Mexican Families Left Disappointed After Government Starts New Investigations Unit PRI's The World
go to original May 31, 2013

A Mexican woman holds a photo of a missing loved one. (Associated Press)

Mexico has a problem with people disappearing. Tens of thousands of people went missing during the term of President Felipe Calderon. Now, the new president has pledged to help families get resolution - but his new unit designed to do just that is off to a slow start, if it's a start at all.

Mexican officials this week announced the formation of a special investigative unit to search for thousands of missing persons.

The announcement was supposed to kick off the work of that new unit but instead it left the families of the missing deeply disappointed.

"If they want people who will do the job and investigate, they should contract us because we will find them, they won't. They're just putting on a political show," said Beatriz Mejía, whose daughter went missing last November and was among a group of relatives who attended the event in Mexico City.

Mejía and the other relatives had come to hear concrete operational details about the new investigative unit. The explanation they got from Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam fell short of those expectations.

Karam said there are still some "legal things" that need to be figured out — including the unit's location. But he promised that "the agreement and the will are already there."

The attorney general and other officials left the ceremony without saying what basic resources the new unit could count on — like an operating budget or even office space. One concrete figure they did offer was the number of investigators in the unit: 12.

That number strikes many as grossly inadequate.

Read the rest at PRI's The World

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