will briefly tell the story of disappearance in Mexico. We think it is the only way we can try to understand the gruesome times in which we are living.

2. DISAPPEARANCES FROM THE DIRTY WAR AND BEYOND

The “Dirty War” period has been an absent subject at both the high school and undergraduate level, so not many Mexicans know that between 1968 and 1982, between 500 and 1,500 people were abducted by government forces and are still missing today. In one of the most shocking episodes of this period, on January 1, 1974, 134 people were arrested by Federal forces and then disappeared in the Sierra de Atoyac, Guerrero. It was just one of several violent incidents targeting left wing activists, along with union and student leaders that remain unsolved and unpunished more than 30 years later, even though ex-president Vicente Fox created a special attorney’s office to investigate crimes of the past. The name of the office was Fiscalía Especial para Movimientos Sociales y Políticos del Pasado (FEMOSPP) and was shut down by former president Felipe Calderón in 2007 having achieved no significant convictions. The relatives of the missing condemned this decision and some journalists even think of a secret agreement with the PRI in exchange of political support for the “War on narco”.

During the “Dirty War” period, the Dirección Federal de Seguridad DFS, The Federal Direction of Security, (a corrupt – and now extinct - security and intelligence agency that operated from 1947 to 1985) arrested a young medical student called Jesús Piedra Ibarra for being part of Liga 23 de Septiembre (a Marxist-Leninist urban guerrilla group). He was never taken to the relevant authorities, was never visited by a lawyer and never had a trial. Instead he was taken to a clandestine facility where he was tortured and probably killed, no one ever saw him again. When his mother, Rosario Ibarra de Piedra, found other mothers that were searching for their beloved ones, she realized that they would have a better chance of finding them as a group than as individuals. She and the other mothers founded one of the first collective efforts to find all the missing from the “Dirty War”: Comité Pro-Defensa de Presos Perseguidos, Desaparecidos y Exiliados Políticos de México, the Committee for the Defense of Prisoners, the Persecuted, the Disappeared and Political Exiles in Mexico. The committee is colloquially known as the Eureka Committee.

Another example of these first expressions of collective effort during and after the “Dirty War” was in Guerrero, where Mr. Rosendo Radilla was arrested and disappeared by the military on August 25,

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1975. After his disappearance his family, especially his daughters Tita and Andrea, devoted their lives to finding not only him but all the other men that were detained in the Guerrero mountains and remain missing. Tita Radilla remembers her first steps in her seemingly endless search:

I used to carry pictures of all the missing near my chest, I hugged them; I went with them everywhere: to Mexico City, to my job and to my home. Sometimes I placed them in the floor or over my bed and, since I knew all of them from their relatives, I asked them: ´Why did you let them get you? You’re a rascal.´ Since all the relatives had told me their story, I felt responsible for taking care of them, searching for them and finding them, they were “my missing”. That was brutal. I thought I was going to go crazy, but I couldn’t help thinking of them.1

In 1988, AFADEM, the organization headed by Tita Radilla, joined FEDEFAM, a federation of collectives and associations of missing relatives from all over Latin America (Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay). This bond gave the Mexican missing cases the international visibility they lacked during the “Dirty War”, however it didn’t help to speed local investigations, which remain buried like the corpses of those who were detained for being part of left wing movements, student unions or guerrillas from 1968 to 1982. When former President Vicente Fox decided to create FEMOSPP to investigate the crimes committed in the past there was a brief hope that the perpetrators and masterminds would be prosecuted. Unfortunately, like most institutional efforts in Mexico, this one was born dead and no one was ever prosecuted for those crimes. For example, Miguel Nazar Haro, the former director of the Dirección Federal de Seguridad, was indicted for torture by the prosecutor’s office, but since he was 70 years old he never went to prison and remained free until he was absolved. He passed away peacefully in his home and the tens of testimonies against him were never considered to have incriminated him.

In order to shed more light on the chronic impunity around enforced disappearances during the “Dirty War” let’s just remember that according to the Report of the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances (WGEID) following their mission to Mexico:

only 2.5 per cent of the cases of enforced disappearance […] that were investigated resulted in a preliminary inquiry and of these cases, only 20 were brought to court. In less than half of the cases an arrest warrant was allegedly obtained, although it was not actually for the offence of enforced disappearances, but for unlawful deprivation of liberty.2

In quantitative terms, the Mexican “Dirty War” has nothing to do with the massive disappearances that took place by design during the Argentinian dictatorship of General Videla or those committed by the Russian Army in Chechnya during and after the Second Chechen War in 1999, nonetheless Mexico’s “Dirty War” left an indelible trace on hundreds of families. That is the reason we think it should be considered as a landmark in understanding the tragedy of the missing in contemporary Mexico. Besides, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights delivered its first accusatory sentence against the Mexican Government for the case of the enforced disappearance of Rosendo Radilla. On September 23, 2009, the Mexican Government was declared guilty for the violation of the right to personal liberty, personal integrity, the acknowledgement of the juristic person, and the life of Rosendo Radilla.3 We should highlight that the Mexican Government hasn’t acted on most of the sentence’s content.

3. THE BEGINNING OF NARCO LINKED DISAPPEARANCES

If we start to dig in the newspapers to find a starting point for this Mexican catastrophe, it is possible that we could select the image that journalist Marcela Turati found during one of his reporting field

1 Gloria Leticia Díaz. “Tita y la Guerra Sucia”. Proceso (Especial Heroínas Anonimas) 14 de diciembre de 2011. 2 United Nations. “Report of the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances on the Mission to Mexico”. p.

11 The document is available at <http://daccess-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/G11/174/91/PDF/G1117491.pdf?OpenElement>

3 Interamerican Court of Human Rights, “Caso RADILLA PACHECO vs. ESTADOS UNIDOS MEXICANOS. Sentencia de 23 de noviembre de 2009. (Excepciones Preliminares, Fondo, Reparaciones y Costas).

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trips. This was in 2001, during the first year of Vicente Fox’s administration4, the first of the democratic alternation:

A young woman who wasn’t dressed for mourning joined one of the demonstrations organized by the women of the Eureka Committee who had been searching for their sons since 1970. She carried the color picture of a twenty something smiling boy who wore a football jersey. The picture contrasted with pictures in black and white that were carried by the elder women and that showed boys with looks from the 70’s, old-fashioned haircuts and serious demeanours. The new arrival to the missing limbo was Alejandro Martínez Dueñas, who was kidnapped by elements of the Agencia Federal de Investigaciones (AFI, Federal Agency of Investigations) in Colima. He was tortured and later hospitalized to address the wounds they inflicted. The authorities told his relatives that he was accused of falsifying bills, but they never proved the accusations.5

But the disappearances linked to drug dealing and narco did not start during the Calderón Administration, not even during that led by Vicente Fox. Some newspapers began to address the cases of narcofosas (graves linked to drug violence) because seven corpses were found in one of the ranches of kingpin Juan García Ábrego after he was apprehended in 1996. In 1997, another mass grave was spotted in the house of Amado Carrillo Fuentes, also known as El señor de los cielos (the lord of the skies), in Cuernavaca, Morelos, just an hour from Mexico City. Finally, one year later and thanks to intelligence provided by the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), authorities found two US informants buried in Ciudad Juárez.6

In the border city of Tijuana, drug related violence erupted earlier than in other places in the country. Tijuana was a party town for most US Citizens, but in the middle of the nineties, a feud between the Arellano Félix brothers and their former partners Joaquín ‘el Chapo’ Guzmán, Ismael ‘el Mayo Zambada’ and Héctor ‘el Güero’ Palma transformed the glamour city into the most violent in the country, a gun fight waiting to happen. In this context, members of the Mexican army apprehended Alejandro Hodoyán Palacios. The interesting part of the story is that Alejandro Hodoyán was one of the famous narcojuniors7 of the Tijuana Cartel. He was accused of killing a delegate of the Procuraduría General de la República PGR (Attorney-General’s Office) and he was captured twice. After the first arrest, his relatives found him at a military compound where he was supposedly tortured to tell all the secrets of the Arellano Félix organization. Since he was half American, the DEA helped him and offered him to be a protected witness. He rejected the DEA offer and came back to Mexico only to be apprehended again, but this time he disappeared.

According to Grupo Esperanza, the first association of relatives against enforced disappearance that was formed in Baja California, there have been cases of enforced disappearance in the state since 1993. However, most of them disappeared between 1997 and 2001, during the same period when the military authorities kidnapped Alejandro Hodoyán in front of his mother. After this wave of disappearances, in 2001 Rosario Moreno de Díaz and other relatives from Sinaloa and Baja California, including Mrs. Palacios Hodoyán, founded Asociación Esperanza contra las Desapariciones Forzadas y la Impunidad (Hope Association against Enforced Disappearances and Impunity), to ask the government for the creation of a special office to look for all those who went missing in the turbulent 90’s in Baja California and Sinaloa. Unfortunately Mrs. Moreno de Díaz died briefly after the creation of the association and Mrs. Hodoyán remained as its visible head. However, two years later Mrs. Hodoyán would found her own association: Acción Ciudadana Contra la Impunidad (ACCI, Citizen Action against Impunity) and soon it became the most visible association in Baja California denouncing the terrible practice of enforced disappearance. Mrs. Palacios passed away some months ago and now the leading voice of the movement to find the missing in Baja California is that of Mr. Fernando Ocegueda, whose son disappeared in 2007. He started his search in ACCI but internal feuds encouraged him to found his own collective: Fuerzas Unidas por Nuestros Desaparecidos en Baja California.

4 It was the first time a candidate of a political party other than the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) won a presidential election. Vicente Fox got to the presidency representing the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN)

5 Marcela Turati, Fuego Cruzado. Las víctimas atrapadas en la guerra del narco, p. 197-200, Grijalbo,2011 6 Marco Tulio Castro. “Asesinatos serán más sanguinarios”. Zeta. 1711. 7 Young drug gangsters that were not lured by the money, but by the adrenaline of the life inside the organization.

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The enforced disappearances practiced during the nineties were not the same as the ones committed during the “Dirty War”, at least they did not have the same target. According to Zeta magazine, more than 45 people who went missing in that period were somehow allegedly linked with the world of narco: some had outstanding arrest warrants for crimes related with drug trafficking and others were accused of carrying weapons. So even though the military or police were accused of some of the disappearances, several members of the drug cartels – sometimes also policemen or military - entered into the equation as perpetrators. According to Carolina Robledo:

In this way, and marking a substantial distance with the struggles of the relatives during the “Dirty War”, the cases of enforced disappearance in which the government took part in Tijuana, with or without the complicity of organized crime, were displaced in a symbolic shift that places drug dealing as an explanatory matrix of specific violence.8

We highlight the violence in Tijuana at the end of the nineties because we think it can shed some light on how and when we began to lose understanding of the phenomena of disappearance due to the evolution or transformation of its paradigm. The motives for disappearance of hundreds of men during the “Dirty War” was clear because we could frame the crimes in a bipolar world where the continuous “threat” of communism instigated by United States administrations granted Latin American governments the right to eradicate any trace of armed or organized leftist movements. The perpetrators were also identifiable: the offenders were certainly government forces, either police or military. Because of that we can affirm unambiguously that the kidnappings committed during the “Dirty War” should be classified as enforced disappearances. According to the definition of the United Nations International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance:

Enforced disappearance is considered to be the arrest, detention, abduction or any other form of deprivation of liberty by agents of the State or by persons or groups of persons acting with the authorization, support or acquiescence of the State, followed by a refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty or by concealment of the fate or whereabouts of the disappeared person, which place such a person outside the protection of the law.

During the 90’s, when the states of Chihuahua, Sinaloa and Baja California erupted in violence, the phenomena took a new turn: the disappearances were now related to the context of drug dealing. The most violent feud in those years was caused by the fight between the Sinaloa Cartel, led by Joaquín ‘Chapo’ Guzmán, Ismael ‘Mayo’ Zambada, and Héctor ‘Güero’ Palma, and the Tijuana Cartel, led by the Arellano Felix brothers. As said before, those were the first years when the newspapers began to report the first narco-graves, but also they began to report the first levantones. This word became a synonym for disappearance, without knowing by whom it was committed. If we try to bring it closer to legal terminology, it would be abduction or an involuntary disappearance. Most of the levantones were committed against men who were inside the narco subculture, as a form of vendetta if they lost a drug shipment or failed to kill someone. However, there were also levantones of people who were not related to narco, like the one of Erick Díaz, a young municipal policeman, who went to a private party with some friends and never came back. According to journalistic investigations, several chief police officers connected with the Tijuana Cartel were at that party and one of them ordered the disappearances. Nevertheless, the formal investigations of the case are frozen and Erick and six other men are still missing.

The phenomenon changed drastically after Felipe Calderón declared war on narco, using the same Manichean discourse George W. Bush used to declare war on another abstract entity: terror. Disappearances became the norm during the Calderón Administration but it was a silent and an invisible norm. There were desaparecidos not only in Baja California, Sinaloa and Chihuahua, but also in Michoacán, Veracruz, Nayarit, Guerrero, Nuevo León, Coahuila, Tamaulipas, Jalisco, Durango, Oaxaca, San Luis Potosí, Chihuahua, Sonora, Estado de México and even in Mexico City. The cases began to stockpile surreptitiously in the different Procuradurías but few of us were aware of the magnitude of the catastrophe. This was because, during the first half of Felipe Calderón’s period, most

8 Carolina Robledo. “Drama social y política de duelo de los familiares de desaparecidos en Tijuana en el marco de la guerra contra el Narcotráfico (2006-2012). Colmex: 2012.

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of us were shocked with the alarming number of homicides that were considered a by-product of the Federal Government’s “strategy against organized crime”.

The number of homicides began to build up silently and we only knew about those who were not only killed but were beheaded, skinned, burned to a crisp or hanged from a bridge. Society was getting used to reading about daily homicides, because, according to the government, it was the main sign that the Mexican Government was winning the battle against criminal organizations. Besides, the main discourse that President Calderón and his security cabinet repeated endlessly was that most of the homicides were caused because organized crime groups were fighting amongst each other. The terrifying result of this media strategy was that most of the killings that appeared in the mass media were seen as necessary and just by a great part of the Mexican society. We have heard awful justifications - even from close friends - of being satisfied with the killings because they think they will cleanse the country and there will be less narcos and bad people.

There were two events in the middle of the Calderón Administration that cracked the official security discourse. The first one was the assassination of 72 South and Central American immigrants in San Fernando, Tamaulipas. The investigation of the case has been secured for national security reasons, but according to the official theory, the immigrants were executed because they refused to work for the Zetas criminal organization. They were found because one of them survived and ran to the nearest military post to ask for help. The slaughter was covered by international media and for the first time Mexico began to be seen internationally as a dangerous place, not only for the migrants, but also for Mexicans.

4. RESPONDING TO VICTIMS’ NEEDS

Seven months after the San Fernando massacre, on March 28, 2011 a young man and six of his friends were killed in the Temixco Municipality in Morelos. The name of the youngster was Juan Francisco Sicilia and he was the son of the poet and journalist Javier Sicilia. Instead of becoming another entry in a huge and terrible database or a discrete mention in an obituary, the death of ‘Juanelo’ became the spark that ignited an unprecedented social movement against drug related violence and the effects of the national security strategy promoted by the Calderón Administration that took a frontal military approach towards criminal organizations. This social effect was created because Javier Sicilia was not a carpenter, a driver or a businessman: his fame as a poet and journalist, as well as his progressive catholic beliefs, gave him a moral halo attractive to mass media and other victims.

We should note that before ‘Juanelo’ and his friends were killed there were other opportunities to build a national movement of victims when the son of prominent businessman Alejandro Martí and the daughter of Nelson Vargas were kidnapped and killed. As a consequence there were huge public demonstrations in Mexico City to ask the government to quit if they were not able to handle the public security issue. However victims from other parts of the country and civil society did not feel included in protests that may have seemed snobbish for being held in Mexico City with the participation of the middle and upper classes. This changed completely when Javier Sicilia walked from Cuernavaca to Mexico City and held a monumental rally in Mexico City zócalo. After the huge public demonstration at Mexico’s largest public square the Movimiento por la Paz con Justicia y Dignidad (MPJD, Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity) was born and began to travel throughout the country hearing victim’s stories and giving them back the voice that the three levels of Government (municipal, state and federal) had ignored. MPJD even tried to question the official discourse about the imperious necessity of waging this war. Thanks to the emergence of the MPJD some of the relatives of the desaparecidos could shake off some of the fear and began to tell us the horrible stories of how their relatives went missing. We realized also that the authorities were a part of the problem instead of being part of the solution. But, above all, we understood at last that the humanitarian tragedy caused by the “War on Drugs” and the feuds between cartels was enormous.

A couple of weeks after the murder of Juan Francisco and his six friends, several mass graves were found in the vicinities of San Fernando. The government reported 193 corpses, but people who live there believe there are still several hundred buried, most of them migrants. Just after the news of the mass graves started to spread – and we got information that the Federal Government tried to censor the news coming from San Fernando - more than six hundred people traveled to Tamaulipas to

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enquire if their relatives were among those found. The government had to establish provisional posts in San Fernando to offer them the little information they had, and to promise they would to try to identify them as soon as possible. Unfortunately, the Calderón Administration proved it had neither the political will nor the forensic tools to keep the promise they gave to the relatives of missing persons that traveled to Tamaulipas. This lack of political will was confirmed when Alejandro Poiré, former Secretary of State, declared at the end of President Calderón’s term: “unfortunately, we did not have the time to search for the missing”.9

The only public policy the Calderón Administration implemented to help the relatives of missing persons was the creation of the Procuraduría Social de Atención a las Víctimas del Delito (PROVICTIMA), a state office to deal with the effects of some crimes. The main chore of the new institution was to give psychological, juridical, medical, social support and advice to the victims of “serious crimes”. The crimes mentioned by Sara Irene Herrerías, former head of PROVICTIMA, were kidnapping, homicide and enforced disappearance, however they also addressed victims of domestic violence. As far as we know other violations of human rights were not considered. PROVICTIMA was created shortly after the first dialogues that took place between the MPJD and the Mexican Government at Chapultepec Castle. In those dialogues we were able to hear first hand terrifying testimonies about homicide and disappearance told by the people who had suffered from them. But within the testimonies, there was always a story of victimization, criminalization by public authorities, which instead of investigating and catching the criminals, threatened, humiliated or doubted the people who went to lodge complaints. There were also testimonies in which it was crystal clear that public authorities (police, army or marines) had participated in the crime. President Calderón and his security cabinet tried to dodge the critics by using the same official discourse by which they defended their security policy: the criminals (the Other) were guilty for the crimes and the government was just trying to clean the house of those kinds of criminals. Unfortunately, reality in Mexico – as in other parts of the world - is not black and white and cannot be read according to a good vs. evil narrative.

We should take this into consideration in the creation of PROVICTIMA, which was born as a decentralized office to deal with some of the victims’ needs, mostly from a relief and care point of view, but also from a juridical perspective. We have spoken with several victims – relatives of desaparecidos - and most of them have visited PROVICTIMA in an effort to find their beloved ones. Some of them have decided not to go anymore because some of the psychologists that followed their cases recommended them to consider their relatives as dead, in order they could mourn them and close their mourning circle. The wife of a desaparecido told us: “it’s as if they wanted to anesthetize us and move us away from justice”. Nevertheless, other victims seemed satisfied with the attention received. Maybe it’s because it’s the first time they have been considered and attended to as victims.

Besides giving psychological, legal, social and medical assistance to victims of serious crimes, PROVICTIMA engaged in the drawing up of search protocols for the missing. We naïvely supposed that these kind of protocols already existed and were applied by the state Procuradurías in their investigations, but after several interviews and journalistic articles read about disappearance cases, we have found out that there is either indolence, lack of will or preparation among those who are in charge of carrying out the investigations to found all the missing reported at the Ministerios Públicos. There are several cases where the persons that lodge the complaint are interrogated as criminals instead of being treated and interviewed as victims who have just suffered a big loss. The direct consequence of this error is that we have a serious problem with victimization and even criminalization of the relatives that go to a Prosecutor’s Office to lodge a complaint. When these relatives can finally lodge a complaint, there is no evidence that the authorities will start searching for their beloved ones, especially when they do not gather the information needed to start the search. We have heard cases where the investigators don’t even ask if the person that went missing had a cell phone or a credit card.

We had access to the search protocols created by PROVICTIMA and at least on paper, they could help to streamline the searches. Unfortunately, PROVICTIMA was born without any law enforcement or investigative attribution so even after they created a fairly comprehensive search protocol, the only

9 Marcela Turati. “No nos dio tiempo de encontrar a los desaparecidos”. Proceso. November 24, 2012. Available at: http://www.proceso.com.mx/?p=326088

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action they could take was presenting it at the National Conference of State Prosecutors Offices and recommend its implementation. Besides that, it is almost certain the PROVICTIMA will be dissolved by the new Administration and a new National System of Victims will be introduced after the congress passed a General Law on Victims promoted by the MPJD. Nobody knows if the new system will continue the same welfare approach taken by PROVICTIMA or will be a more investigative and law enforcement one.

5. THE SCALE AND NATURE OF THE MISSING PROBLEM

As said before, PROVICTIMA was the only public policy that the Calderón Administration offered to try to solve the problem. But instead of solving it, we believe the effort was meant to conceal it and pass the “hot potato” to the next Administration. Only with that in mind can we understand why Felipe Calderón and his Security Cabinet waited until the last moment of his administration to try to confirm a database of all the missing.10 This was a very difficult task because most of the states don’t have the crime of enforced or involuntary disappearance in their Penal Codes, so when someone goes to the Ministerio Público to lodge a complaint they tend to consider it not as an enforced or involuntary disappearance but as an illegal loss of liberty (kidnapping), as a simple absence or as an abuse of authority. Some of the Procuraduría General de la República (State’s Attorney’s Office) employees leaked the incomplete database to US media and then Propuesta Cívica, a Mexican NGO, housed the database in its website for information purposes.

The database is now housed by the Secretariado Ejecutivo del Sistema Nacional de Seguridad Pública (part of the State Ministry) and shows the frightening figure of nearly 27,000 cases.11 Still, we should remember there is no differentiation between the ones that disappeared as a consequence of extreme violence during the Calderon Administration and the ones that are absent by other causes. So, the pertinent question is ‘are they more or less than 27,000?’ Unfortunately, even if the Peña Nieto Administration can refine the database, we still have to consider the huge rate of unreported crime. We do not have the rate of unreported disappearances but we can estimate this with data from the 2008 National Survey on Insecurity about kidnappings. 12 The 2008 survey estimates a rate between 60% and 86% of unreported kidnappings, but advises readers that the estimate should be taken cautiously given the nature of the crime. They also note that the kidnappings of minors and migrants are not taken into consideration. So if we consider all the persons that do not lodge a complaint because of fear or disinformation, we can easily talk about 40,000 missing, which is a higher number than all the men and women that are still missing because of repression of the Argentinian dictatorship. But we’re still not counting all the Mexican and the South and Central American migrants that have disappeared in the gullets of organized crime while trying to get to the United States. According to the Movimiento Migrante Mesoamericano, which has reviewed data from the Mexican Commission of Human Rights, there could be up to 70,000 migrants that have gone missing since 2006. Therefore, those 27,000 cases that were going to shrink after the government refined the database could easily transform into nearly 100,000 missing.

That’s why we think there is an urgent need to consider “the missing” tragedy in México as a humanitarian crisis. According to the Red Cross:

A humanitarian crisis [takes place] in a country, region or society where there is total or considerable breakdown of authority resulting from internal or external conflict and which requires an international response that goes beyond the mandate or capacity of any single agency and/or the ongoing UN country program.

Unfortunately, in Mexico we have several regions that are controlled by criminal organizations, and others where they are fighting for control. It’s a new context. We already reviewed the setting and

10 The creation of the official database of missing or disappeared persons only responds to the established responsibilites in the Ley del Registro Nacional de Datos de Personas Extraviadas o Desaparecidas for the Secretariado Ejecutivo del Sistema Nacional de Seguridad Pública (SESNSP).

11 The official database can is available at: http://www.secretariadoejecutivosnsp.gob.mx/es/SecretariadoEjecutivo/Sistema_RNPED

12 Instituto Ciudadano de Estudios sobre la Seguridad, “Análisis de la séptima Encuesta Nacional sobre Inseguridad ENSI/7 2010”. February 2011.

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features of the disappearances during the “Dirty War” and they were somehow clear on who committed the crimes and the groups and collectives that suffered them. There is no such clarity in the new disappearances, however we can provide some lines of investigations thanks to the brave enquires carried out by the relatives in the absence of efforts by the authorities, and through the research of some supportive journalists. The first typology of disappearance cases could be the ones performed by criminal organizations – probably with the help of public authorities - to calentar la plaza, this is to terrorize the population of a town or city for different purposes, either to attract the attention of police and army so they can battle a rival organization, to show their power to other organizations and the government or for electoral purposes – let’s remember that members of the political class are usually linked with these organizations. The second reason to disappear someone could be to enslave him or her and take advantage of his or her free and enforced labor. We have heard several rumors that there are numerous labor camps in states like Nuevo León, Tamaulipas, Michoacán, Veracruz, Sinaloa or Durango. The rumor is that there are hundreds - maybe thousands - of men and women performing jobs like picking and packing drugs in slavery conditions. We have also heard that in some regions telecommunications students, nurses and construction workers have disappeared during the same period of time, the hypothesis behind these kidnappings is that criminal organizations need those types of professionals for their business. The third type of disappearance is the one linked with prostitution, and the most affected population is young girls and boys. We have read cases of girls that disappear in a northern state of Mexico and appear in a brothel in Central America. A fourth one could be considered a punishment to activists, journalists or professors that are perceived as a threat to the business of criminal organizations, politicians or enterprises. Finally, the police, army or marine officers perform a fourth form of disappearance. But we are not talking about corrupt officers, we are highlighting that there are officers that in the middle of the war – remember, evil vs. good - they take some license and shoot or kidnap suspicious subjects instead of taking them to the prosecutors’ office.

We gain hope from the fact that several collectives and associations were born in the middle of this nightmare. Some of them are associations that used to work in human rights and adopted the cause of the missing, but others are just depoliticized groups of persons who knew each other from the prosecutor’s office and share the same grief. There are more than ten of these groups and associations that are trying – as much as they can - to press the government to find their loved ones. It is a heterogeneous combination of groups because each state has its unique context of violence and its own groups of power and chiefdoms, however they are united for the same hunger for justice and the necessity of finding their beloved ones. We are convinced that these collectives and associations should be the roots for a national movement to find all the desparecidos. Our role in academia and organized civil society is just to walk with them and help them empower themselves until they become political subjects able to negotiate and press the government. It is also our job to help them network with other entities, such as churches, laboratories or international organizations.

Fortunately, the issue has installed itself on the public agenda, and if the number of desaparecidos is as large as we have stated, the issue will be there for years to come. We have to make the best of the time we have, we don’t want to wait thirty years to know about our missing as happened in Chile, Argentina, Guatemala, El Salvador or Colombia. Even if the conflict is still ongoing, we should try to take small steps to end chronic impunity and lack of justice around these multiple cases of disappearances. We should think of a national and plural commission to find the missing and to the fulfillment and implementation of the international human rights treaties and instruments according to the Constitutional Reform on Human Rights. There are activists, professors and journalists already working to fill the fathomless hiatus in which we find ourselves. We hope this article can cross several borders and work as a message in a bottle for the international community.

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The Missing Blog’s mission is to aggregate and disseminate news, information and resources about enforced disappearances around the world. We seek to bring together voices from a range of disciplines to cultivate thoughtful discussion on these topics. The scope of the site will include coverage on enforced disappearances particularly in conflict situations as well as those that go missing under other circumstances such as during migration. Additionally we seek to cover emerging approaches to dealing with the legacy of enforced disappearances, particularly the needs of families that are often overlooked in legal approaches to transitional justice. While the rule of law is critical, The Missing Blog is primarily driven by humanitarian considerations. Importantly, this includes the needs of families whose loved ones go missing in conflict. The marginalization of families needs in traditional approaches to transitional justice is quite common. Families of the disappeared require truth, justice and economic support, but also emotional and psychosocial intervention. We will discuss ambiguous loss, and international criminal law, truth commissions and social stigma. The Missing Blog aims to be inclusive of all the legacies of disappearance. As such, here we will seek to encourage the most transversal discussion of the issue of missing persons, and will privilege approaches that are holistic and acknowledge the range of needs families face, and how they interact. Such discussions will inevitably include academic discourse, though we will not dwell in the ivory tower. The Missing Blog seeks to be relevant to the ongoing discussion around enforced disappearances, exposing current situations and hopefully shedding light on a way forward. The Missing Blog is not directly affiliated or partnered with any organization or political group or view. We welcome contributions and primary source material as we aim to leverage our resources to provide a platform for information that may otherwise go unheard.

Simon Robins Post-war Reconstruction and Development Unit University of York York YO10 5DD, UK simon.robins@simonrobins.com www.simonrobins.com

Ram Kumar Bhandari NEFAD Nepal csj.lamjung@gmail.com nefad.wordpress.com

The Missing Blog

www.missingblog.net

missingblog.net@gmail.com

Facebook.com/TheMissingBlog

@themissingblog

Alejandro Vélez Salas and Doria Vélez Salas

nuestraaparenterendicion@gmail.com

nuestraaparenterendicion.com

@rendicion, @rincondescorchy