The Relatives of Missing Migrants Find Joy and Pain While Searching in Mexico Orsetta Bellani - VICE News
go to original December 25, 2015

Elvira Mendoza Rios is looking for her brother Manuel. He left their small village in Guatemala nine months ago and went missing a few weeks later in the northern Mexican border city of Reynosa. He wanted to get to Florida to work.

"If he had reached the United States he would have called. Manuel is a responsible man, he always communicated with us when he lived there," Elvira said, referring to her brother's first five-year stint in the US before he was deported back to Guatemala in 2010. "It hurts so much."

Elvira was talking towards the end of a three week trip around Mexico along with 40 other relatives of migrants from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua who went missing during their journey north. The group covered around 1,500 miles showing photographs of their missing loved ones at the church-run shelters where migrants in transit stay, the prisons where they might just have been locked up, or just in the street in cities and towns where they are known to congregate.

Most in the group are women, many are mothers. The trip — known as the Caravan of Mothers of Disappeared Migrants — has been organized annually since 2006 by an NGO called the Mesoamerican Migrant Movement. It stems from the desperation of relatives of missing Central Americans who they last heard from during the journey through Mexico that has long been plagued by dangers from the criminal gangs that prey on migrants to abuses by officials who do the same.

The Movement claims that around 20,000 Central American migrants go missing each year in Mexico. Activists suspect that a Mexican crackdown that has all but shutdown traditional migration routes — such as the infamous freight train known as La Bestia — could be making the situation worse.

Read the rest at VICE News

Photo: Orsetta Bellani

Related: Mothers of Disappeared Central American Migrants Ask Pope for Help (teleSUR)

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