Angelita Almeras helped to locate the remains of several hundred missing Mexicans while looking for her own brother — a search that ended abruptly this week when a shooter killed her.
In the Latin American nation, even trying to track down one of the more than 100,000 people who have disappeared can be fraught with danger.
Almeras, a 27-year-old single mother of two, had asked the government for protection a week ago due to intensifying threats by telephone and social media, people close to her said on Friday.
Photo: AP
Yet help never arrived, and on Thursday she was gunned down at the beauty salon where she worked in the city of Tecate across the border from the US state of California.
Ahe is one of eight people killed since 2021 while searching for missing persons in Mexico, activists said.
“This should never have happened,” said Paula Sandoval, a friend of Almeras who is also searching for a brother kidnapped in 2020.
“If the authorities had done their job, this wouldn’t have happened. Neither she nor her family deserved this,” she added.
Almeras’s brother, Jose, disappeared along with his girlfriend in 2018, when violence linked to drug trafficking escalated in Tecate.
As part of their effort to find him, Almeras and her mother founded a group called Union and Strength for Our Disappeared.
Sandoval remembered her as a “warrior” with a big heart who was committed to the cause.
“She always helped the victims... She always ran to them if called on,” she said.
Almeras — who after her death was initially identified by a local human rights commission as Angelica Leon based on her second surname — filed three complaints about threats she received, her friend said.
“They told her that they were going to come after her; they asked her why she was uncovering graves. They told her that she was going to end up just like the people she was finding,” Sandoval said.
The threats came from unknown telephone numbers and social media accounts.
“The authorities did nothing to identify them,” Sandoval said.
Almeras had become a prominent figure in the defense of the missing and their families, “which put her in a position of vulnerability in a state and a country mired in violence,” rights group Elementa Derechos Humanos said.
Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on Friday said that Almeras had protection from the local authorities and that the alleged perpetrator had been identified.
“Everything indicates that there is no connection” to her work looking for the missing, he said, alluding to Almeras’s former partner who voluntarily wen to the prosecutors’ office after her murder.
“There is possibly another reason, but I can’t say more than that,” Lopez Obrador added, in remarks met with skepticism from those close to Almeras.
“It’s unfortunate that the authorities are looking for a scapegoat ... to close the case as soon as possible,” Sandoval said.
“But this really has to do with her search work,” she said, adding that Almeras “got along very well” with her former partner.
More than 114,000 people have gone missing in Mexico, mostly since 2006 when the government of then-Mexican president Felipe Calderon deployed the military to fight drug cartels.
Since then, a spiral of violence has left more than 420,000 people dead.
Despite the risks, Sandoval said that she plans to continue with her own search, although with each grave found “things are uncovered that make certain people uncomfortable,” including authorities.
ANGER: A video shared online showed residents in a neighborhood confronting the national security minister, attempting to drag her toward floodwaters Argentina’s port city of Bahia Blanca has been “destroyed” after being pummeled by a year’s worth of rain in a matter of hours, killing 13 and driving hundreds from their homes, authorities said on Saturday. Two young girls — reportedly aged four and one — were missing after possibly being swept away by floodwaters in the wake of Friday’s storm. The deluge left hospital rooms underwater, turned neighborhoods into islands and cut electricity to swaths of the city. Argentine Minister of National Security Patricia Bullrich said Bahia Blanca was “destroyed.” The death toll rose to 13 on Saturday, up from 10 on Friday, authorities
Two daughters of an Argentine mountaineer who died on an icy peak 40 years ago have retrieved his backpack from the spot — finding camera film inside that allowed them a glimpse of some of his final experiences. Guillermo Vieiro was 44 when he died in 1985 — as did his climbing partner — while descending Argentina’s Tupungato lava dome, one of the highest peaks in the Americas. Last year, his backpack was spotted on a slope by mountaineer Gabriela Cavallaro, who examined it and contacted Vieiro’s daughters Guadalupe, 40, and Azul, 44. Last month, the three set out with four other guides
Local officials from Russia’s ruling party have caused controversy by presenting mothers of soldiers killed in Ukraine with gifts of meat grinders, an appliance widely used to describe Russia’s brutal tactics on the front line. The United Russia party in the northern Murmansk region posted photographs on social media showing officials smiling as they visited bereaved mothers with gifts of flowers and boxed meat grinders for International Women’s Day on Saturday, which is widely celebrated in Russia. The post included a message thanking the “dear moms” for their “strength of spirit and the love you put into bringing up your sons.” It
DISASTROUS VISIT: The talks in Saudi Arabia come after an altercation at the White House that led to the Ukrainian president leaving without signing a minerals deal Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy was due to arrive in Saudi Arabia yesterday, a day ahead of crucial talks between Ukrainian and US officials on ending the war with Russia. Highly anticipated negotiations today on resolving the three-year conflict would see US and Ukrainian officials meet for the first time since Zelenskiy’s disastrous White House visit last month. Zelenskiy yesterday said that he would meet Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the nation’s de facto leader, after which his team “will stay for a meeting on Tuesday with the American team.” At the talks in the Red Sea port city of Jeddah, US
RSS