Mexican ‘searchers’ seek missing people and political support

Searchers, known as “buscadoras” in Mexico, are seeking political support in the United States after finding little more than closed doors in their home country.

The term searchers refers to the often gruesome task of physically sifting through the soil in search of human remains that are ignored by Mexico’s specialized forensic services.

The buscadoras are primarily the mothers and sisters of Mexico’s more than 100,000 missing people – people who vanished without a trace, likely victims of criminal acts.

Searching families are forming groups across the country, doing a job that Mexican authorities at the local, state and federal levels, including President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, whose six-year term ends on October 1, have refused to do.

“The Mexican government is on its way out. There are elections coming up, but in these six years he has not spent five minutes for the country’s victims. In his six years in office, he has not had a single attack in the country,” said Bibiana Mendoza, who helped found the search group Hasta Encontralte (Until We Find You) in the city of Irapuato in the central state of Guanajuato.

According to the United Nations, 97 percent of the disappearances have occurred since 2006, when Mexico introduced military force to combat drug cartel violence. The homicide rate soared from 4 per 100,000 residents that year to 12 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2012.

Mexico’s official murder rate correlates with presidential administrations and their public safety policies.

Former President Felipe Calderon, a traditional conservative who ordered the militarization of the country’s police, oversaw this rise until 2012.

Calderon’s successor, Enrique Peña Nieto, ruled as a centrist whose government became associated more with corruption than with any particular policy, although under his administration the murder rate fell to 8 per 100,000 before rising again to 12 per 100,000.

President Lopez Obrador, long criticized for his “hugs, not bullets” policing strategy, oversaw a surge in homicides to 15 per 100,000 people before falling to 12.

Mexico’s dire security situation over the past two decades doesn’t seem to be linked to political party — each of its three previous presidents has had a different political affiliation — and Mendoza linked it to the country’s intense partisanship.

“Mexican civil servants seem to lose their humanity the moment they take up government employment and trade it for the defence of a political party,” Mendoza said.

“Over there, everyone says, ‘Our party did the right thing, our party did this for the missing, or the violence is not our party’s fault, it’s the fault of the previous party,’ and they try to take a social issue, like the search that women are doing in Mexico, and turn it into a convenient political game to use in election campaigns. And once we get in the way, a new rhetoric emerges: ‘You’re either with me or against me,’ and the state stopped being on our side a long time ago.”

But Lopez Obrador, who campaigned as a leftist, made sweeping promises to families of the missing, including relatives of 43 student activists kidnapped and believed to have been killed in Guerrero state in 2014.

Those promises included strengthening the national search committee and allowing an independent investigation, but Lopez Obrador’s view as an outside critic of President Peña Nieto’s handling of this and other disappearances changed once he took office.

“There has been some interest and progress for some time under the current administration, particularly on the Ayotzinapa case, but there certainly hasn’t been that type of dialogue or cooperation or attention generally given to the search parties,” said Stephanie Brewer, Mexico director for the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), a human rights think tank.

“That’s the context, but what’s happened particularly in the last year to year and a half is that the Lopez Obrador administration seems to have decided that it no longer wants to pay the political costs of confronting this crisis.”

In November, President Lopez Obrador accused former officials of his administration of inflating the number of disappearances to “influence” the government.

He stepped down as head of the national search committee in August and called for a new census of the disappeared following whistle-blowing from Carla Quintana, who denounced attempts to tamper with official figures in Lopez Obrador’s favor.

As the group continues their search, with the federal government turning its back and often facing threats from criminal organisations trying to hide evidence of their crimes, they have also looked overseas for attention.

Earlier this month, Mendoza and Olimpia Montoya, from the search project, “Projeto de Busqueda,” received the WOLA Human Rights Award at the organization’s 50th anniversary celebration in Washington.

The group also visited executive branch and congressional offices calling for increased U.S. oversight and awareness of the forensic equipment provided to Mexico.

“My heart goes out to the families whose loved ones have been forcibly disappeared in Guanajuato and other parts of Mexico, many of whom have searched for their missing people without adequate resources and with little support,” Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) told The Hill in an email.

“I am concerned by the alarming number of disappeared persons in Mexico, the low number of convictions, and the shocking level of impunity. I call on the Mexican government to work with the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances to strengthen transparency and methodological mechanisms. I will continue to monitor the situation closely and work with key actors to find effective ways to address these serious issues.”

But U.S.-Mexico relations are at an impasse, with federal elections coming up in both countries.

Mexico’s elections take place on June 2nd, and former Mexico City mayor Claudia Sheinbaum is leading by a large margin, but opposition candidate Xochitl Gálvez has regained some vigor in her campaign in the final stages of the election.

Sheinbaum, Lopez Obrador’s handpicked successor, is widely expected to continue Lopez Obrador’s policies when he takes office on October 1, one month before the U.S. presidential election.

This is the Biden administration’s biggest current concern in the bilateral relationship, as President Lopez Obrador has effectively reduced migrant border crossings through crackdowns across Mexico, giving the Biden administration political space on key issues.

“The United States celebrates the vitality of Mexico’s democracy, even though there are very clear and very worrying signs of democratic backsliding under the Lopez Obrador administration. The United States has not been as vocal about some of Mexico’s human rights problems as it has in other countries,” Brewer said.

“So what President Lopez Obrador gets in exchange for these immigration enforcement measures by Mexico is primarily a tacit agreement that certain other thorny issues will not be brought up to criticize him or be used in the same way in bilateral relations.”

As diplomacy and politics intensify, Buscadora and others say they will continue to push for closure for disappeared relatives who are often revictimized by criminal allegations and racist dehumanization.

Mendoza and Montoya said they have been ostracized by a society that views victims as criminals unworthy of public funds and have received no help in searching for their relatives, specifically their siblings.

“Unfortunately, in a country that doesn’t give all its citizens the tools to be equal, they expect us to be perfect. They expect us to act and live like people who have privileges when we don’t have any,” Mendoza said.