Breathe
By Rosario Mosso Castro
With almost two decades of accumulated impunity in the issue of disappearances, Baja California currently has an average of seven missing persons per day. Meanwhile, the state continues to lack reliable databases (neither of incidence, nor of family members' DNA, nor of clandestine graves, nor of unidentified bodies located), a trait shared by most states in the country.
The good news for 2023 came in the budget during January: finally the Prosecutor General's Office hired a forensic archeologist and announced that the purchase of equipment for a genetic laboratory was authorized to allow nuclear DNA analysis, mitochondrial DNA analysis and a "Rapid Hit" which will allow the FGE to reduce the backlog accumulated in two years, they said. But eight months later, this is still on the drawing board.
It was in February 2007 when Fernando Ocegueda Flores arrived at ZETA' s offices in Tijuana; he looked deeply saddened and ready for anything, because the Attorney General's Office ignored him after he reported that on Saturday, February 10, 2007, an armed criminal commando had entered his home and violently took his 23-year-old son Fernando.
Sixteen years ago, that desperate father turned investigator, without protection, went into dangerous places in a Tijuana ravaged by drug trafficking. He investigated and took risks, as other relatives of the disappeared have felt compelled to do for almost 20 years.
After the publication of the Ocegueda case, more families were encouraged to speak out and stories of young people who had been missing for more than three years were made public. Thus, the reports began to accumulate and the numbers began to dance in confusion.
According to official figures given by the Attorney General's Office to ZETA, between 2008 and 2016 in Baja California an average of 490 deprivations were reported per year; also between 2013 and 2019 nine thousand 640 reports of disappearances were accumulated, of which one thousand 400 people did not return home, and of these, 12 percent are related to crimes.
In 2022 alone, a total of 2,711 people were reported missing: 37.05 percent were found alive and 77 (2.84 percent) were found dead; while 1,630 (60.10 percent) are still missing. Tijuana alone has more than 3,000 files that are still open.
Interviewed at the beginning of August, the coordinator of the Specialized Unit that includes missing persons, Alejandro Lopez, acknowledged the obvious: the five Public Prosecutors, 14 assistants and 19 assigned agents are insufficient.
Currently in Baja California, there are 22 collectives of families tracking their missing, dead and alive, receiving anonymous information, finding graves and corpses.
Although the Baja California District Attorney's Office does not have information open to public access, last March they responded through transparency to the group Elementa DDHH; they reported that, from January 1, 2009 to December 2022, they had located 281 clandestine cemeteries in which they found 199 corpses and 1,162 skeletons and/or human remains. Since last March, these are being classified by the forensic archeologist, at a rate of seven files per month.
Regarding justice, it was only in 2020 when the recently resigned Attorney General, Ricardo Carpio, being the head of specialized units in the same FGE, decided to resort for the first time to the crime of enforced disappearance committed by private individuals contemplated in the Federal Criminal Code.
Under this accusation, cab driver Juan Manuel de Mateo Uribe was arrested after proving that he was the last person to see Diana Piggeonountt, a 15-year-old high school student whose body has not been found for five years. In November 2022 he was sentenced to 56 years and six months in prison and 725,400 pesos as reparation for damages; this last part, by the way, has still not been paid in any case.
To date, there are about 10 files that are being prosecuted in the same way, according to reports from the collectives, so slow is the lax arm of the law.
In these conditions, the State 29 arrives to the commemoration of the twelfth International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances. The collectives continue to do the work of the government, searching for victims dead and alive, risking their lives in the face of criminals, while reiterating - as they have done for almost 16 years - the demand that the criminals who took or murdered their people be found, tried and sentenced.
*Rosario Mosso Castro. General Editor of Semanario ZETA in Baja California, dedicated to investigative journalism in hostile environments, 2018 Courage in Journalism Award by the International Women in Media Foundation (IWMF).
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