Ciudad Juarez.- Due to distance, language, lack of information and often ineffectiveness on the part of authorities, families of missing migrants face greater barriers to searching for their loved ones at the border.
“If the investigation processes are naturally very slow due to the negligence of the State, let alone the reparation of damages to the victims’ families, in matters of migration the barriers are evidently much greater due to the issue of distance from the families and the lack of access,” said Alejandra Corona Carvajal, coordinator of the Juárez Office of the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS).
According to the National Registry of Missing and Unlocated Persons, in Chihuahua there is a current report of 140 foreign persons reported missing between 2018 and 2024; 76 of them in the municipality of Juárez.
These are people from Guatemala, the United States, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Venezuela, Colombia, El Salvador, Honduras, Brazil, Peru, Cameroon, Germany and Haiti, of whom 53 disappeared in 2023 – 31 of them in the municipality of Juárez – and 24 so far in 2024 – 13 of them on this border.
In the framework of the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances, which since 2010 has been commemorated every August 30 by the United Nations (UN), Coronado lamented the lack of political interest in the issue and even more so when it involves migrants, which also makes it invisible.
At the national level, JRS has the Migrant Search Program, through which it has been discovered that one of the main barriers that families face when a migrant relative disappears in Mexico is the difficulty in communicating with the authorities of this country.
“Most people, for example from Central America, come from very humble, remote communities… one of the barriers we see is the access of families to have contact with the Prosecutor’s Offices and the Commission for Assistance to Victims; for example, the family obviously has a foreign number and what the CEAV does is communicate with the relatives directly, but just having the foreign number, having to communicate through WhatsApp, the access to the Internet to be able to communicate, that already makes calls impossible, and we have had many conflicts because of that,” she said.
Another barrier for some families is language, since in countries like Guatemala there are many communities where diverse indigenous languages are spoken and it is difficult to communicate with family members, who are usually adults and do not have much access to Spanish or technology.
Another barrier has to do with the data that families have about the route their loved one has taken, since sometimes they only know that they were going to cross the border through Ciudad Juárez or that they were headed to this city, but they were not aware of the point where they were when they disappeared, which is crucial to investigate in the corresponding federal identity.
“This has to do with the very nature of transit, the family cannot tell us the exact point where they were intercepted, even when we have had cases where there is talk of forced disappearance at the hands of public security authorities, because the relatives do not have the complete information that allows us to identify which authority it was, if it was a state police, if it was Sedena, if it was the National Guard or the municipal ones, people really cannot identify this type of very precise information, so it also makes it impossible to be able to take action in this case for a crime but at the same time it is a serious violation of human rights,” he commented.
The local JRS coordinator also highlighted that many of the cases of disappearances of foreigners on the move are due to arrests by agents of the National Migration Institute (INM), who detain them and leave them incommunicado for days.
“We have had several incidents where relatives share with us that the last information they have is that they had arrived at a checkpoint with the INM and that was the last communication with the relatives, so it also has a lot to do with the Institute’s immigration policy of not informing and not allowing access to rights, and these like repatriations or immediate returns to the south of the country that do not allow them to notify the family that they were returned or taken to an immigration station,” he explained.
He said that in addition to being left incommunicado, sometimes they are only allowed to make a call if they pay, but after being stripped of all their belongings by the same federal agents, the migrants do not have money to cover the cost of the call and be able to communicate with their families.
According to the Missing Migrants Project (MMP) of the International Organization for Migration (IOM), deaths and disappearances in the Chihuahua and Sonoran deserts have turned the border between the United States and Mexico into the most dangerous land migration route in the world in recent years.
In Ciudad Juárez, according to El Diario’s documentation, the disappearance of people is often related to the “coyote” groups themselves, who had promised to take them to the United States and then abandoned them when they were taken through the desert or kidnapped them and kept them incommunicado for days to increase the concern of their families, and then demanded thousands of dollars in exchange for their release.
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