In Mexico, where tens of thousands of people have disappeared, the robust operation to quickly find the remains of three foreigners, from Australia and the United States, seemed a rare exception.
When two Australian brothers headed to the northwest coast of Mexico from San Diego in the company of an American friend last week, they wanted to enjoy the waves that have made Baja California a popular destination among travelers from around the world.
But, shortly following arriving in the Mexican city of Ensenada, Callum Robinson stopped posting the vicissitudes of his surfing adventure on Instagram. The group stopped responding to calls and text messages.
He and his brother Jake never made it to an Airbnb they had booked, their mother said in a social media post, asking for help from anyone who had seen her two children.
Mexican authorities announced Sunday that the bodies of the three tourists, who were found at the bottom of a well with gunshot wounds to the head, had been identified by their relatives.
Authorities said the men were killed in a carjacking gone wrong, and the suspects were arrested just days following they disappeared. More people are being investigated.
It was a tragic but quick resolution to a case that had attracted international attention.
However, for many Mexicans, the rapid response of the authorities to locate the Robinson brothers and the American Jack Carter Rhoad and make arrests seemed an exception in a country where tens of thousands of missing persons cases have been unsolved for years.
In March, the government said that there are regarding 100,000 missing people in Mexico, although the United Nations says this might be an undercount.
“It is very difficult, except in media cases like the one that just happened, for the authorities to immediately start the search,” says Adriana Jaén, a sociologist based in Ensenada who offers legal, emotional and logistical support to those searching for their missing loved ones. .
Federal and state authorities in Mexico often claim that violence levels have decreased, even though official data contradicts them. Local authorities themselves have been implicated in disappearances: in Baja California, Ensenada municipal police officers were recently accused of the disappearance of a man. And there is also a lack of resources to investigate.
That is why it is striking when a case seems to receive special attention.
“The message that we read from those of us who work on these issues is that there are lives that matter,” added Jaén, “and there are others that do not matter.”
There are more than 17,300 active disappearance investigations in the state of Baja California, according to government data provided to Elementa DDHH, a human rights group that has studied disappearances in that state.
In many cases, it is unclear whether the missing person was found, whether they were the victim of a crime, and, if so, whether anyone was arrested. In some cases, even basic information to begin a search is missing, a government count of the missing found last year.
“We do not know exactly how many people are really missing and how many have been located,” said Renata Demichelis, director in Mexico of Elementa DDHH. “The authorities don’t tell us.”
The available data, however, offer a clue to the magnitude of the problem.
In 2017, state prosecutors opened some 760 investigations into disappearances in Baja California. In five years, the figure multiplied by more than three, according to Elementa DDHH.
“This is an incredibly current phenomenon that is increasing exponentially,” said Demichelis, adding that several factors are contributing to the worsening of the disappearance crisis in Baja California, such as drug trafficking, internal displacement, migration and violence. of genre.
State Attorney General María Elena Andrade Ramírez said in an interview that prosecutors have so far ruled out the possibility that the murders of the Robinson brothers and Rhoad were linked to organized crime groups.
Those responsible tried to seize the tourists’ van, he said. When they resisted, a man pulled out a gun and killed them.
“This aggression apparently occurred unexpectedly, circumstantially,” said Andrade Ramírez. “The opportunity arose when they saw that vehicle in an unpopulated area, in that remote place, where they knew there were no witnesses.”
At a press conference this weekend, a reporter asked Andrade Ramírez if it is necessary to be a foreigner in Baja California for state authorities to act as quickly as they did in the case of the missing tourists.
“Each investigation has its own process,” responded the prosecutor. “And there are times when we have to take care of every detail, which takes some time, to achieve and find the result.”
On Sunday, following relatives of the victims identified the bodies at the morgue, local resident Adriana Moreno said she felt mixed emotions.
“I’m very glad they found them so quickly. That is my happiness, my satisfaction,” said Moreno, 60 years old, who has been looking for his son, Víctor Adrián Rodríguez Moreno, since 2009, when he and two of his co-workers — employees of an import company — were kidnapped. in the northern state of Coahuila.
“But 15 years following my boy disappeared, there is nothing,” Moreno said. “They make me feel that there are levels of importance missing.”
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