Mexican Families Struggle to Bring Attention to Those Who've Disappeared Tim Johnson - McClatchy Newspapers
go to original March 7, 2013

Posters bearing the photos of disappeared people lie piled up on a table at the office of a group hunting for disappeared people in the Mexican state of Coahuila. (Tim Johnson/MCT)

SALTILLO, Mexico — Rogelio Elizondo’s son went to buy a used car in Nuevo Laredo. He never came back.

He and a companion simply vanished on May 8, 2011. Because they were carrying the equivalent of $5,000 for the purchase, suspicion turned to foul play. Alarmed, Elizondo fretted over what to do. Friends offered advice.

“People said to us, ‘Don’t report this.’ They said, ‘Let us look into this,’ ” Elizondo recalled. After 10 days, growing more desperate, Elizondo went to the Coahuila state police, only to find utter lack of interest.

“They said it wasn’t their jurisdiction. It happened in another state,” Elizondo said. Indeed, Nuevo Laredo is in neighboring Tamaulipas, not Coahuila. “They said, ‘We aren’t going to investigate. There’s nothing we are going to do.’ ”

In much of Mexico, Elizondo’s tragedy would remain the anguish of a solitary family in a country where the problem of people who’ve disappeared is worse than anyplace else in the Western Hemisphere. Mexico’s government acknowledged in February that it has a list of 26,121 people who’d vanished without a trace during the government of President Felipe Calderon, who left office Dec. 1.

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