Mexican groups demand justice for disappeared at Juarez border
Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, Oct 1 (EFE).- Dozens of Mexican groups and families of the disappeared and victims of violence protested on Saturday to demand justice in Ciudad Juarez, on the border between Mexico and the United States.
The Families United for Truth and Justice, the Paso del Norte Human Rights Centre, and mothers of disappeared women held a mass in the chapel of the mission of Guadalupe, where they brought tarps and photographs of their relatives.
“Every day we see that they continue to publish (the names of) mothers who do not find their daughters. Girls aged 10 years and older are not found. The authorities have no strategy to prevent this from happening,” Norma Laguna, mother of the disappeared young woman, Idaly Juache, said.
Another of the participants was Sandra Iveth Robles Martinez, sister of the disappeared young man, Juan de Dios Robles.
The woman carried a cross with photos of disappeared persons, which symbolizes carrying the pain of struggle and hope that they will return, as they have not given up.
“We continue to fight, looking for our family members, we need the government to help us so that this does not happen,” she told EFE.
The march also occurred in the midst of policies to militarize public security, promoted by Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.
Alejandro Duran, organizer of the event and member of the Families United for Truth and Justice group, described it as “a problem that has to be addressed at the national level.”
“And with regard to the matter of militarizing the National Guard, experience tells us that this does not lower the rates of violence. We do not agree with this measure,” he argued.
This year, Mexico surpassed the official figure of over 100,000 people who have disappeared and not been located since record-keeping began in 1964.
But Duran pointed out that there is no exact number of the disappeared in the state of Chihuahua because on several occasions, disappearances are not reported to the authorities.
After the mass, the demonstrators went to the memorial for missing persons in Borunda Park in the north of the city.
There, they wove a red carpet symbolizing the blood of the victims of violence and the disappeared.
They placed inquiries of their absent relatives, in a struggle to locate them.
Mexico registered 33,308 murders in 2021 after the two most violent years in its history under Lopez Obrador’s mandate, with 34,690 murders in 2019 and 34,554 in 2020. EFE
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