Mexican Police Again at Center of Another Mass Disappearance of Young People Leticia Pineda - Agence France-Presse
go to original January 29, 2016

A relative of one of five youngsters who went missing on January 11 in Mexico prays as she camps at the public prosecutor's office in Tierra Blanca community, Veracruz State. (Alfredo Estrella/AFP)

For more than two weeks, the parents of five missing young people have been living inside a Mexican state prosecutor's office in an attempt to pressure authorities to find their children.

The parents spent the first night sitting on cold plastic chairs. Then they brought mattresses, a microwave oven and a television set inside the government building.

"It's our home now," said Columba Arroniz Gonzalez as she heated up some tortillas and soup for her gaunt-looking husband in the patio of the prosecutor's office in Tierra Blanca, in the eastern state of Veracruz.

Their son, Bernardo Benitez, 25, is among the five young people, including a 16-year-old girl, who disappeared after state police officers detained them in gang-plagued Tierra Blanca on January 11.

The case has become a symbol of Mexico's growing number of "forced disappearances" - a term used for abductions committed by authorities.

Their plight has been compared to the disappearance of 43 students in southern Guerrero state in September 2014, when municipal police attacked the young men and delivered them to a drug cartel, which allegedly killed them.

Read the rest at Digital Journal

Related: Who Is Behind Mexico’s Epidemic of ‘disappearances’? (iPolitics)

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