Central American Families Keep Searching For Their Loved Ones Disappeared In Mexico’s Violent Scene

As much of the public conversation focuses on the Trump administration deporting hundreds of migrants to El Salvador’s CECOT maximum security prison — which some human rights groups have labeled “enforced disappearances” — family members of Central Americans who have disappeared inside Mexico while making the journey to the U.S. are also voicing their frustrations, but at the Mexican government for what they see as lack of cooperation.

“It’s been a difficult experience because the authorities appear to offer support, but in reality they don’t help at all,” Elizabeth Castañeda, a mother from El Salvador, told The Latin Times. “Our children, when they pass through Mexican territory, are discriminated against.”

On July 29, 2015, Castañeda’s son, Gustavo Salvador Artiga Castañeda, left his home in La Libertad with the aim to make it to the U.S. On August 30 of that year, Castañeda got a call from Gustavo to let her know he was in El Altar, a town in Sonora, Mexico near the border with Arizona.

“He had the idea of chasing the American dream, reaching the United States and giving a better life to his wife and son,” Castañeda said. That was the last time she heard from him.

Ten years later, in May, a group of seven families from Central America gathered on Mexico City’s Paseo de la Reforma to present a preliminary report with the latest findings from their continued search for their loved ones.

Known as the Regional Network of Migrant Families (Red Regional de Familias Migrantes), the families reported that they visited homeless camps, migrant shelters, rehabilitation centers and prisons in northern Mexico, searching for information about their missing relatives.

While most of the group’s findings were not disclosed publicly — as the information could be part of active investigations — some families revealed that they were able to contact eyewitnesses who claimed to see their loved ones inside Mexico at the time of their disappearance.

During their searches, they said, time and again they were disregarded by authorities.

“The authorities put up every obstacle to prevent a record of the people who are missing,” Ana Enamorado, a Honduran mother whose son, Oscar Antonio López Enamorado, went missing in Mexico in 2010, told The Latin Times. “We have gathered information about the people we are searching for. Many people have provided information, saying they have seen them.”

Plagued by years of organized crime-related violence, Mexico currently counts over 128,000 disappeared or unlocated persons, a figure which many experts say is an underestimate. Amongst migrant communities, the figures are even more opaque.

Mexico’s National Registry of Missing and Unlocated Persons (RNPDNO) says that just 237 migrants have gone and remain missing in Mexico since 2009, while rights groups claim that number is more likely in the thousands or tens of thousands. In 2018, Alejandro Solalinde, a Mexican priest who works with migrant communities, told Amnesty International that his migrant shelter network had counted over 10,000 disappeared migrants.

“If we were to go door to door in Central America, we would find hundreds of thousands of cases,” Enamorado said.

For years, civil society organizations have urged the Mexican government to help facilitate the search for missing migrants inside its territory and to create a better system for tracking disappearances.

Critics say that any steps Mexico has taken to find migrants have been half hearted.

Since 2015, the government has outlined Guidelines for the Foreign Search and Investigation Support Mechanism (MAEBI), which makes it possible for families of migrants to report disappeared family members at Mexican embassies and consulates in their home countries, instead of traveling to Mexico.

However, according to Fundación para la Justicia, the Mexican consulate in El Salvador refuses to receive complaints from families of migrant victims.

In April, the organization also denounced before the UN Committee on Migrant Workers that Mexico has failed to deliver on a 2022 promise to create a Search Table for Missing Migrants that would better coordinate between authorities, families of missing migrants and other organizations.

“To date, neither the committees of families of missing migrants nor the organizations that support them are aware that this Table has begun operations, nor have its operating guidelines been published…” read the denouncement.

In July 2012, Carlos Rafael Medina Martinez, a migrant from San Pedro Sula, Honduras, disappeared in Tamaulipas, a state on the border with Texas, after allegedly being deported from Houston just days earlier.

At the time, Carlos’ mother, Iris Adelina Martinez de Medina, said she got a call from Carlos’ former roommate in Houston letting her know that he’d been detained by local police in Mexico.

“Since then, I haven’t had any information about him,” Martínez told The Latin Times. She said that a more efficient system for searching for missing migrants is needed in Mexico.

“The authorities say there are no arrests, or records of his detention, and really, there isn’t a centralized database across the different states,” she said. Martínez hopes that Mexico will create a “database that allows us to say: someone went missing, this person disappeared, and that they can immediately provide us with the information.”

Violence against migrants in Mexico is not new. In 2010, the Zetas drug cartel massacred 72 migrants — many of them Central Americans — in San Fernando, Tamaulipas. In the past decade, human rights groups including Human Rights Watch, Doctors Without Borders, and the Washington Office on Latin America, documented violent aggression towards migrants, including at the hands of Mexican authorities.

Despite the lack of government help, and the dangers of poking around in territory controlled by Mexican drug cartels, the searching families from Central America continue their visits.

“All these places we’ve visited, where we’re constantly being watched by the hawks, we’re being followed by people we don’t really know if they belong to criminal groups or if they’re undercover authorities,” said Enamorado. “We know that searching families have been murdered. But that doesn’t stop us.”