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.
Airlines in Australia, Hong Kong, India, Malaysia and Singapore yesterday canceled flights to and from the Indonesian island of Bali, after a nearby volcano catapulted an ash tower into the sky. Australia’s Jetstar, Qantas and Virgin Australia all grounded flights after Mount Lewotobi Laki-Laki on Flores island spewed a 9km tower a day earlier. Malaysia Airlines, AirAsia, India’s IndiGo and Singapore’s Scoot also listed flights as canceled. “Volcanic ash poses a significant threat to safe operations of the aircraft in the vicinity of volcanic clouds,” AirAsia said as it announced several cancelations. Multiple eruptions from the 1,703m twin-peaked volcano in
Farmer Liu Bingyong used to make a tidy profit selling milk but is now leaking cash — hit by a dairy sector crisis that embodies several of China’s economic woes. Milk is not a traditional mainstay of Chinese diets, but the Chinese government has long pushed people to drink more, citing its health benefits. The country has expanded its dairy production capacity and imported vast numbers of cattle in recent years as Beijing pursues food self-sufficiency. However, chronically low consumption has left the market sloshing with unwanted milk — driving down prices and pushing farmers to the brink — while
China has built a land-based prototype nuclear reactor for a large surface warship, in the clearest sign yet Beijing is advancing toward producing the nation’s first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, according to a new analysis of satellite imagery and Chinese government documents provided to The Associated Press. There have long been rumors that China is planning to build a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, but the research by the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in California is the first to confirm it is working on a nuclear-powered propulsion system for a carrier-sized surface warship. Why is China’s pursuit of nuclear-powered carriers significant? China’s navy is already
‘SIGNS OF ESCALATION’: Russian forces have been aiming to capture Ukraine’s eastern Donbas province and have been capturing new villages as they move toward Pokrovsk Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi on Saturday said that Ukraine faced increasing difficulties in its fight against Moscow’s invasion as Russian forces advance and North Korean troops prepare to join the Kremlin’s campaign. Syrskyi, relating comments he made to a top US general, said outnumbered Ukrainian forces faced Russian attacks in key sectors of the more than two-and-a-half-year-old war with Russia. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in a nightly address said that Ukraine’s military command was focused on defending around the town of Kurakhove — a target of Russia’s advances along with Pokrovsk, a logistical hub to the north. He decried strikes
RSS