Missing in Mexico

[Music] we have almost 80 000 people missing in mexico but if the barbell sound is not there where is bar by the sun these mothers their hearts are broken for life and there's not one it's not a hunter they're not a thousand there are thousands of missing sons brothers tijuana is this sprawling metropolis of 2.1 million people this border city south of san diego has historically been a major battleground for powerful drug cartels fighting to secure trafficking routes into the united states but now there's a different kind of fight that's driving up homicides at an unrelenting pace while the tourist zones have remained largely unscathed forgotten neighborhoods on the outskirts of the city is where low-level drug dealers fight and die for the right to sell street corner drugs to a local market they keep nothing they give nothing underage or young kids they don't have a chance because there's no good schools there's no good jobs so when when these criminals come and they often offer a salary a decent salary they all they right away think of their families they're gonna get fed they're gonna get close you know they don't think about their lives they're gonna get killed well i think we're we're in a period of violence where uh the bottom of the pyramid is is fighting it out over over the drug trade the street-level drug trade so i think that is what's going on and a lot of young kids are getting drawn in to to sell the cell methamphetamine right that's the big the big drug of the moment that's transformed the street drug trade in tijuana sandra double a pulitzer prize-winning journalist has covered the tijuana san diego border region for the san diego union tribune since 1994. we have three active drug organizations we have sinaloa cartel jalisco and the remnants of the arellanos and there's no stability at the top there was stability when you had the arianos in charge there was some stability when you had cineloa in charge and now nobody's fully in charge so that so with no stability at the top you have all this infighting at the bottom but i mean i think a lot of these drug dealers when they're killing each other they don't even know who they're working for and who they might be working for one day and then they might switch and go to someone else so there's just chaos right now in baja california 1700 people have been killed this year many gunned down and left out in the street but hundreds of others have simply disappeared officials say 1 281 people from baja california are missing leaving their families without answers mothers like barbara martinez form collectives and make searching for their missing children their sole mission in life [Music] casa barbara says cessor then a 17 year old was inside the family residence in the urbivia neighborhood of tijuana she says friends and neighbors told her people came inside the home and took cesar from his bedroom though she doesn't know exactly who took her son she believes it was likely local drug traffickers police will only say that the case is under investigation after she reported it barbara says she didn't believe authorities were searching for her son so she started barbara says she received information from anonymous sources that the body of her son was buried underneath an abandoned home in tijuana at that same location the remains of another missing boy one of cesar's friends had previously been found back at casa campos members of barbara's parent group decided to go onto the property to search during the search a man from an anonymous number calls barbara on the phone he tells her exactly where to dig to find the body of her son oh my god at one point during the parents search at casa campos baja california state police officers came onto the property threatening to arrest the parents for being there they said their search constituted trespassing and they took pictures of everyone on the property and wrote down the license plate numbers of those who were there including journalists the parents decided to protest by continuing their search of casa campos and by taking their fight to the offices of the state governor the parents got permission from the governor to continue their search barbara and other volunteers members of her collective her friends and her family along with cesar's younger brother continued searching casa campos the structures became unstable so government workers had to demolish them before the parents could continue searching but after weeks of digging barbara doesn't find the remains of her son so there are about 50 to 60 of these parent collectives across the whole nation in mexico in baja california there are about eight that are really active and they form into these parent collectives first and foremost for safety so when they're out in the wilderness searching these remote areas you don't want to be alone but they also sort of get something else out of it it's almost like a support group they grieve together they help each other with their investigations they check on each other the interesting thing is the family members of the missing can sort of become stigmatized by authorities and by society and that stigma is that the victim must have been selling drugs or they must have been related to some cartel member or they must have been doing something that got them into trouble that caused them to be disappeared and so in these collectives the family members sort of find this new community and new support system and then they also they lobby together so they find more political power if they work together as a group the disappearances don't just affect people in mexico we spoke to parents from san diego and los angeles who've had to relocate to tijuana to search for their missing kids in hesperia in san bernardino county not a day goes by that jessie varajes doesn't think about his brother jesse says neighbors saw two white trucks pull up to his brother's ranch and ducati they later found evidence of a gun battle and claw marks on the ground as if someone had clawed and grasped at the dirt to not be taken away talano jesse's brother was 39 when he was taken from his home in april 2019. jesse says like in many cases authorities don't have any answers they don't have an if i go right now to the fiscalia and ask questions about it they don't have no answers for me they will have a bunch of excuses it's not the same as in answers they have a bunch of excuses i'm not i'm not gonna be in the mood to be listening to them you know because i already have my pain i already have to deal with the pain of my about my where's my brother what is he doing what are they doing to him it's a thing that you live day by day it's a thing that you wake up on the middle and night heaven having a sweat uh dreams of of you know you're dreaming that they're doing something to your your your loved one in december jesse joined other collectives on a two-week search across baja california they first met here at the state government offices they picked an area known to locals for suspicious activity several corpses had already been found there on prior searches stories like maria's are ones that national search commissioner carla quintana hears in every neighborhood and state in the country quintana was appointed by mexico's president andres manuel lopez aberrord to lead the country's national search commission on across mexico 7 687 people disappeared in 2018. 8 804 people disappeared in 2019 and so far in 2020 6822 disappearances have been recorded across the country as of december 30th [Music] the searches can be dangerous because they challenge both the authorities and the drug cartels they need to know what is going to be happening somebody starts shooting right they need to know not to walk away from the group it's real easy for them to walk away family members sometimes have to form unique relationships with criminals so they can get answers we want god to take care of them yeah because eventually they're going to get killed each other yeah so it we don't care about them we care about finding our our loved one so sometimes we have conversations with the same criminals mothers brothers fathers talk to their criminals and ask them questions where it could be although a lot of the times the criminals were so high in drugs they don't even remember where they bury your your your relative when you see these mothers how how they they're on the fields walking sometimes when not even hiking shoes it's it gives you a satisfaction of helping people it gives you something that i wasn't looking for i was looking for my brother and i'm looking for my brothers for my brother but now they all became my brothers they all became my own brothers my own sisters my own sons on the first day of the search the parent collectives and officials found human remains we have almost 80 000 people missing in mexico as of uh 1964 but but most of them probably 95 of them uh have been missing or went missing as of 2006. so we have almost 80 000 people the big crisis we have in mexico whether it is afraid that we still have thousands of people missing there's the search groups uh been forgotten for say they're not been taken seriously and now finally they've figured out that the problem is getting big and we need help [Music] over the past decade or so mexico has been overhauling its criminal justice system since a constitutional reform in 2008 the new system is more transparent and has greater protections for those accused of crimes defendants are now considered innocent until proven guilty whereas before they had to prove their innocence there's also a greater bar for getting evidence admitted at the street cop level there's a lack of resources training and experience that some say makes it really hard to get a conviction and local cops are often bribed to work directly for criminal organizations some say the new system makes it too hard to put criminals away leaving them on the street where they commit more crimes without consequences currently in baja california very few homicide cases end with a person sent to prison for the crime that's according to data with mexico's national institute of statistics victim advocate groups say the new system re-victimizes those whose loved ones have been murdered and parents say sometimes they're treated like criminals rather than victims is not there still because they didn't take everything that they support so we're supposed to go back there we're going to go back there and dig more but if the barbell sound is not there worries by by the sun thousands of families in mexico suffer without ever getting answers or finding their missing loved ones though it's rare sometimes parents on these searches do locate the remains of their missing family member they get answers but with those answers comes unspeakable grief thirty-year-old dona suhi went missing in march 2020 after she went to meet someone she had met online to deliver a piece of clothing she planned to sell to that person on december 9th her family found her body in a shallow grave buried behind a partially finished residential area real estate development in tijuana okay this grave that you found with the bodies there and you pull them out with so much care you know because they already been hurt so much you don't want to hurt him anymore you know we put him on the side the forensic comes take him and where they where they put him they hit him again we asked state authorities what kind of resources they would need to help families find their missing loved ones is my question to lopez obrador what are you doing about it senor what are you doing about it what are you doing about the crime you're doing nothing about the crime the crime is getting worse every day senor brother this is during the month we were making this special report barbara martinez's other son cesar's brother also went missing seventeen-year-old esteban urriel rico de la cerda is seen here in september looking for the remains of his lost brother in that abandoned home in tibana now esteban has not been seen since december third as for barbara she started the process all over again of searching for another missing son [Music] oregano barbara now searching for two missing sons vowing to never give up until she gets answers she says she refuses to accept that she lives in a country void of justice so she keeps marching on searching [Music] [Applause] [Music] my you

Channel: The San Diego Union-Tribune

Views: 396,253

Rating: 4.8488998 out of 5

Keywords: san diego, union-tribune, union, tribune, sdut, local, news

Id: tR5j_Sx0WlY

Length: 23min 35sec (1415 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 17 2021