Missing In Mexico: 25,000 Mexican Families Disappeared In 6 Years

Mexico City, Mexico – Missing in Mexico is becoming a common calamity in the six years since President Felipe Calderon took office. Unpublished government documents indicate that more than 25,000 people have gone missing in Mexico.

Mexico’s violent internal struggle against drug mafias and crime gangs has led to many suddenly becoming missing in Mexico. Mexico’s attorney general compiled a list of tens of thousand of adults and children who suddenly disappear without warning. This spreadsheet list includes “names, dates of disappearance, ages, clothes they were wearing, jobs and some brief details.”

According to UPI, these brief details showcase how those missing in Mexico were going about their normal daily lives when someone made them disappear.

“The father was arrested by men wearing uniforms and never seen again,” one reads.

“His wife went to buy medicine and disappeared,” says another.

The people of Mexico are not happy with their government seeming lack of official response.

“What does the government do? Nothing or almost nothing. Why? There is a paralysis,” said Juan Lopez Villanueva of the group United Forces for Our Missing in Mexico. “The state has failed us.”

The missing in Mexico are just another symptom of the problems facing Mexico. According to the Guardian, government corruption might be the root cause for some of these cases.

Silvia Ortiz’s teenage daughter Fanny went missing in Mexico eight years ago and the Ortiz family has led the charge to find her.

“I still don’t know if Fanny is alive or not. Maybe she is in a mass grave and I will never find her, but I have to keep looking,” Ortiz says. “If I don’t, who will?”

Mexican police ignored requests to look for the daughter so the Ortiz family used a sniffing dog to follow the teenager’s trail until it led to clues indicating she had been abducted by criminals associated with the Zetas drug cartel. Even then the police did nothing. Then Ortiz discovered the official supposedly leading the abduction investigation was the lover of one of their prime suspects.

Years later the only hope Ortiz has received is a photograph of a girl resembling Fanny sitting next to the Zetas’ leader, Heriberto Lazcano–known as “El Lazca”–who was shot dead by the Mexican navy. Ortiz eventually tracked down the woman in the photograph but that is where the trail ended since she discovered the details about the photograph were a lie told by Mexican police.

Many believe the missing in Mexico might be still alive but are being forced to work for the drug cartels. Fanny’s mother will never let go of that hope until she has a fully identified body to bury. “All I want is to see my baby,” she says. “All I want is to tell her I love her, and to tell her I want to heal her wounds.”