March 24, 2008
Disappearances, the ‘Silent Side’ of Mexico's Narco War
Frontera NorteSur
The unearthing of at least 48 murder victims from three properties in Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua City during recent
weeks grimly refocused attention on the persistence of torture and forced disappearance in Mexico. Since many – if not
most – of the victims were presumably associated with illegal drug trafficking and other criminal activities, the popular
wisdom is that common citizens who keep their noses out of trouble shouldn't be overly concerned by the discovery of mass
horrors like the latest narco graves.
But victims' relatives have another message for society: human rights are universal.
Contending that authorities are ignoring their pleas for justice, relatives and friends of victims of forced disappearance
are increasingly taking their plight to the media and the public. In the Baja California state capital of Mexicali, members
of the Esperanza Association Against the Forced Disappearance of Persons set up a protest encampment earlier this month outside
state government offices. Members of the organization charged that 300 cases of disappeared people in the five municipalities
of Baja California remain unsolved.
Meanwhile, in the Guerrero state capital of Chilpancingo the Committee of Friends
and Relatives of Murdered, Disappeared and Kidnapped Persons contended that Guerrero Governor Zeferino Torreblanca, and State
Attorney General Eduardo Murueta, have closed their doors to family members of missing persons presumably kidnapped by organized
crime elements.
"Not a single state official has faced down the violence that this place is going through," charged
Filiberto Ceron Radilla, father of disappeared architect Jorge Gabriel Ceron Silva. "It is as if they want to oblige
the citizenry to accept a reality that we are not ready to tolerate." There was no immediate comment from either Governor
Torreblanca or Attorney General Murueta.
The Guerrero relatives' committee has documented the cases of 107 people who
disappeared in the state from December 2006 to January 2008. Additionally, the group reported at least 20 similar disappearances
in the first two months of this year. Although violence has diminished somewhat from last year and 2006, high-profile disappearances
and murders, suspected of being carried out by organized criminal gangs, continue on a fairly regular basis. In one of the
latest cases to hit the press, Edgar Calvillo Roux, the director of the Acapulco police department's intelligence center,
was reportedly kidnapped by armed men on March 5. As of yet no information about Calvillo's fate has come to light.
Condemned
by all human rights organizations, forced disappearance constitutes the silent side of Mexico's narco war. Much more visible,
of course, are the inner city shootouts, street side body dumping and public executions that have jarred entire regions of
the country. In Ciudad Juarez, for example, nine people were reported slain gangland style on Monday, March 17, including
one man who was shot to death inside the popular Willy's dance club in the city's Pronaf district.
Since the administration
of Mexican President Felipe Calderon took office on December 1, 2006 more than 3,000 people have been murdered in gangland
style killings. As of March 14 of this year, the victims included 2,811 men and 197 women. Added together with similar statistics
from 2006, more than 5,000 people have been killed in narco-tainted violence in the last two years. The body count is significantly
higher than the total number of US soldiers killed during the first five years of the Iraq war.
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Sources: El Diario de Juarez, March 18, 2008. Article
by Martin Orquiz. Norte, March 18, 2008. Article by Arturo Chacon. Los Angeles Times, March 15, 2008 Article by Marla Dickerson
and Richard Marosi. La Jornada de Guerrero, March 15, 2008. Article by Marlen Castro. La Jornada, March 10, 2008. Article
by Antonio Heras. El Sur, March 1, 8, 15, 16, 2008. Articles by Ezequiel Flores Contreras, Aurora Harrison, editorial staff
and the Agencia Reforma news service.
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Frontera
NorteSur (FNS)
Center for Latin American and Border Studies
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, New Mexico
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(Reprinted
with authorization from Frontera NorteSur, a free, on-line, U.S.-Mexico border news source. FNS can be found at http://frontera.nmsu.edu/)
Translation
FNS
