‘ I have to find answers’
Relatives of country’s missing scour hillsides for loved ones
IGUALA, Mexico — On an arid hillside high above this now infamous city, Margarita Isidoro tirelessly wields a machete in search of her son.
The petite 57- year- old wearing black and pink sneakers, and a purse slung across her shoulders, moves with singleminded focus. She hacks at tangles of a thorny shrub and crawls into crevasses in the uneven terrain, driving her blade again and again into the soil. She kneels, claws at the dirt and tosses rocks aside.
Isidoro isn’t alone. Emboldened by international attention on 43 missing college students, dozens of parents have come out to hunt for their children, who have been missing for months or even years, digging alongside Isidoro as they’d never dared before, and as authorities never bothered to do.
“Whether he is dead or alive, I want to find my son,” says Isidoro, whose youngest went missing in April 2010.
Isidoro was afraid to search before now because someone had warned her that the same people who took her son in the badlands of the southern state
Whether he is dead or alive, I want to find my son. MARGARITA ISIDORO MOTHER OF MISSING CHILD
of Guerrero might come after her or the rest of her family. Her son, Orlando Catalan, was 22 years old when he left home one afternoon to buy water and never returned. His car was found in another neighbourhood eight days later. “Now I’m ready, if they take me, they take me. I’m going to find my son.”
More than 22,300 people have gone missing in Mexico in the past eight years by the government’s count, a number that human rights activists believe to be much higher given the expanses of the country controlled by organized crime. Among the missing are the 43 students from the Rural Normal School of Ayotzinapa, who were taken by Iguala police Sept. 26 and allegedly turned over to members of the Guerreros Unidos drug gang that rules parts of the state. The Mexican government says the students were likely killed and their bodies incinerated beyond identification. The mayor of Iguala and his wife were arrested and accused of complicity in the mass crime.
After the 43 students vanished, searches around Iguala turned up at least 10 secret graves. None of the remains found in those mounds proved to be the students, but knowing they belonged to someone’s son or daughter, more relatives came forward to seize the moment.
The parents out searching the rugged terrain on this late fall Saturday have banded together in a shared fury over government involvement in the deaths of the Ayotzinapa students, and a suspicion that officials could have been involved in the disappearances of their children, too. What gives them the courage to search for the bodies now, they say, is that federal police have agreed to guard the area, and international journalists are there as witnesses.
Still, they are afraid as they pile into trucks and drive miles over rocky roads up into the hills for the second consecutive weekend. The relatives, and even the priest on hand to celebrate mass before the search, tape paper over their licence plates to make it more difficult to identify their vehicles. In the brush they don’t call out to each other by name, instead shouting for “the friend with the red handkerchief.”
A week earlier, family members had unearthed suspected graves and, in some cases found human remains. This time, under a new agreement with the attorney general’s office, they identify only suspicious spots, planting small orange flags or leaving piles of stones as markers where federal investigators should excavate.
“For us, all of Iguala is a clandestine cemetery,” said Claro Raul Canaan Ramirez, whose sons, 21- year- old Hiram Jafeh Canaan Avila and 24- yearold Omar Canaan Avila, disappeared Aug. 30, 2008, in Iguala. A cousin and an acquaintance with them were killed.