The disappeared: Inside families’ risky search to uncover the truth behind Mexico’s mass graves

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What happens when a loved one simply vanishes? In Mexico, sixteen people go missing every day. These families turned to the government and the police to no avail, before discovering the grim answer for themselves

I don’t know if they are spirits or souls or what to call them. But you feel it, you sense something. You feel it in your heart.Their loved ones disappeared. In their hunt for answers, these families came up against a terrifying network of power and impunity. That didn’t stop them.Digital storytelling by Laura Blenkinsop, Jeremy Agius and Timothy MooreI wasn’t part of the first group who went to the grave.

I was messaging with him. At 11:30 — that was the last message I got — I asked him ‘what time will you be home?’ I didn’t like him to be in the street. He said, ‘I’m on my way home, Mum.’ Organized crime had bought off police forces, prosecutors and politicians. The federal government was battling some of the most powerful cartels, and the narcos were also fighting each other.Two years after Arturo vanished, a 19-year-old architecture student named Gerson Quevedo agreed to meet a friend at the local convenience store to grab a snack.

Theirs were among 298 skulls and thousands of bones found in 155 shallow graves around the edges of the clearing. By the time it was fully excavated, earlier this year, the site was the largest known clandestine grave in Latin America. Most of the people found in Colinas de Santa Fe are still nameless. But the stories of nine of the victims expose the web of crime, power and impunity that allows disappearances to continue unabated.The graves are called ‘clandestine’ in Mexico, but they’re rarely a secret. When they are dug at the edge of communities, they serve as a warning about who holds power, and who is untouchable.

Elfego Rivera, 22, was a gardener at a golf club who drummed at Carnaval. He, too, got picked up in the Cardel raid. He had stopped on his way home to pick up the hamburgers his pregnant wife was craving.One of the neighbours told me that she heard him say, ‘I live close, I live right here.’ And they said to him, in harsh words, ‘No way, pal, you’re going in [the van].’

He told me he’d been asked to work with Safe Veracruz. And I said, ‘No, honey, it's very risky’ … And he said, ‘No, love, I want us to have a better life.’ Luis Ángel Castillo, 23, ran a small gold trading operation out of his family living room. It paid the bills, but his dream was opening a gym of his own. In the early evening on July 11, 2014, he was at home with his mother and sister when five gunmen burst through the front gate and forced him to the floor.I felt so guilty for not being able to help him. When he was little, I could protect him. But now – against five men with guns, I couldn’t help him. It was impossible.

 

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Bias Behind Bars, an investigation on the systemic bias in prisoners’ risk assessments, won the award for Innovation in Investigative Journalism. OJA21

So, yeah, let's continue to not ask them for visas.

The last corrupted Mexican governments did nothing for its people. The neoliberal governments were only interested in making profit . For example, they made deals with Canadian mining companies while exploding the Mexican people. Justice was not a priority

The challenge of reporting on the missing, of course, is that they’re missing. The story is obscured. There are thousands of families living with that pain, but their stories can’t help to explain the how or the why, because they don’t know it themselves.

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