That day, the mothers scoured the site outside El Fuerte, a town in Sinaloa state, on Mexico’s northern Pacific Coast, looking for one of two men presumably kidnapped by cartel gunmen in recent weeks. One body had already been found in a field. The women believed the other may be nearby. In the end, they came up empty.
“This is my life,” said Mirna Medina, a forceful woman who holds the group together. “Digging up holes.”
Her son, who sold CDs by a gas station, was kidnapped in 2014. Three years later to the day, she and the other mothers of the search group dug up his remains. “I felt his presence,” she said, remembering the day and breaking out in tears. “I wanted to find him alive, but at least I found him.”
Some 37,000 people in Mexico are categorized as “missing” by the government. The vast majority are believed to be dead, victims of the country’s spiraling violence that has claimed more than 250,000 lives since 2006. The country’s murder rate has more than doubled to 26 per 100,000 residents, five times the U.S. figure.
Because the missing aren’t counted as part of the country’s official murder tally, it is likely Mexico’s rate itself is higher.
The killing and the number of missing grow each year. Last year, 5,500 people disappeared, up from 3,400 in 2015. Mexico’s murders are up another 18% through September this year.
Victims’ families, mostly mothers, organize search parties, climbing down ravines or scouring trash dumps. Their technique is crude. Sometimes they hire laborers to hammer steel rods into the soil and haul them up to see if they smell like decomposition. Other times, they simply look for an exposed body part or shallow grave.
The sheer numbers of the disappeared now rival more famous cases of missing people in Latin American history.
The Disappeared, or Desaparecidos, became a chilling part of Latin America’s vocabulary during the Cold War, when security forces kidnapped, killed and disposed of the bodies of tens of thousands of leftist guerrillas as well as civilian sympathizers. The most infamous case is Argentina’s “Dirty War,” where at least 10,000 people vanished from 1976 to 1983. In Buenos Aires, mothers of the missing organized weekly vigils in front of Argentina’s presidential palace, gaining world-wide prominence.
Mexico fought its own far-smaller war against Marxist guerrillas during the 1970s. According to the government human-rights commission, 532 people went missing, and at least 275 people were summarily executed by security forces.
This time around, the horror in Mexico is bigger and its causes more complex. Many of the disappeared in recent years are believed to be the victims of violence unleashed by criminal gangs fighting to control drug routes and other lucrative businesses such as extortion, kidnapping and the theft of gasoline from pipelines, often with the complicity of police forces, government officials say.
“It’s a crisis of civilization in Mexico,” said Javier Sicilia, a poet and victims’ advocate whose son was murdered in 2011. “It’s diabolical—an unprecedented perversity to disappear human beings and erase any trace of them from the world.”
The trauma of Mexico’s missing is an open wound in the nation’s psyche. Families who can’t grieve for their loved ones spend the day alternating between doubt and despair, praying for, and dreading, the blessing of certainty.
“We don’t sleep nights, we have nightmares wondering what happened, where can he be,” said Maria Lugo, 62, whose son disappeared in 2015.
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Those with WSJ access can get the rest of the gruesome story at the link, along with pictures and graphs illustrating the extent of the problem.
Obviously, by no stretch of the imagination is Mexico a “Safe Third Country” for purposes of U.S. asylum law. The brazen attempt by the Trump Administration and GOP Senators led by Chuck Grassley and Mike Lee to force such an agreement down the throat of Mexico is as disingenuous as it is immoral.
It also is appalling the number of Trump Administration senior immigration officials who parrot the bogus claim that “refugees from Central America are required to apply for asylum in Mexico.” Neither international law nor U.S. law imposes such a requirement, for good reasons. Actually, the single “Safe Third Country Agreement” that we have negotiated with Canada in compliance with our immigration laws is quite circumscribed and very limited in scope. And, there are ongoing efforts in Canada to force Canada to withdraw from this agreement because of the Trump Administration’s mistreatment of asylum applicants.
Nevertheless, as I have previously pointed out, given conditions in the Northern Triangle, while Mexico isn’t a “Safe Third Country” for purposes of our law, it might well be a “safer third country,” in practical terms, for many Central American refugees and their families. It’s bigger than the Northern Triangle countries, somewhat better governed than the “failed states” of the Northern Triangle, easier and less dangerous to reach, has more economic opportunities and resettlement options, and is generally (although, sadly, not always) not as overtly hostile to refugees as is the U.S. under Trump.
To encourage (rather than attempt to force) more individuals to apply for asylum in Mexico, our Government should:
- Publicly acknowledge and treat the migration from Central America as a “humanitarian situation,” rather than a law enforcement issue;
- Work with the UNHCR and Mexican authorities to improve asylum processing, adjudication, and resettlement in Mexico;
- Provide financial aid and incentives for Mexico to improve its asylum system (rather than law enforcement money or threats to cut off funding);
- Emphasize to Central American refugees the possible benefits of applying for asylum in Mexico (or elsewhere), rather than threatening them and trying to intimidate them from coming to the U.S.
- Finally, and most important, the U.S. should be taking a leadership role with the UNHCR and other countries in our hemisphere to address the endemic problems in the Northern Triangle that are creating these refugee flows.
Refugee situations are complex, on a number of levels. They won’t be solved by the simplistic approaches (a/k/a political stunts) currently being taken by the Trump Administration, including the ridiculous “Wall.” Indeed, they can’t be solved by any single country. It takes the countries of the world working together to resolve them. That’s exactly what the mechanisms set up under the U.N. Convention on Refugees were intended to do. It’s beyond foolish for our Government to ignore them.
PWS
11-16-18