Chris Gregory's 'Evidencia': Chasing Ghosts in a Cartel-Controlled Mexican Town Zachary Slobig - Wired
go to original May 18, 2015

Outside of Cocula - a town over from Iguala - a member of the search party scans the hills for signs of kidnapped persons. The man, who preferred not to be identified, is searching for his son who disappeared five years ago. (Chris Gregory)

The disappearance of 43 students in the small city of Iguala, Mexico stunned the world and sparked protests throughout the Mexican state of Guerrero. The students, who meant to protest government discrimination, vanished after a confrontation with police. Federal investigators soon uncovered many mass graves containing severely burned bodies - but no sign of the missing youth.

Scores of families have come forward to say they have loved ones missing in the area, and investigators have found clandestine graves throughout Guerrero. That prompted photographer Chris Gregory to ask a simple, yet troubling, question. “Who were those people, I wondered,” he says. “It begged the question of whose bodies those were.”

Determined to find out, Gregory joined his friend, writer Jeremy Relph, in following the trail of scant evidence so they might make sense of the disappearances linked to organized crime and violent drug cartels. His series, Evidencia, is a search for answers to the question of how hundreds of people can simply vanish. The crush of media and federal authorities emboldened the townspeople to roam the countryside searching for the lost. Gregory joined them on daily expeditions seeking any trace of their loved ones. Anything they found was displayed at the church in town so it might be identified.

His images reveal their mission with clinical precision, capturing clues to an impossible puzzle - a knot of clothing here, discarded bedding there. Anonymous tips provided leads on the locations of graves. “Someone would remember seeing lights from a vehicle way up in the hills, or fires in strange places,” says Gregory. The series reads like a detective story, but without even a hint of the tidy resolutions common to the genre.

Read the rest at Wired

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