Church demands justice for families of Mexico's missing persons

By David Agren, OSV News

MEXICO CITY (OSV News) -- Alicia Trejo clutched a missing person poster of her son Francisco Albavera Trejo as she spoke to reporters. She affectionately remembered him as ambitious, a stellar student completing an engineering degree and fond of his family.

She also bitterly recalled 11 years of fruitless searching -- along with the crushing indifference of the authorities at all levels of government.

"It's been nothing but promises," she said of the authorities while attending an ecumenical service at a monument for the missing in Mexico City. "Sometimes the authorities tell us that (our children) are away by choice. I have total certainty that he is not absent by choice because my son loved his family … and his family loved him."

The service offered solace for the families, who chanted, "Present, now and always," when their children's names were read.

It also offered a rude reminder of the national tragedy of the disappeared as more than 110,000 Mexicans remain missing, according to a federal registry that dates back to 1962.

Many of the missing disappeared in the horror of the country's ongoing crackdown on drug cartels and organized crime, which has claimed more than 300,000 lives since 2006. But families report frustrations with the authorities, prompting them to form search parties that scour the countryside looking for clues on their disappeared loved ones.

The annual commemoration for the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances Aug. 30 assumed a sense of desperation for the families in Mexico City. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is carrying out a "census" of the missing -- a move families fear is an attempt at downplaying Mexico's missing person crisis and reinforcing his narrative of the country becoming pacified.

"He promised us many things," Trejo said of the president. "He promised help and all the necessary resources without any limits. He ended up ignoring us (and) closing the door on us."

Collectives (associations of families of the missing) in some Mexican cities marked Aug. 30 with special Masses celebrated for their missing family members.

Priests and activists who advocate for families of the disappeared say the Catholic church was slow to respond to the missing persons' crisis, but prominent church leaders have been raising their voices and accompanying families.

"We've been close with families," Jesuit Father José Francisco Méndez told OSV News. That closeness, he explained, includes celebrating the Eucharist on important dates and developing a prayer for the families.

"Many of them approach their parishes," he added. "They've sought support from their parish priests or priests in their parishes, and also religious who are close by."

Mexico's bishops celebrated a Mass for the missing June 18 at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Cardinal Francisco Robles Ortega of Guadalajara also celebrated Mass on Aug. 27 for the collectives of families searching for their relatives.

"We cannot allow that the tragedy of these people, which involves so many other people in their families, be left under the protection of a number that some manage with political-electoral criteria," Cardinal Robles said in an Aug. 27 homily.

"It is unjust that we allow the identity of human beings -- who have all the value and dignity to maintain their identities, even when they are missing -- to be pulverized. Let us not lose sight of them. That the authorities do not treat them as a number to be shrunk so that it suits them politically and electorally.”

López Obrador announced plans earlier in the summer for a census of the missing persons list, dispatching teams from the social welfare secretariat to knock on the doors of families of the missing.

He insisted early results showed many people safely at home -- not missing. But he also spoke conspiratorially of the missing persons' registry, alleging it was being used against him by political opponents.

"It's a campaign against us, being used in a vile way. Anything that helps them attack the government," he alleged at a July 31 press conference.

The head of a government search commission, Karla Quintana, subsequently quit. Sources told the Washington Post that Quintana disagreed with the president's plans to alter the register of missing persons.

"The problem with the census is that it doesn't really want to know how many missing people there are, but rather how many discover that they have already appeared and that is a subtraction," Michael Chamberlin, director of a consultancy which works with families of the missing, told OSV News. "There is no interest in knowing exactly what happened or where they are."

Activists working with families of the missing recognize shortcomings with the list. But they question the president's motives for downplaying the tragedy of the disappeared.

"Only for image reasons is the president concerned about the number of missing persons," Jacobo Dayán, a human rights lawyer, wrote on the news site Animal Politico. "To reduce the impact on his government, he intends to lower figures and not resolve this humanitarian crisis."

López Obrador came to office in December 2018 promising to resolve the issue of Mexico's missing. Three people interviewed by OSV News recall meeting with López Obrador prior to his inauguration and early in his administration, when he promised to receive them every three months.

"When disappearances started to occur in his administration and when he wasn't able to resolve the (prior) disappearances, he personally became closed off," Jorge Verástegui, whose brother and nephew disappeared in 2009, told OSV News. "The final (meeting) was very tense."

The number of missing persons in Mexico tragically continues climbing.

"Every time we hold an event there are more people. It's not because there's more support for the missing," Verástegui said. "It's a permanent and ongoing crime."