Members of a search brigade. There are many such groups across Mexico.
A Jalisco woman whose son was kidnapped in 2018 and never seen again is offering classes on search procedures to family members of other people who have disappeared in the state.
Adriana Méndez Cabrera, a former medical examiner, founded a collective that is now made up of more than 140 members of families who are searching for missing loved ones.
Assisted by former colleagues from the Jalisco Institute of Forensic Sciences, Méndez began sharing her knowledge of search procedures with collective members at an event in Guadalajara on Sunday.
“The little I know, or maybe it’s a lot, I’ll impart to the collective,” she told the newspaper Reforma at the Niños Héroes roundabout, which has been renamed by family members of the missing as the “Roundabout of the Disappeared.”
“[Then] we’ll go out to the field, we’ve already worked in several areas in various municipalities,” Méndez said. “… All the training will be on search techniques,” she added.
She said that ordinary people have to look for their missing loved ones due to the inaction of state authorities.
“My son disappeared two years ago and the [Jalisco] Attorney General’s Office never, never helped me,” Méndez said, adding that the investigators supposedly assigned to the case were changed frequently and no progress was made.
“You go to the state-run morgue and they don’t show you all the bodies, … and sometimes I was ignored,” she said. “Put simply, the Attorney General’s Office doesn’t work.”
Faced with the authorities’ apparent negligence, Méndez founded the Más Uno Igual a Todos collective last August and in the space of just six months it grew from 10 members to more than 140. Similar search brigades operate in several other states of Mexico.
There are more than 11,700 missing people in Jalisco, according to the National Search Commission, and about 80,000 across Mexico.
Source: Reforma (sp)
