MEXICO CITY (AP) - Federal police officer Luis Angel Leon Rodriguez
disappeared in 2009 along with six fellow police as they headed to the
western state of Michoacan to fight drug traffickers.
Since then, his mother, Araceli Rodriguez, has
taken it into her own hands to investigate her son's disappearance and
has publicized the case inside and outside Mexico. She's found some
clues about what happened but still doesn't have any certainty about her
son's whereabouts.
As Mexican troops and police cracked down on drug
cartels, who also battled among themselves, Leon was just one of
thousands of people who went missing amid a wave of violence that
stunned the nation. A new report by a civic participation group has put a
number for the first time on the human toll: 20,851 people disappeared
over the past six years, although not every case on the list has been
proven related to the drug war.
With at least another 70,000 deaths tied to drug
violence, the numbers point to a brutal episode that ranks among Latin
America's deadliest in decades. In Chile, nearly 3,100 people were
killed, among them 1,200 considered disappeared, for political reasons
during Augusto Pinochet's 1973-1990 dictatorship, and at least 50,000
people disappeared during 40 years of internal conflict in Colombia.
The new database is shedding needed light on
Mexico's unfolding tragedy. It's also sparking angry questions about why
it doesn't include all of the disappeared.
Neither Rodriguez's son nor his six colleagues who
went missing on Nov. 16, 2009, are in the database, which was allegedly
leaked by the Attorney General's Office to a foreign journalist. The
group Propuesta Civica, or Civic Proposal, released the data on
Thursday.
Rodriguez's mother said she's been in touch with
authorities investigating the case and has spoken about it in several
public forums about the missing.
"I don't think any government entity has a complete database," she said.
A spokesman for federal prosecutors, who would not
allow his name to be used under the agency's rules, said the Attorney
General's Office had no knowledge of the document.
As compiled by Civic Proposal, the report reveals
the sheer scope of human loss, with the missing including police
officers, bricklayers, housewives, lawyers, students, businessmen and
more than 1,200 children under age 11. The disappeared are listed one by
one with such details as name, age, gender and the date and place where
they disappeared.
Some media in Mexico have reported that the number
of missing could be even greater, at more than 25,000, with their
estimates reportedly based on official reports, although media accounts
didn't make the reports public.
"We're worried because several of the people gone
missing in the state of Coahuila, and that we have reported to
authorities, don't appear on the database," said Blanca Martinez of the
Fray Juan de Larios human rights center in that northern border state.
She's also an adviser to the group Forces United for Our Disappeared in
Coahuila, made up of relatives searching for loved ones.
Martinez said that between 2007 and 2012 the group
registered 290 cases of missing people. The database released Thursday
lists 272 cases in the state since 2006.
"We have no doubt that the authorities have done absolutely nothing" to solve them, she said.
Public attention to Mexico's disappeared has grown
especially since 2011 when former President Felipe Calderon publicly met
with members of the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity, a
human rights group led by poet Javier Sicilia. His son was allegedly
killed by drug traffickers that same year.
Sicilia's movement demanded that the thousands of
killed and missing should be treated as victims of the drug war, even if
they were criminal suspects. Calderon's government responded that it
would create a missing persons database, but authorities have not made
it public so far. Calderon also ordered the creation of a special
prosecutor in charge of assisting crime victims and supporting the
search for the missing.
"There is nothing worse for me than having a
missing relative. Not knowing where the person may be is very serious
and so ... in every case that comes to us, we try to find a solution, to
find the person," said Sara Herrerias, the head of Provictima, the
office established by Calderon to help crime victims.
Herrerias, however, was cautious talking about the
number of missing and said she could only discuss the cases that her
office has dealt with.
In 14 months, she said, Provictima has handled the
cases of 1,523 missing people, most of them allegedly taken by members
of organized crime but with some cases also reportedly involving
government authorities. Of the total number, 150 people have been
located, 40 of them found dead.
Herrerias declined to talk about the possible
magnitude of disappearances. "I don't like to talk when I don't have
hard data," she said.
Estimates of the missing vary. The National Human
Rights Commission, which operates independently from the government, has
said that some 24,000 people were reported missing between 2000 and
mid-2012, in addition to some 16,000 bodies that have been found but
remain unidentified.
The government of President Enrique Pena, who took
office Dec. 1, estimates the number of unidentified bodies at about
9,000 during Calderon's previous six-year administration.
Civic Proposal director Pilar Talavera said that
although her group saw inconsistencies in the database, they decided to
disclose it not only to help the public understand the scale of the
violence, but also to pressure authorities to disclose official
information on disappearances.
While the numbers help, what the relatives of the
missing need most, of course, is to just learn what happened to their
loved ones.
Since the disappearance of Rodriguez's
then-23-year-old son, a dozen alleged members of the La Familia drug
cartel have been arrested as suspects in his case. Rodriguez said she
has interviewed four of them, who have told her that her son and the
other six officers were killed and their bodies "disintegrated."
She said that so far no one has given her any clues about where her son's remains are.
"If it's true what the criminals say ... even with
that, my heart asks to find Luis Angel," Rodriguez said. "For me Luis
Angel is still missing."
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