Mexico’s Growing Missing List

They took him barefoot. Jose Luis Osoria had been asleep when the screams of his 16-year-old daughter pierced the sweltering night. Flinging open his bedroom door, the carpenter discovered six men armed with semiautomatic weapons. The men, some in black federal police uniforms, shoved past his daughter and grabbed Osoria.

It was the last his family saw of him.

Today, after months of beseeching officials, demonstrating and visiting the morgue in this city across the Rio Grande from Texas, Armandina Osoria still has no idea why her husband was detained on Aug. 13, 1998--or where he is.

“What we want to know is, if he’s been killed, what happened? We want to know, good or bad,” said the 43-year-old mother of three, tears welling in her eyes. “If he’s buried, tell us.”

Osoria’s kidnapping is part of a mysterious wave of disappearances in Mexico in recent years that has alarmed human rights groups. The issue captured world attention in December when U.S. and Mexican authorities launched an unprecedented search for mass graves in Ciudad Juarez amid the revelation that more than 100 people had vanished in that border city near El Paso.

But the problem of los desaparecidos--the disappeared--is much broader.

Quietly, say human rights groups, the toll has soared in recent years, with hundreds vanishing in a strange mix of drug violence in northern Mexico and anti-guerrilla sweeps in the south. In most cases, the police or the army are suspected, the groups say. Now, activists and legislators are struggling to attack a problem that they believe may have claimed as many victims as did the army’s “dirty war” against leftist guerrillas in the 1970s.

“It’s a social phenomenon in the whole north, not just in Ciudad Juarez,” said Victor Clarke, a prominent human rights activist in Tijuana. “It’s an unusual, alarming phenomenon because of the method. And we always ask, where are the disappeared? Where did they put 400 people?”

Precise numbers of those who have disappeared are difficult to obtain. The government’s Human Rights Commission registered 524 cases in the 1990s, many allegedly involving officials, compared with 67 cases in the 1980s. The commission, which was founded in 1990, says it has resolved more than half the cases from the past decade, finding the victims dead or alive.

But private human rights groups believe that the tally of missing is even higher. They say many disappearances are never reported, due to families’ fear of vengeance or distrust of authorities.

Clarke believes that as many as 400 people have been taken in northern Mexico alone since the mid-1990s, some seized by soldiers fighting drug lords, others by corrupt police working for the traffickers. Judith Galarza, head of Mexico’s Assn. of Families of the Disappeared, or AFADEM, estimates that the northern total could be as high as 500.

Scores of Suspected Guerrillas Missing

In the south, meanwhile, human rights groups have documented scores of cases in which suspected left-wing guerrillas have vanished in recent years.

“There are different phenomena in Mexico that lead to a similar unfortunate outcome: disappearances,” said Joel Solomon of Human Rights Watch in Washington, who wrote a report last year on the problem. “There is, however, one underlying factor common to all of the cases, and that is the failure of the justice system to deal with disappearances properly.”

Analysts trace the growth in the problem to events in the mid-1990s. As Mexico became a major conduit for Colombian cocaine, trafficking groups flourished along the U.S.-Mexican border from California to Texas--and so did bloody conflicts.

But analysts note the reemergence of a chilling practice.

“This method that appeared was associated in the past with the military,” said Clarke, the human rights activist, referring to the dirty war, during which as many as 500 suspected guerrillas are believed to have been “disappeared.” He added: “What I observe is that organized crime has adopted this method, working with corrupt authorities.”

Activists speculate that drug lords and their allies began to “disappear” people to sow terror, or to dispose of evidence after they had tortured a victim to death.

Clarke’s experience illustrates why the phenomenon has been so difficult to pin down. He was among the first to investigate the new wave of disappearances. But in 1997, after he had documented seven cases in Baja California, he was stopped cold: Anonymous callers threatened to kill him.

“We decided not to touch the theme,” he said.

Relatives of victims have faced similar threats. Ciudad Juarez is the only place where families have banded together, demanding action on the 196 cases--including 18 involving Americans--they have recorded, most from 1993 to 1997.

When they dare to report disappearances, many families get little help.

Consider the situation of Armandina Osoria. A stocky woman with lively brown eyes, she sits on a bed and riffles through a file of letters, legal documents and photos regarding her husband’s case.

Since Jose Luis Osoria was hauled away, she tells a visitor, she has tried everything. She has sought out officials in Ciudad Victoria, the Tamaulipas state capital, and the military in Mexico City. She has organized demonstrations at government offices and the bridge linking her city with Laredo, Texas.

All without result.

When Osoria reported her husband’s disappearance to federal police, she recalls, the agent responded with a threat.

“He said if I was telling lies and my husband was involved in drugs, they would take me prisoner,” she recounted in the interview at her home, a gray concrete-block building brightened by faded pink-flowered curtains.

The family believes that Jose Luis Osoria was abducted after he was mistaken for a neighbor. Family members say they have identified one of the men who took him--a federal police officer whose photograph they spotted in a newspaper. He is still working, in a different city.

The federal police commander in Nuevo Laredo, Homero Martinez, at first denied that he was investigating the Osoria disappearance. When a reporter showed him a photo of the agent allegedly involved, however, he produced the paperwork.

“Of course we’re investigating,” Martinez said. He declined to comment further, however, saying the case was still open.

Human rights activists say such callousness is typical. They charge that authorities either dismiss disappearances as vendettas between traffickers or drag their feet because security forces allegedly are involved.

“We’ve seen cases where it was a year after the disappearance that the first serious investigation took place,” said Solomon of Human Rights Watch. “That’s ridiculous.”

In their defense, Mexican authorities note that disappearances are hard to investigate, especially when relatives won’t cooperate. In addition, they say, criminals in Mexico often don police uniforms, making it difficult to determine who is at fault. In some cases, missing people turn out to have run away or crossed into the United States.

Many Cases Don’t Get Reported to Panel

Alfonso Quiroz, a 37-year-old lawyer who heads the Program of Presumed Disappeared for the government’s Human Rights Commission, notes that his group has confirmed the whereabouts of 297 out of 524 people registered as missing in the 1990s. But he acknowledges that many cases are never reported to the commission. For example, it has recorded only 50 disappearances in Ciudad Juarez.

“We are very worried. That’s why we’re working to strengthen this program,” said Quiroz, noting that the commission recently won independence from the Mexican executive branch.

But critics note that the commission still can’t conduct criminal investigations. Those are generally handled by state prosecutors, and as a result, the federal government doesn’t even know the scope of the disappearance problem.

“I’m sure these clandestine graves don’t exist only in Ciudad Juarez,” Atty. Gen. Jorge Madrazo Cuellar told reporters last month. “We are ready to work with local authorities to know if these actions are being repeated in other areas of the country.”

Now a left-wing lawmaker has proposed making disappearances in which authorities are implicated a federal crime. The bill, submitted in December by Congressman Benito Miron, president of the Chamber of Deputies’ Human Rights Committee, would increase the penalty applied to illegal detention cases and require the government to pay reparation to victims its personnel held.

Miron said the Ciudad Juarez graves are “an indication to society and maybe to wavering legislators that, with such events, there is a need to make this a crime.” Authorities discovered nine bodies buried in the Ciudad Juarez sites; the whereabouts of the others missing in the city continue to be a mystery.

In addition to the disappearances in northern drug-trafficking regions, the problem has resurfaced in southern Mexico. Activists say the toll of missing in the south began to rise in 1994, when the Zapatista rebels launched a short-lived uprising in Chiapas state. But most of the disappearances have occurred in Guerrero and Oaxaca states, where the army has been confronting the small left-wing Popular Revolutionary Army, or EPR, and its offshoots since 1996.

The Miguel Agustin Pro Human Rights Center in Mexico City and Amnesty International have documented scores of such cases, allegedly involving the military, state police or paramilitary groups. AFADEM, the relatives association, has registered nearly 100 such disappearances, but the group believes that its list is incomplete.

Activists say a major difference in the south is that victims often reappear days or months after vanishing. Some turn up in prison facing charges; others arrive home saying they had been detained and tortured by the police or army.

Miguel Castro, a peasant and left-wing activist who disappeared April 5, 1997, told the Miguel Agustin Pro center that two short-haired men forced him off a bus outside Acapulco, blindfolded him and whisked him by car and helicopter to a remote building. There, Castro testified, men who identified themselves as military officials beat him and applied electrical shocks to his head, wrists and ankles, demanding information about the EPR.

Castro returned home 16 months later, after the officials finally accepted his claims of innocence, he said. They told Castro “that I was lucky to have been detained by the military, because if the police had captured me, they would have killed me,” he said in his testimony, which was sent to the Human Rights Commission. Castro has been too frightened to press criminal charges, said the Miguel Agustin Pro center.

Little Evidence That Guilty Are Punished

Human rights activists say officials responsible for such abductions appear to be treated leniently.

“The military prosecutor says they are punished, but we have no evidence of that,” said Rafael Alvarez, an investigator with the Miguel Agustin Pro center, noting that military trials are generally secret.

Repeated calls to seek comment from the military prosecutor, Rafael Macedo de la Concha, were not returned.

While the problem of disappearances seems to have grown sharply, there has been little public outcry. Officials and human rights groups are stepping up their efforts to publicize the problem. Congressman Miron is holding forums around the country on the issue. Activists recently proposed drawing up a well-documented national list of those who have disappeared.

Manuel Miron, the legislator’s brother and aide, says violence has grown so much in recent years that many Mexicans have become desensitized, especially when suspected lawbreakers are the victims.

“But whether someone’s thought to be a guerrilla or a drug trafficker, human rights are human rights,” he said. “The state must respect those rights.”