Mothers and relatives of hundreds of disappeared people in Jalisco gathered at the Niños Heroes monument in Guadalajara on Mother’s Day to demand action from the authorities.
“Can we celebrate this day when our children are not at home?” asked a spokeswoman for the Jalisco Families United for Our Disappeared (Fundej).
“No, we definitely can’t,” responded Maria Leticia Vazquez minutes later. “A mother without a child is not complete.”
Maria’s daughter Erika Cueto went missing seven months ago on the coastal highway in the state of Nayarit. A well-known pole fitness instructor in Puerto Vallarta, she was traveling in her pink Chevrolet Spark to Jalisco’s neighboring state to arrange details about an event that she was organizing there. Her car was found five days later, next to a river in Puerto Vallarta. It had been painted white. Some reports suggested traces of blood were found, along with restraints often used by kidnappers.
Family members of Cueto are furious that Jalisco authorities made little or no effort to investigate in the crucial hours following the disappearance of their relative. In contrast, they say, significant resources were invested to search for Puerto Vallarta councilor Humberto Gomez Arevalo, who disappeared in February of this year.
In addition to the apparent apathy of investigators, Cueto’s relatives and friends have criticized the lack of collaboration between Jalisco and Nayarit authorities in the case.
Cueto’s case is far from unique. According to government statistics, Jalisco follows Tamaulipas as the state with the second-highest number of disappeared people, with more than 2,400 people missing since 2007. Only eight agents are assigned to these cases, and according to parents, the investigations are characterized by inefficiency, misinformation, and sometimes outright disinterest.
State governor Aristoteles Sandoval has yet to respond to a request for a meeting with families of the disappeared, while Fundej says that he “expresses concern in his words but not in his actions.”
The organization wants the state government to implement an intelligence and security strategy to locate as many missing people as po
ssible. Fundej is asking authorities to take DNA samples from relatives and create a database of missing individuals, among other things.
To make their point, protesting families carried banners and photos of their missing relatives and installed an altar at the foot of the Niños Heroes monument.
While the federal government has reported a 17-percent drop in the murder rate in the past year, unofficial sources claim the number of disappeared has risen by an estimated 170 percent.