Houston Chronicle By Dudley Althaus 9/29/2018
NUEVO LAREDO, Mexico — The day before his body was pulled from beneath another in a shallow clandestine grave, Jose Eugenio Hernandez, 14, was detained by Mexican marines at a convenience story in this border city, witnesses told his mother.
The former altar boy apparently had been tortured and then shot in the back of the head, Maria de los Dolores Romero said as she leafed through newspaper clippings of the crime in the parlor of her three-room home.
“The fact they found him is a miracle,†Romero, 36, said of the late April tragedy. A candle flickered beside a photo of her son on a makeshift altar that dominates the room. “I prayed that he would be returned to me, one way or another. I knew that in these times it would be very difficult he would come back to me alive.â€
Despite a searing pain over her loss, Romero said she considers herself blessed. At least she knows her son’s fate. “If they hadn’t found my child, it would have meant an eternity of not knowing,†Romero said.
That certainty has eluded dozens of women here in Nuevo Laredo still searching for loved ones they allege were snatched by the marines this year. The case is being pressed by human rights advocates and the United Nations. Mexican navy commanders have ordered an investigation and replaced hundreds of marines in Nuevo Laredo after the disappearances.
Ongoing violence unleashed a dozen years ago by a military offensive against Mexico’s criminal gangs has killed some 150,000 people. But the dead at least have been counted, mourned and laid to rest. It’s the vanished who perhaps most haunt Mexico.
More than 37,000 people have been registered as missing across the country, according to government tallies. Advocates for the missing say many others remain unreported. Tamaulipas state, which borders Texas from Nuevo Laredo to the Gulf of Mexico, accounts for the highest number of the disappeared — more than 5,300 and counting.
Finding the missing, and achieving a measure of justice for them, stands among the most daunting challenges facing President-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who takes office Dec. 1. Widely known by his initials, AMLO, Lopez Obrador has vowed to replace the onslaught against the gangs with a pacification strategy involving economic development, amnesties and investigations targeting finances of the gang kingpins and protection networks.
“You are the hope of all of us who are living this pain that has no name,†one distraught woman shouted at Lopez Obrador during a recently televised gathering of families of the missing in Mexico City. “What did they do with my son? Where is my son?â€
Roughly tracing narcotics production zones and trafficking routes, the searches for the missing take place near Mexico’s Pacific and Gulf Coasts and along the 2,000-mile border with the United States.
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