MEXICOS BEACH WARS PATCH

Nowhere was that clearer than in the case of the 43 students from the southern town of Ayotzinapa, who went missing in 2014, possibly after stumbling onto a heroin-trafficking operation. By the time Quintana became commissioner, it was obvious that they often worked closely with corrupt officials. (Alejandro Cegarra for The Washington Post)īut drug traffickers, too, were abducting people. Her mother, Silvia Ortiz, leads a group of relatives of the disappeared who search for hidden graves. “There are 13 sites like this, my dear.” A cross hangs on a photograph of Fanny Sánchez, who disappeared in Torreón in 2004. It would be impossible to identify many of the remains. Here, the narcos didn’t just disappear people but exterminated them. How many bodies were in each grave? (Up to 10 pounds of pebbles - around three humans). How much help had they received from the government? (Not much). How long had they been digging here? (Four years). She fired questions at Ortiz and a state forensic expert. Now the bureaucrat was here, her hiking boots sinking into the soft dirt, a floppy hat jammed over her short gray hair. “What if she’s the kind of woman who just sits behind a desk?” Ortiz recalled thinking when she first heard of the commissioner. They weren’t particularly impressed by Quintana’s Harvard law degree. Groups such as Ortiz’s were combing sites like this all over the country, largely on their own. “They surveil us, they threaten us,” said Silvia Ortiz, the leader of a group of mothers who found the graves while searching for their missing children. Just a day earlier, men peering through binoculars had been seen driving slowly past the graves. Quintana had roared up with six truckloads of federal police and soldiers. Nowhere was that more true than in the desert outside Torreón, where on that chilly morning last December, she was exploring a field sprinkled with human remains the size of peppercorns. Ten months into the job, though, she was starting to realize the limits of government power. “I’d say there are moments in which it’s necessary - there is no other option - but to be in the government.” “Many people think human rights defenders should always be in opposition to the government,” Quintana said. He’d even written a book defending migrants - and called it “Listen Up, Trump.” On taking office in 2018, López Obrador named a gender-balanced cabinet and pledged more attention to the poor and Indigenous. The president had vowed to solve Mexico’s most notorious case of the disappeared: 43 college students who had vanished years earlier. Her boss at the powerful Government Ministry, Alejandro Encinas, was one of López Obrador’s closest allies. She’d have to rely on a corrupt, underfunded justice system for help in exhuming and identifying the bodies. She would receive a $22 million budget for her first year - significant but hardly enough. Quintana had embarked on “the most impossible job in the country,” one said. She was a respected lawyer, but human rights activists had their doubts. Initially, she paid the WiFi bill out of her own pocket.

The commission had been established a year earlier, but barely funded. There were a dozen desks and a few chairs. In February 2019, Quintana walked into her new office at the National Search Commission. (Photos by Alejandro Cegarra for The Washington Post) A count of Mexico’s disappeared since 2006 Mexicans are uncovering two clandestine graves a day, on average. It’s the worst crisis of the disappeared in Latin America since the Cold War, when military-backed governments kidnapped and secretly killed their leftist opponents - an estimated 45,000 in Guatemala, up to 30,000 in Argentina, as many as 3,400 in Chile. More than 79,000 people have disappeared in Mexico, most of them since 2006. “You don’t know if that’s a person disintegrating,” she said later. Quintana, a 41-year-old lawyer in a pink scarf, stared as a pebble crumbled in her hand. Now, 12 miles from the NAFTA boomtown of Torreón, the land was dotted with tiny bone fragments. The remains were dumped in shallow, unmarked graves. They’d hacked them to pieces and roasted them until the bones exploded.

MEXICOS BEACH WARS PATCH

“Fragments,” one of her companions said, and everyone knew what that meant.Ī decade ago, thugs from the Zetas cartel had brought their victims to this windswept patch of turf. EJIDO SAN ANTONIO DEL ALTO, México - Karla Quintana was on her knees, looking at some pebble-like objects she’d scooped from the desert floor.

Mexicos beach wars