Thread: Missing people's kin feel deserted

Missing people's kin feel deserted

Web Posted: 06/04/2007 10:32 PM CDT

Mariano Castillo
Express-News Border Bureau

LAREDO — Mexican President Felipe Calderón's offensive against drug cartels has been ticking off small victories, but progress is at a standstill for families here whose loved ones have disappeared across the border.
More than 60 U.S. citizens from Laredo have gone missing in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, in the past four years, many presumed kidnapped by drug traffickers.


Their stories grabbed the attention of politicians and the media during the peak of the violence in Nuevo Laredo, becoming the faces of the victims of the drug cartels.

Relatives formed a group — Laredo's Missing — that became a lobbying and information clearinghouse for Americans who crossed into Mexico and never came back.

Now the group is trying to restart its campaign to bring attention to their cases and is pressuring elected officials to renew the public support that was evident when they started.

"We are feeling abandoned, like the authorities have left us on a waiting list," Danielle Ortiz said last week. Her husband, Sergio, a private investigator, was last seen in Nuevo Laredo in January 2003.

Ortiz was referring to Laredo Mayor Raul Salinas and U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo, two politicians who had been the most willing to offer help to the victims' families.

In response to questions by the San Antonio Express-News, Salinas met with the group Monday and renewed his pledge to help the families find justice.

Homero Villarreal, whose two sons were kidnapped in Nuevo Laredo in front of their families three years ago this month, said Salinas asked the group to write a letter detailing their cases and promised to use diplomatic channels to get the letter to Calderón.

Though the crimes happened in Mexico, Laredo's Missing hopes that U.S. pressure will give its pleas for help a stronger voice.

Cuellar defended the actions of U.S. authorities, saying they are doing all that can be done.

"What makes this a very difficult, complex issue is that these crimes happened in Mexico, in another jurisdiction," he said last week.

Nonetheless, Cuellar said that during a recent trip to Mexico City he personally handed the chief of the Drug Enforcement Administration at the U.S. Embassy a package with information about the missing Americans.

There has also been discussion of a toll-free tip line and a U.S.-Mexico task force on these specific cases, Cuellar said.

"I wish we could do more," he said.

The timing of the families' new efforts follows the arrest in April of Eleazar Medina Rojas, also known as "El Chelelo," in Nuevo Laredo.

Families of the kidnapped Americans said witnesses and authorities put Medina behind many of the snatchings, though it is not known what evidence backs that up.

Mexican authorities paraded Medina in front of the media in Mexico City, identifying him as "principal hit man and kidnapper" for the Gulf Cartel in the state of Nuevo León.

But that hasn't translated into resolutions of the border kidnappings since his arrest.

No one at Mexico's federal attorney general's office, known by its Spanish acronym PGR, in Mexico City was available to discuss Medina's arrest.

"I don't have a hunch — I am sure that he was one of the ones who took my sons because we have witnesses," Villarreal said, adding he knows of people who told PGR investigators as much.

But repeated calls to the PGR and its attaché in San Antonio were fruitless, he said.

Ortiz of Laredo's Missing said FBI officials have mentioned Medina's name as a suspect to several families.

"We want to sit down (with Mexican authorities) and discuss how we can help each other, but it has fallen on deaf ears," said Salinas, a former FBI agent who became mayor here last year.

Salinas said he has discussed the issue of kidnapped Americans in Mexico with his Mexican counterpart, the mayor of Nuevo Laredo, but that those talks were "not for public dissemination."

The FBI and the local sheriff's and police departments said they have followed leads to the international boundary, but have been stymied by their Mexican counterparts.

Rotations and firings of rogue cops in Nuevo Laredo removed many of the investigators familiar with the kidnappings, Laredo police spokesman Joe Baeza said.

"We've lost some communication with some people we thought we could trust," he said.

Still, the families said they would remain on the offensive until tangible results appear.

"There is a tremendous silence," said Priscilla Cisneros, whose daughter Brenda was last seen at a Nuevo Laredo concert almost three years ago.

"It's harder now than it was at the beginning," she said. "Time is our worst enemy."

http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/metro/ ... e064e.html

I guess the Hispanic journalists got together and decided they would use the word "kin" because it sounded less ethnic.

http://www.alipac.us/modules.php?name=F ... ic&t=67224