By Albinson Linares - Telemundo News; Suzanne Gamboa and Carmen Sesin -
NBC News
MEXICO CITY.— As the FBI and the Mexican National Guard scrambled to find the four kidnapped Americans, María Isabel Cruz Bernal has spent years searching for her missing son with the help of family and friends.
Reyes Yosimar García Cruz disappeared in 2017 in the state of Sinaloa, but the investigation stalled two years ago.
So from dawn to dusk, in deserts, fields, and clandestine graves, he searches for his son...or his remains.
García Cruz was 28 years old when he disappeared.
"It makes me very sad that those Americans were kidnapped, and two were killed. But the Mexican government found them quickly, alive and dead, but it found them. We have been looking for years and they do not help us," said Cruz Bernal.
Relatives commemorated the anniversary of the disappearance of the 43 Ayotzinapa students, on September 26, 2022, in Mexico City.
Luis Barron/Future Publishing via Getty Images
According to data from Mexico's National Search Commission, more than 14,000 people went missing in the country last year, at least 27 people every day.
In May 2022, the country exceeded the figure of more than 100,000 missing.
"We feel that it is a mockery because there is no investigation, there are no searches, there are no guarantees that our family will return," he said.
"The years go by and we are dying in the hope of finding our loved ones. This government is not fulfilling what it promised."
["It's a nightmare": relatives of the Americans kidnapped in Mexico pray for their safe return]
The kidnapping of the four US citizens, carried out last Friday in full view of many bystanders, drew strong condemnation from the President of Mexico and the promise of a thorough investigation.
Following a joint search and investigation between the United States and Mexico, the people were located on Tuesday.
Two were dead and the others were taken to the United States.
For most Mexicans, there is no such thing as a quick,
resource-intensive search or investigation of their loved ones who have been kidnapped or are missing.
And, in many cases, it is not known if the disappeared are alive or dead.
Ricardo Ainslie, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and director of
Ya Basta!
Kidnapped in Mexico,
a 2007 documentary, said the "quick" resolution of the kidnapping is quite unusual.
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"In Mexico, there are people who have not been found for years and who are still missing. People don't know what happened to them. They take people off the street, as seen in the video. A van pulls up. They take them away an armed gunman and they don't show up again," he explains.
Cruz Bernal is helped by other people who belong to Sabuesos Guerreras, an association she founded in Sinaloa that is dedicated to tracking down the remains of the disappeared.
"Mexicans live in fear"
"There is a lot of gun violence in the United States that goes unreported. And a lot of gun violence goes unreported in Mexico, or there is no prosecution or punishment," said Andrew Rudman, director of the Mexico Institute at the Wilson Center, a center Washington, DC-based academic research firm "The problem goes much deeper than what happened last Friday. It kind of shows how big the problem is."
["He saw them die," says the mother of a kidnapping survivor in Mexico]
Mexico has spent decades fighting violence.
President Felipe Calderón, who ruled from 2006 to 2012, declared an aggressive war on drug cartels and deployed troops throughout the country.
Calderón had the support of the Mérida Initiative, a security agreement between the United States and Mexico.
He also launched the Todos Somos program in Ciudad Juárez, as a response to the crime that prevailed in that city, which had some of the highest rates of violence in the country, and made massive investments in the city's infrastructure in multiple areas.
That helped reduce crime figures in the region, Ainslie says.
But Calderón's approach has been criticized for sparking more violence as smaller drug gangs proliferated.
The current president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel Lopéz Obrador, adopted a different strategy.
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"Since López Obrador came to power, his policy has been hugs, not bullets," Rudman said.
In addition to that policy, the president promised to prioritize job creation and job opportunities, believing that this would prevent people from joining gangs or engaging in criminal activity.
However, López Obrador's strategy has also been criticized.
"I think conceptually the idea that you have to create alternatives to working with gangs makes sense in the long run, but it doesn't solve the problem," Rudman said.
[Mexican authorities acknowledge that they waited four days to start looking for the Americans]
López Obrador replaced the federal police with a civilian-led national guard.
Amid the ongoing violence, much of it perpetrated by cartels and gangs, in September he placed the guard under military control.
"In some parts of the country, Mexicans live in fear: fear of being in the wrong place, at the wrong time, of being innocent bystanders. Even if they may not have supported security policies of the past, I don't think they are seeing the kind of change that López Obrador promised or that they were seeking," Rudman said.
"People lower their heads"
What has surprised many people in the United States who have seen the video of the kidnapping of the Americans is that there were other people and cars while the violence was taking place, but no one seems to move after the kidnapping.
Ainslie said this demonstrates the impact on communities of violence becoming commonplace.
It is what she saw in Juárez in 2010.
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"When violence reaches a level that makes it more and more present, people lower their heads," he says.
"They realize that it is dangerous to talk a lot and know a lot."
In Mexico, women are usually the family members who are most dedicated to searches.
They leave everything to dedicate themselves to the preservation of memories and the location of remains, bones, bodies or anything that brings them a little closer to knowing the whereabouts of their loved ones.
[343 migrants found inside an abandoned trailer in Veracruz. Of these, at least 103 were unaccompanied minors]
"We women have had to go out looking for our lost people because the State does not do it, nor the state governments, nor the federal government do what is necessary. They have not left us another, we have subsidized their work and they do not even accompany us" said Grace Fernández, a member of the Movement for Our Disappeared in Mexico, who also has a missing relative.
"We are very sorry for what happened to the Americans in Mexico. Nobody deserves something like this, but in this country that situation happens every day. Every day people disappear," he said.
The seekers, in the spotlight
The groups of searching mothers say that they are looking for treasures, and avoid talking about corpses or the dead.
They usually receive death threats that force them to leave their homes and regions but, in 2021, Aranza Ramos was murdered in Sonora while she was looking for her husband.
That same year, activist Javier Barajas Piña was shot dead in the state of Guanajuato, the most violent in Mexico.
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In 2022, they murdered Esmeralda Gallardo and Rosario Rodríguez Barraza, who were also searchers and activists for the disappeared.
“They keep killing us searchers, those of us who are looking for our disappeared,” Cruz Bernal says sadly.
But his face lights up when he remembers that Sabuesos Guerreras, the organization he founded four years ago, already brings together 850 women and three men who have located more than 480 bodies and 19,000 burned fragments, in addition to 70 people alive.
However, it is a temporary consolation.
"This void is not filled one bit. What I want is for our family not to continue suffering and suffering, because what happened to me," Cruz Bernal said, "I don't wish on anyone."
Albinson Linares reported from Mexico City, Suzanne Gamboa from San Antonio, and Carmen Sesin from Miami.