AP, Mexico :
Long before 43 teachers, college students disappeared in an attack by police, Maria Guadalupe Orozco’s son went missing in the same southern Mexico city of Iguala.
Orozco says Mexican soldiers took Francis Garcia Orozco as he was ferrying equipment between a nightclub and the fairgrounds for a festival, an assertion based on witnesses and grainy security camera footage that day in March 2010. The military denied it.
Now she wonders if he’s among the 28 bodies found in five burial pits at a clandestine mass grave uncovered during the all-out search mounted by authorities for the missing students. Officials say none of college students was among the remains recovered, so rather than solve an extraordinary crime that has captured international attention, a mass forced disappearance by the state, the discovery of the bodies has added layers of horror to a situation already difficult to fathom.
Instead of finding the 43, authorities are asking “Who are the 28?” Guerrero has long been a stronghold for both leftist guerrillas and drug traffickers, so the dead could be both. Or neither.
Given Mexico’s record on identifying the missing, Orozco may never know if her son is among them.
“It’s like reliving those days of anxiety, desperation, of wishing and asking God for the telephone to ring,” Orozco said of the grisly find. “If anyone knocks on the door at any minute, you think, ‘He’s here now.'”
The government of President Enrique Pena Nieto took office two years ago saying it would make a verifiable list of the missing in Mexico, and released a searchable database of 22,322 people in August. Government officials, who say at every turn that violence has dropped dramatically on their watch, put little attention on the fact that 9,790 of those people – more than 40 percent – have gone missing since Pena Nieto took office.
The rest were from the previous six years under former President Felipe Calderon, when disappearances began to spike with his attack on organized crime.
