The relatives of missing persons received some TLC from the Catholic Church’s most senior figure in these parts, when Cardinal José Francisco Robles Ortega, the archbishop of Guadalajara, presided at a special service dedicated to the disappeared on Sunday, August 27 at the imperious but unfinished Santuario de los Mártires in Cerro del Tesoro neighborhood.
“I want to praise, encourage and recognize the relatives of these unjustly disappeared people,” Robles said in his homily. “Each of these faces is a loved, sought after and wanted person.”
Echoing words used so frequently by relatives of the missing, Robles said: “We want to know where they are. If they are alive or dead. We have the right to know.”
Robles called on authorities to make more strenuous efforts to locate the missing and stop the impunity and violence in the state.
In an editorial published in the latest edition of the archdiocese magazine El Semanario, Robles criticized President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador for making light of “the serious situation the country is going through in many areas.” He specifically mentioned the president’s turning a deaf ear to a journalist’s question about the recent case involving five missing young men in the Jalisco town of Lagos de Moreno. He said the response showed “a perverse lack of sensitivity.”
Robles also warned citizens to be aware that as next year’s elections near, to gain favor for its party’s candidate the federal government will likely try to convince voters that missing persons data is inflated and is actually less than reported. “We can’t allow the disappeared to be a number that can be lowered at election times,” Robles wrote.