Dozens of women and men on Friday searched a garbage dump outside Mexico’s capital looking for signs of missing loved ones, working without the protection of authorities as part of a nationwide effort to raise the profile of those who risk their lives to find others.
Under a blazing sun and amid foul odors, they picked through the dump and other sites in Tepotzotlan, which hugs Mexico City on three sides.
Hundreds of collectives across Mexico are participating in search operations this weekend to draw attention to the work they are left to do without official help in a country with nearly 100,000 people registered as missing.
Photo: AP
The work is dangerous. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has documented nine cases since 2019 of women who were slain over their work hunting for missing relatives. Other organizations in Mexico have recorded even more cases.
The groups participating this weekend decided to forgo government protection as a way to protest authorities’ frequent indifference to disappearances.
“We feel abandoned by the state to respond to this situation, which is a real national emergency,” about 250 collectives making up the National Unification of Searching Families said in a statement.
Juan Carlos Trujillo Herrera has been searching for four brothers who disappeared in Guerrero and Veracruz states more than a decade ago.
Uniting search collectives across Mexico raises consciousness, he said.
“With the state, without the state and beyond the state, no one has to stop” searching, he said.
At the dump, searchers used a backhoe as well shovels and picks to dig through debris. Metal rods were pushed into ground and then sniffed for the scent of death.
While disappearances have plagued Mexico for decades, the phenomenon exploded in 2006 when authorities declared war on the drug cartels. For years, the government looked the other way as violence increased and families of the missing were forced to remain silent or carefully search for their relatives.
The administration of Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador drew the ire of many families and advocates last year by ordering a recount of the missing. It was seen as an effort to lower the embarrassingly high total, moving it from about 113,000 last year to just short of 100,000.
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