Editor’s note: This story first appeared on palabra, the digital news site by the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. This story is part of the series “Migrating and Vanishing.”
I am Araceli Cruz López, an indigenous Tzotzil woman. My little brother was born on June 8, 2003. He was one month shy of his 19th birthday when he disappeared while attempting to migrate to the United States. I live in a camp of displaced people in Chiapas, Mexico. Where do I go? Who do I turn to? Where do I start?
The question repeats itself. The answers do not. At an institutional level, there are multiple failures when it comes to the search for missing migrants. There is a serious forensic crisis in Mexico: 56,000 unidentified bodies and more than 100,000 missing persons. A law regarding the search for missing persons has been in place since 2017, but most of its requirements are not complied with. Identification mechanisms are disjointed and depend on the will of each state.
The data kept by the National Search Commission (CNB, per its Spanish acronym), the agency in charge of searching for people in Mexico, is deficient and contradicts the numbers provided by the state prosecutors’ offices. In the context of a national crisis, who is searching for the migrants?
Civil society organizations, such as the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF, per its acronym in Spanish), the Foundation for Justice and the Democratic Rule of Law (FJEDD) and Mesoamerican Voices, Action for Migrants, among others, have made progress with the families in this regard by establishing networks among themselves, while trying to do the same with some states.
Aurelio was found by trackers
On May 4, 2022 at 3:30 a.m., 18-year-old Aurelio Cruz López called his sister Araceli. He had departed from the town of San Cristóbal de las Casas in the state of Chiapas on April 28, from a camp for people displaced by violence. At first he wanted to look for work in the state of Sonora, but he…
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