Searching for answers in Mexico's disappearances

This week marks a month since 43 young students disappeared in the Mexican state of Guerrero. Outcries and protests are becoming more frequent as time drags on with no trace of them. And the government is unable to answer the most pressing question: Where are they?

The last time the students were seen was after they were detained following clashes with police in the town of Iguala on September 26. Mexico’s Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam says that police then handed the detained students over to the Guerreros Unidos cartel—on orders from the mayor and his wife, both of whom are now fugitives.

Fault Lines heard several allegations of authorities carrying out disappearances while filming “The Disappeared” (which airs Saturday, November 1, at 7 p.m. Eastern time/4 p.m. Pacific on Al Jazeera America). But since investigations into kidnappings are extremely rare, much of the work—and risk—falls to families and human rights defenders.

After years of unrelenting violence, few civil society human rights groups remain to help families investigate disappearances in Tamaulipas, one of Mexico’s most dangerous states. Raymundo Ramos Vázquez, the director of the Human Rights Committee of Nuevo Laredo, is one of the last people in the region offering those services to otherwise helpless families.

The following is a condensed and edited transcript of Fault Lines’ conversation with Ramos.

Fault Lines: How did the allegations of human rights abuses by the marines and other security forces start here?

Ramos: In May 2011, marines began to arrive in this region—Coahuila, Nuevo León and Tamaulipas. It began with the army and special forces, then the federal police and finally the marines. The three institutions came in as if the whole population was criminals—raiding homes, detentions, checkpoints, operations in different parts of the city.

At the beginning of June, there were reports of detentions and people disappearing. Families observed that personnel from the armed forces—marines, army, federal police—would arrive at their homes and ask to speak with certain family members. They would have a list of the people, and they would interrogate them.

If these initial interrogations weren’t enough, they would take them by force, if necessary, and tell the family that they would return soon. But that didn't happen. So the families in some cases followed the operations, even outside of the city. The cases began to accumulate, and we began to find similarities. In the case of the marines, they would take the people to their camps, interrogate them and torture them.

Much of the war on cartels that began in 2006 was fought under former president Felipe Calderón. Now with Enrique Peña Nieto in power, has anything changed?

A lot has changed. We feel less protected, less safe, and we're waiting for more aggression against human rights defenders and more abuses by the state against civil society. When Felipe Calderón's term finished, we believed that the violence would finally be over, that maybe the disappearances would decrease and that there would be justice. Peña Nieto promised, since the beginning of his term, that he would serve and respect human rights. But in Mexico, there simply is no justice. It doesn't exist.

More abuses have been documented and more disappearances than from the previous administration. We're receiving all types of cases committed by the armed forces—rapes, teenagers being detained, torture, enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings. We're worried. Social leaders are being persecuted, especially journalists and human rights activists.

It’s necessary on our part to call upon international bodies so they know the truth of what’s happening here. Because in Mexico, the press here doesn't publish interviews like this.  They don't give a voice to families of the victims, despite the fact that we have demonstrations. That doesn't appear on the biggest television channels here. It's like we don't exist.

Do you think that the marines are working with organized crime?

The investigations that the we and families did, as well as information obtained from functionaries of the government who we asked for testimony, show us that if the marines weren't working for some cartel or a criminal group, they were facilitating their work. The six men that disappeared in June 2011 were taken by the marines to the town of Miguel Alemán, where they were abandoned. And then later, the marines say that a criminal group came and took them—and they don't know their whereabouts.

We believe that the responsibility is not with the commander who carried out the operation. The responsibility is with whoever gave the order from the highest level of the government to combat some group and protect another.