Families Scour Mexico's Mountains for Graves of Disappeared Relatives E. Eduardo Castillo - The Associated Press
go to original December 8, 2015

Becoming a “search dog” to find your son (El Daily Post)

The first time the men and women set out to dig for their missing relatives in Iguala, they didn't know how.

Leaders of the expedition told them to look for discoloration in the dirt, evidence of recently turned soil. Look for depressions in the ground, they said. That may signal a clandestine grave.

They headed for the mountains with picks and shovels, and stopped at a field where someone recalled having detected a foul odor. Amid purple and yellow flowers, they dug — 10 centimeters, 20, 40. At 60 centimeters, they hit a human bone.

The gravediggers cried and prayed, and kept burrowing into the ground until they had unearthed six graves.

"We knew we were going to look for buried bodies, but we never imagined that was what we would find," said Mario Vergara, whose brother had disappeared two years before. "What we saw broke us."

The expeditions began shortly after 43 students from a rural teachers college were detained by police in Iguala on Sept. 26, 2014, and vanished.

Emboldened by a national uproar over the students, and eager to find their own relatives, hundreds of families came out of a scared silence to report kidnappings for the first time, adding names to a list of 26,000 missing nationwide.

Read the rest at The World Post

Related: Serving as a Bloodhound to Find Your Own Son’s Grave in Guerrero (El Daily Post)

BBC Trending traveled to Iguala in Mexico to meet families who've turned to social media to help find their missing loved ones. More than 25,000 people have disappeared in the country, most of them the victims of drug cartels. (BBC Trending)

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