Families Hunt for Remains After Victims Vanish in Hands of Mexican Police Christopher Sherman - The Associated Press
go to original November 24, 2015

A framed snapshot of Carlos Sanchez hangs over a makeshift altar in his wife's home in Teloloapan, Mexico. (Associated Press)

Carlos Sanchez and his family had nearly completed the harrowing drive, hurtling along a dark and dangerous highway out of the mountains to a hospital when they collided with a state police truck parked across the highway lights out.

Before they knew what was happening, they were dragged from the car by uniformed police. Sanchez's wife, sister and cousin were loaded into the back of a police patrol truck. They would not see Sanchez, who hours earlier had been shot three times outside his home in Teloloapan, until they arrived at a walled compound in the mountains.

They had been kidnapped by police.

In April 2013, Sanchez and his cousin Armando de la Cruz Salinas became two more of Mexico's nearly 26,000 recorded disappearances since 2007. The abduction of 43 students from a rural teachers' college in the southern Mexico city of Iguala on Sept. 26, 2014, by local police drew attention to a remarkable fact of life in Mexico: Police are responsible for many disappearances.

Mexico's deputy attorney general for human rights, Eber Betanzos, told The Associated Press in August that municipal police had participated in scores of abductions around Iguala during the term of Mayor Jose Luis Abarca, who faces charges in the case of the 43 students.

Members of the extended Sanchez family agreed to speak about their missing on condition of anonymity. They wanted to tell the story of the violence that surrounds them like the air they breathe, and of police responsibility for many of what are now called "the other disappeared." But they are deathly scared of the captors and cops who still live among them and operate with impunity, returning at times to abuse or threaten those who might talk.

Read the rest at Newser

Related: Police Kidnappings Are Scarily Common in Mexico (Associated Press)

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