Dressed in white T-shirts, the mothers climb the bare hill. In front of them are heavily armed soldiers of the National Guard, searching for danger. The hills on the outskirts of the Mexican city of Tijuana are notorious. It is in these places that drug cartels kill and bury their opponents.
Edith Hernández (51) is one of about thirty family members who are looking for their loved ones today. She drives an iron rod into the rocky ground, spins it around, then brings the end to her nose. “If someone is buried here, you can smell it. Then the rod stinks.” Edith is looking for her son, or rather: parts of her son Omar.
“Omar was a sweet boy, but he got the wrong friends,” she sighs. Her son turned to drugs. “He even stole money from us. Things got better in recent weeks, he would come by to talk. But he didn’t answer his phone anymore.”
horrible pictures
Omar became one of nearly 100,000 Mexicans missing since the start of the drug war in 2006. According to a recent United Nations report, drug cartels and corrupt government officials are usually responsible for such disappearances.
“When I got to the police, they showed me horrible pictures. On one of them I thought I recognized my son, only his head was found. But the police said it couldn’t possibly be Omar. And I didn’t want to believe he did it. they had beaten him up so horribly.”
She held out hope that Omar was still alive. “First I went to hospitals, prisons, rehab,” Edith says. As time went on, hopes that her son was still alive faded. She joined a ‘colectivo’, an organization of relatives of missing Mexicans. Almost every weekend she went looking for human remains with other mothers of missing persons.
Search for family
Fernando Ocegueda is president of the ‘Asociación Unidos por los Desaparecidos’, the family organization that Edith joined. He too has been looking for his son for years. “The government is not doing anything to help us,” he says. The only thing he managed with great difficulty is the armed escort. “That is necessary, because where we look it can be life-threatening.”
Ocegueda is committed to recognizing the great suffering of thousands of Mexicans. “That’s not just emotional,” he says. “Usually it is men who disappear, fathers who provided income. Those left behind often have a hard time economically.” His message is that the government must do more to help find the missing and help the families economically.
Ocegueda’s organization is trying to build a memorial center in Tijuana where the infamous “soup cooker” dissolved hundreds of bodies in acid:
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