If you go missing in Mexico, your family becomes the search party. If the government looks, chances are high someone will fumble the search.
Out of incompetence? Or something more sinister?
Eleven years ago this month, 43 students disappeared. From the Ayotzinapa rural teaching college in Mexico’s state of Guerrero, they were in the city of Iguala to hitch a bus ride to a student protest in Mexico City, an annual event commemorating the shooting of students in 1968 right before Mexico City hosted the Olympics (not the best public image start to the games, but that’s another tragedy for another day.)
I solved the case in 43 MISSING, a Detective Emilia Cruz Novel, but the true bottom line is that what happened to the missing 43 students is still an incoherent jumble.
In the 11 years since their disappearance, city officials, local police, armed forces, federal politicians, and a string of narco types have been implicated but nothing really sticks. Stories change. Arrests are reversed. Dubious deals lead to dubious testimony.
A new wrinkle
This week narco journalist Ioan Grillo noted that kingpin Abigael González Valencia, or “El Cuini” was one of the criminal narcos sent from Mexico to the US. He’s such a big deal that Terry Cole, head of the DEA, personally escorted him off the plane in handcuffs.
Cuini supposedly provided information to the Ayotzinapa investigation. The problem is, as Grillo notes, “Cuini was a top cartel operator in Jalisco state, the disappearance of the 43 students was carried out by the Guerreros Unidos cartel working with police in the city of Iguala, hundreds of miles away.”
Moreover, former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador reportedly wrote a letter to the parents of the students in which he confirmed holding up the extradition of Cuini because of an arrangement with another cartel kingpin “helping” with the investigation, Gildardo López Astudillo, known as “El Cabo Gil.”
Gil is alleged to be the head of killers for the Guerreros Unidos, the gang thought to be responsible for action against the students. Yet, as Grillo maintains, “for a witness to demand that the government protect a major kingpin of a different cartel would indicate an extraordinary deal.”
Another unsolved mystery . . .
Family matters
Meanwhile, it has fallen to the families to hunt for not just the Ayotzinapa victims but those missing across Mexico, and keep up the pressure on the government. The searchers are called buscadores. They use their own money/resources, a network of tipsters and volunteers to hunt for their loved ones.
While in office, López Obrador scorned their efforts and accused the group of “a delirium of necrophilia.”
Last year, NPR accompanied a group called Madres Buscadores (Searching Mothers) as they were prevented by police from combing an area outside Mexico City.
Was it for their safety? Or for another, less palatable reason?
You decide.
Not far from fiction
DRAGON CARTEL will be the 10th book in the Detective Emilia Cruz series. In it, after solving the murder of the mayor’s sister in BARRACUDA BAY, Emilia returns to the hunt for the missing. This time she’s looking for a Customs agent.
She’s fictional, but Emilia represents the buscadores and all those who are searching for the truth. As in real life, there are forces arrayed against her . . .
- Those who willingly take bribes to protect organized crime,
- Those who face a binary threat: help the cartel and live. Don’t help and you and your family die,
- Those who ignore/spin bad news because it looks bad for them politically, and
- And those who are simply incompetent . . .
What can Emilia do to overcome these forces?
All suggestions welcome.
MY BACKSTORY— I learned a few things about danger, deception and resilience during a 30-year career with the CIA focusing on counterdrug efforts and technical collection. Now a mystery author, those lessons play out on the page, especially in the Detective Emilia Cruz mystery series set in Acapulco. Starting with Cliff Diver, the series is a back-to-back winner of the Poison Cup Award for Outstanding Series from CrimeMasters of America. I’ve also written historical and political thrillers, essays about the craft of crime fiction, and live with a very large white dog named Bear.
