Families of Mexico's 28,000 'Disappeared' Fight for Closure, Justice Marina Jimenez - The Star
go to original August 30, 2016

Short video for the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances. Through 43 portraits of the disappeared students of Ayotzinapa (Iguala, Mexico) in 2014, fire painter Steven Spazuk keeps all the disappeared people alive. (Amnesty International Vlaanderen)

Socorro Arias unlocks the door to her son’s bedroom. A faintly musty smell wafts out. Other than a layer of dust, everything is just as Raymundo Isaac Rico Arias left it on Feb. 12, 2012, the day the 27-year-old teacher disappeared.

A stack of Valentine’s Day hearts — cut from red construction paper — lies on Rico’s bed, intended as gifts for his students. Clothes are piled in the corner, along with shoes and leather belts. Marilyn Monroe smiles seductively from one wall, while a Virgin Mary statue sits on the bureau, gazing pensively in front of the mirror.

Rico is one of 28,000 people who have been officially registered as missing in Mexico in the last nine years. Human rights experts say the number is much higher, as many families do not report cases, fearing reprisals.

... As of 2014, there were just 13 federal convictions for enforced disappearances, the legal term for cases that involve state actors, while 95 state-level investigations had resulted in no convictions.

The missing are a byproduct of the decade-long war the government has waged against the cartels like the Zetas, the Sinaloa cartel and others, that control Mexico’s multibillion-dollar drug trade.

Since the government deployed the military to fight the cartels in 2006, an estimated 100,000 people have been killed and thousands have been kidnapped for ransom or disappeared, by either the cartels or the police and military. The violence happens amidst cartel power struggles, and during fiery crack downs by the government’s forces.

But in Mexico a disappearance can also happen when a minor crime goes awry, or in a case of mistaken identity. Often, the reason someone is “disappeared” will never be known.

Read the rest at The Star

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