Families Scour Mexico 'Killing Field' for Drug War Victims

By teleSUR

11 October 16

 

In Coahuila, families of the disappeared don't hunt for mass graves, but comb the desert for scraps of bone left behind when cartels burn bodies.

amily members of victims that have “disappeared” in the northern Mexican state of Coahuila call the desert area near the city of Torreon a “killing field,” and it's where they go to look for clues about what happened to their loved ones.

In the past year, the grassroots group known as Grupo Vida, a Spanish acronym for its full name Victims for Our Disappeared in Action, has recovered 4,000 bone fragments from the farmlands of Patrocinio that offer bits of evidence of the gruesome abuses that have happened there. But the human rights defenders say state and federal law-enforcement officials have failed to thoroughly investigate the evidence they've handed over.

Few of the remains have been identified.

“The government claims to be investigating cases of people disappeared,” author and journalist Dawn Paley, who recently reported on the Coahuila disappearances in a piece in The Nation, told teleSUR Monday. “However family members I have interviewed who are part of Grupo Vida say there are no advances in their cases.”

Forensic experts have linked evidence from the more than 4,000 shards of bone — many heavily charred — to the DNA of just three people. Overall, the remains collected by grassroots investigators from more than a dozen trips to the desert fields correspond to an unknown number of victims. The gruesome burning process used by perpetrators to dispose of bodies often strips the bones of genetic information.

Local media have reported that the technique used by drug cartels in Coahuila — namely the notorious Zetas syndicate — to cover the tracks of their killings is to mix dead bodies with diesel fuel and “cook” them until nothing but splinters remain. The barbaric practice means family members scour the ground for bits of bone, rather than search for mass graves like those found scattered across other violence plagued states, such as Guerrero, where the 43 Ayotzinapa students disappeared two years ago.

Silvia Ortiz, a spokesperson with Grupo Vida, recently told Mexico’s El Milenio that the search efforts have turned up evidence including teeth, molars and tiny bones. The group has urged authorities to speed up the process of identifying the remains, which could provide closure for family members who have been searching for their missing relatives for up to a decade or more in some cases.

Before the most recent trip into the so-called “killing fields” to comb for evidence, Grupo Vida had collected 3,448 bone fragments, only 54 of which have a chance of being identified, according to local media. But Ortiz assured in an interview with AFP that after the latest mission, the number of shards has surpassed 4,000. And the search continues.

The state government responded to the crisis on Saturday, noting that “varying levels of carbonation and calcination” on recovered bone fragments point to fuel-fed incineration of bodies that make it very difficult if not impossible to identify remains. The official statement clarified that the 3,448 recorded remains do not indicate an equal number of victims and claimed that an investigation is ongoing.

But Grupo Vida has little reason to have faith in the official investigation after seeing dismal progress on their cases. According to Paley, the collective initially met in 2013 to discuss the “Victims’ Law” introduced by President Enrique Peña Nieto in response to social movement calls to tackle impunity for grave human rights abuses in the country. After the high-profile disappearance of the 43 Ayotzinapa student that shined a national and international spotlight on the crisis sweeping the country, Grupo Vida was inspired to take matters into their own hands.

“They heard about searches that were turning up bodies there (in Guerrero) and decided to begin their own,” said Paley, whose most recent piece in The Nation is titled “A Growing Grassroots Movement in Mexico is Resisting the U.S.-backed Drug War.”

The grassroots search has been fruitful in terms of discovering remains, by the state and federal governments continue to largely brush aside families demanding justice and turn a blind eye to gross scale of the crisis.

State collusion with organized crime is suspected to be one of the main drivers that allowed the bloody phenomenon of the Coahuila “killing fields” to emerge. The place is a microcosm of the larger violent reality lived in Mexico thanks to the U.S.-backed drug war that has failed to curb drug trafficking while ramping up militarization and criminalization of social movements, campesinos, and other marginalized groups.

Paley, author of “Drug War Capitalism, wrote in The Nation that many believe police, military, and local politicians helped feed cartels and the wave of brutal violence spurred by turf wars between the Zetas and infamous drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman’s Sinaloa cartel.

“Local lore has it that the former governor of Coahuila, Humberto Moreira, allows the Zetas drug cartel to enter Coahuila in exchange for huge personal gain,” she wrote, noting the battles for control between the Zetas and Sinaloa cartels. “But there are other players, as federal police and soldiers were also deployed to the city, and municipal police supervised the bulk of criminal activity.”

According to a recent report on the Zetas cartel and tragedies in Coahuila and the northeastern state of Tamaulipas, municipal mayors were little more than “decorative figures” in the context of a blossoming drug trafficking business and the violence that goes along with it. The study, carried out by the Colegio de Mexico’s Center for International Studies together with Mexico’s Executive Committee for Victims, found that mayors had no authority to counter the power the Zetas held over local police forces.

In the Coahuila municipality of Allende, where the Zetas kidnapped and presumably massacred at least 42 people in 2011, at least 20 police were working in the service of the cartel, according to the report. Separately, a former Zetas member has testified in a case in a Texas court that the cartel used official Coahuila helicopters and other resources to evade anti-narcotics operations.

In a conversation with investigators on the report, current Coahuila governor Ruben Moreira admitted that “Coahuila has not done anything” when it comes to disappearances. Underlining the failure, the Colegio de Mexico study claims that the true victim toll of the 2011 Allende case could be as many as 300 — far and away more than the official statistic of 42.

The crisis of forced disappearances in Mexico has raged unabated in recent years, with latest official figures reporting that more than 28,000 people are missing in the country, an increase of more than 5,000 from two years ago when the Ayotzinapa students disappeared in Iguala, Guerrero. Human rights experts suggest that real figures are likely higher than state statistics.