If there were a bulletin to search for Carmela Hérnandez Gómez, I would say that the indigenous woman was last seen in May 2019 when she was abandoned in the McAllen desert, and that she wore lighter clothes than the sacred sheep wool skirt she used to wear in her homeland, San Juan Chamula, Chiapas.
Likewise, I would say that she was 53 years old when she disappeared and is robust, with an oval face, light brown skin, long braided hair and a little gray, who only speaks tsotsil and does not know how to read or write.
However, his name does not appear in the search bulletins of his state’s outreach program, nor in the National Registry of Missing and Missing Persons (RNPDNO). Moreover, there are no reports of missing indigenous migrants on this platform.
The database built for this research, with the crossing of information from the bulletins of the program Have you seen A? and the catalogue of municipalities of the National Institute of Indigenous Peoples (INPI), reveals that there are 25 tsotsiles, tsetsales, choles, zoques and tojolabales that disappeared while they were migrating.
In Chiapas, a state located in southern Mexico, these stories have accumulated for more than two decades, between 2000 and 2022.
Some disappeared on their way to the United States; others, when they worked in the interior of the country, mainly in northern entities.
According to the record of this investigation, Juan Guzmán Domínguez is a 35-year-old tsotsil, flat nose, thin complexion, 1.65 meters and 65 kilograms.
In San Juan Cancuc, Chiapas, his homeland, he planted corn, beans and coffee; to give a better life to his four children, he went to Sonora to work on the pinch of grapes in the Santa María fields.
He was not yet a month old when he disappeared in December 2015.
“The last time he called me was seven years ago. My little daughter was two weeks old,” says his wife, Ana López, from a pinch of grapes in the state of Jalisco.
“In fact, the work was fine, but suddenly he stopped calling. Some tell me that he is locked up, that he is in prison; then, I asked again and some friends told me he’s dead. I don’t know if that’s true. Know where it is right now…”
The database of this research shows that most migrants last communicated in the states of Sonora, Tamaulipas, Baja California, Sinaloa, Baja California Sur, Nuevo León, San Luis Potosí and Quintana Roo. The rest disappeared on their way to the United States, mainly on the border between Sonora and Arizona.
Hulda Hernández Ramírez is the name of one of the two indigenous women who appear in this record. The Zoque woman was 20 years old when she was last seen. He was crossing the Tucson Desert on June 17, 2000; currently, he is 42 years old. Her hair is black, she has torn eyes and, as particular signs, a cool little finger, three bent left toes and a brown mole on her abdomen.
Most of the people identified in the database were between 15 and 35 years old when they disappeared and, on average, studied primary or even secondary school.
They are called Javier, Salvador, Juan, Abraham, Nicolas, Israel de Jesús, Felipe, Álvaro, Carlos Alfredo, Karina del Carmen, Hugo Francisco, Eleuterio, Eder de Jesús, Pedro, Heber, Natanahel, Mariano, Samuel, Marco Antonio, Manuel, Genaro, Miguel Ángel and Adolfo.
“The people who we believe no one is going to demand justice for them are the ones who disappear. The indigenous woman who left to work, but has no way to communicate with her relatives, that woman who is looking for her; or the young migrant, the indigenous or rural person who nobody knows about his relatives, who is looking for him,” says Sandybell Reyes, a member of the civil association Voces Mesoamericanas.
They were looking for work and no longer returned
“All these stories of disappearance have their origin in Chiapas, considered a reserve of cheap labor, being a land of working people who from their roots are peasants,” explains the activist.
The 23 men and two women of this research emigrated from San Cristóbal de las Casas, Las Margaritas, Ocosingo, Chamula, Chilón, Chenalhó, Yajalón, Pantelhó, Pantepec and Huitiupán.
Mikel Ruiz, a tsotsil researcher at the Center for Higher Studies in Mexico and Central America (Cesmeca), points out that many of the “disappearances along the way” are attributed to human traffickers and organized crime.
‘Malena’ — her name was changed to protect her identity — has been searching for her brother for more than a decade. The young tsotsil, brown-skinned and 1.55 meters tall, and a friend were used by drug traffickers as “mules,” forced to pass drugs through the Sonoran Desert. The only one who appeared was the friend, but with mental problems.
“He ran away from where he was kidnapped, in a house of which he does not know the location, and that there were more people there, they injected him with a lot of drugs to keep him asleep and that affected him a lot,” says ‘Malena’.
Another circumstance of disappearance detected in this investigation is when the indigenous migrant is deported by the United States government and is stranded in the border cities of Mexico without money to return.
When he was expelled, Manuel Gómez Jimenez stayed three months in Tijuana, Baja California. The last communication he had with his family was eight years ago, when he asked them for money and papers to return to Chiapas.
“Money was sent to an account, where he was supposed to withdraw that money. He was on the call with the family and at that moment they took his phone and since that time we lost communication with him, “says his nephew Sergio Gómez.
Manuel’s whereabouts are a mystery to the family, who in the absence of answers in the Attorney General’s Office, are looking for them with the healers.
“The healer told me everything: leaving work your brother receives his pay. They took him to take and after all they killed him, they took his money and his papers that he was carrying,” says Veronica, sister of the migrant.
Chiapas has a historic figure of 528 missing or unlocated people and cases have an uptick since 2015.
For this investigation and for a first delivery, the Attorney General’s Office of Chiapas, the State Search Commission and the Secretariat for the Sustainable Development of the Indigenous Peoples of Chiapas, among other authorities, were sought. No institution responded to the interview requests.
This research was carried out thanks to the support of the Consortium to Support Regional Journalism in Latin America (CAPIR) led by the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR).
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