Mothers seekers in Nayarit demand judges to hear their cases

On February 6, 2018, Bryan Eduardo Arias Garay, 19, did not return home after finishing his job at a hamburger stand in Nayarit. Since that day, Virginia Garay, his mother, has not stopped looking for him. Recently, the woman and the relatives of two other disappeared young women presented an “amparo busca”, through which they asked the Judiciary of Nayarit to join the search for the three men. However, the judges suspended the procedure for a year because, they argued, the disappeared young people did not come to ratify the request for amparo.
“It’s illogical, we’re asking them to look for them, and how are they going to ratify?” reproaches Virginia, in a telephone interview with Political Animal.
“The judges are demarcating themselves and we want them to help us search because we no longer know what else to do. The judges have the obligation to also search for the disappeared, not only the Search Commission, not only the Prosecutor’s Office, but they also have an obligation to search by their means for the disappeared, and that they have answered us that they have to ratify them first, imagine how we feel (…) Our courage, our helplessness is for one more authority to close the doors to us.”

The response Virginia received is the same as that notified to the relatives of Jonathan Félix Peña González and Francisco Galindo Cruz, who also disappeared in Nayarit. However, the woman reported that they have knowledge within the collective Warriors in Search of Our Treasures – which she founded – that in total there are eight families that have received similar responses or have simply been ignored.
 “These are not isolated cases. For example, there is an amparo vs the disappearance of the 43 students of Ayotzinapa in respect of which the judge has suspended the procedure, since they have not ratified the demand. In another case, 2 missing migrant adolescents were warned to ratify the lawsuit filed in their favor,” Karla Quintana, head of the National Search Commission, wrote on her Twitter account.
“One of the biggest problems in the face of the disappearance of people is the lack of analysis and decision-making in a structural and contextual way,” he added on February 25.

Yesterday, the mothers of 3 missing young people, accompanied by CNB and CLB Nay, filed a complaint with the @CJF_Mx vs 2 judges who decided that, since it was not possible to locate their children, they decided to say whether or not they ratified the amparo demands, they suspended the procedure. 🧵 pic.twitter.com/7PB7ESnTNz
— Karla Quintana O. (@kiquinta) February 25, 2022

Bryan’s Disappearance
Virginia says that every day her son Bryan came home at dawn, after he had closed and washed the hamburger and hot dog stand where he worked. Therefore, I rarely expected him awake. “Whenever I arrived, I would go to my room and let me know I had arrived,” he recalls.
On February 6, 2018, Virginia woke up around 6:00 a.m. and realized she didn’t hear when her son told her he had returned to the house, so she got up to look for him. The young man was not in his room or in the living room or in the kitchen. I wasn’t in the house.
He picked up the phone and started dialing him. The cell phone was on because it rang and rang, but no one was listening. Virginia says that’s when she began to worry the most because her son’s routine activities had not been carried out and, in addition, he did not answer his cell phone. 
For a week, he went every day to the Nayarit Prosecutor’s Office to file a complaint about Bryan’s disappearance, but no one listened to him, only a week after the disappearance.
“They told me that ‘he is young’, that ‘he left with friends’, that ‘it became easy for him not to warn’, that ‘after a while he will appear’ and that ‘we just make them do paperwork'”, reproaches the woman.
As the days went by when she visited the Prosecutor’s Office to ask if there was information about her son, she met other mothers and fathers who were also desperately looking for help to find their children. Like her, they went from one window to another and to another without getting answers.
That’s how he founded the collective Guerreras en Busca de Nuestros Tesoros, which is currently made up of 35 families searching for 36 disappeared people in Nayarit and Guadalajara.
“Notorious ineptitude and carelessness”
After receiving the response of the judges, who asked that the disappeared persons come to ratify the amparo promoted by their mothers so that the authorities can search for them, with the support of the federal and state Search Commissions, the mothers of the three young people filed an administrative complaint in the Council ofe the Federal Judiciary (CJF), against Laura Margarita Sepúlveda Castro, head of the Second District Court of Amparo in Criminal Matters, as well as Óscar Márquez Torres, secretary of the First District Court of Amparo in Criminal Matters acting as district judge, both in Nayarit.
In the text, signed by the three searching mothers – as well as by Commissioner Karla Quintana and Gerardo Baltazar Serrano, head of the State Search Commission – they claim that, as a result of the disappearance of their children, they have not only had to face stigmatization, lack of response and obstruction of the investigations, but now the authorities in Nayarit made a decision far from common sense, lacking in seriousness and ethics, which demonstrates “notorious ineptitude and carelessness”.
“Requiring a missing person to ratify a lawsuit to search for themselves is not only absurd, but contravenes the urgency of fulfilling search obligations quickly and effectively,” they state in the complaint. 
“The decisions of the judges referred to denied our forcibly disappeared children and us constitutional protection, violating various human rights, starting with the right to be sought, to truth and to justice.”
In addition to addressing their complaint, the seeking mothers asked the CJF to take judicial policy measures to train all its personnel in relation to the disappearance of persons, not only with respect to the search as a primary authority, but also in the face of all the legal consequences of a disappearance for those who suffer from it and their families.
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Original source in Spanish