A simulated search

TLALPAN, MEXICO CITY.—During the week of November 20 to 24, families of disappeared people participated in a search party on the Ajusco Hill in the south of Mexico City. The Mexico City Search Commission and the collective Una Luz en el Camino, made up of relatives of disappearance victims, organized the brigade. They found no human remains nor clues that suggested that bodies were left in the area. The families attribute the lack of discoveries to the negligence of the Search Commission, particularly that of Commissioner Enrique Camargo.

On the first day of the search, the families and officials gathered outside a chapel in a part of the Ajusco known as Los Tlapancos, a remote locale where dirt paths cut through rocky, overgrown hills. The Commission chose the location due to previous reports of stolen cars and bodies found in previous years.

In addition to families from Mexico City and Mexico State, relatives of disappeared people from Oaxaca, Morelos and Hidalgo attended the brigade. Members of the National Guard, the Mexico City police and the Natural Resource Commission, firefighters and forensic experts from the prosecutor’s office participated in the search, as well as officials from the Mexico City, Hidalgo and Morelos state search commissions.

The Commission officials separated the families into four cells. They assigned each group to search a polygon designated on a map. The officials instructed the families to line up and search the ground on either side of the dirt paths.

The families advanced into the overgrowth. After just a few feet, the weeds held them back. The Commission’s machetes weren’t sharp enough to open a throughway. They struggled to push through the vegetation but managed to hack a path forward.

The hill plunged into a ravine filled with garbage. The families emptied out the bags one by one; they found rubble from construction and food remains. Once they returned to the path, an official from the Commission pointed out a white bundle nestled among several downhill trees.

“It looks like a body bag,” he called out.

The firefighters descended to examined the bulk. They opened it and found more detritus.

On the second day, the searchers continued to roam the overgrown hills. The Commission officials took the families to a section of dense forest. The families walked for hours through the trees, climbing over barbed-wire fences that appeared in the brush. They came upon a farm that did not appear on the map.

Wednesday brought cold and rain. The Commission officials led the families to a valley where some of them had searched several months prior.Amidst the chilly drizzle, they told the families to walk among hills where the grass reached some of the women’s shoulders. They found gullies filled with waste. The forensic experts meticulously examined the clothing crumpled among the rubble and food packaging. None of the garments had bullet holes or blood stains, only mud.

At the end of the day, the families complained to Commissioner Enrique Camargo, who arrived only for the closing activities. They pointed out that the Commission had not done any prior prospecting on the site.

“You have us walking in circles in the wilderness,” said Rosalinda Sandoval, who searches for her son Leonardo, disappeared in the town of San Miguel Ajusco on May 15, 2022. She added that she had asked for searches in other parts of the Ajusco but that the Commission had denied the requests, opting for aspotwhere she saw little chance of finding anything. “Those of us who live here know how they work [up here]. They throw the bodies out of their cars and they go. They don’t take them up into the hills.”

“This isn’t a search, this is a hike,” added Goyita Ortíz, mother of Gustavo Alberto de la Cruz Ortíz, disappeared on March 21, 2007, “but with hiking there’s a path, and here we have to make it ourselves with machetes.”

“This is the first time I’ve come to a search in Mexico City, but it’s not the first time I’ve experienced this: a simulation. This search is a simulation,” added Adriana Cruz, who searches for her brother Juventino Cruz Cruz, disappeared in Oaxaca in 2022.

The Commissioner met with some of the families to revise the search plan for the two remaining days of the brigade. They agreed on two new points to search.

Thursday’s search took place in the woods on either side of a bike path that crosses the Ajusco. Those who searched uphill found condoms, underwear and bottles; those who combed the downhill slope found trash. The Commission officials took great care to identify the expiration dates on the food packaging they unearthed.

On Friday the search continued at another point close to the bike path. The trail crossed a residential neighborhood. Cars and pedestrians passed the searchers as they examined the soil for signs of human remains.

Commissioner Camargo did not attend the final day of the search.At the end of the day, the families gathered in a circle and once again spoke to the officials.

“Our disappeared are not an experiment,” said Jaqueline Palmeros, the leader of the collective Una Luz en el Camino. She held up a photo of her daughter Jael Monserrat Uribe Palmeros, disappeared on July 24, 2020. “If it were your children, your parents, your brothers, you would be here, and you’d know what it feels like to search in the trash, in the dirty water, in the soil, among the dead. If tomorrow one of you were disappeared, we’d search for you, too.”

The families and the Commission agreed to conduct a second search on the Ajusco from December 11 to 15. It will take place in a region that some of the families named as a point of interest in their cases.

“The Search Commission had no operating capacity, and that made it so we didn’t have any discoveries this time,” Palmeros said in an interview, “because there certainly are people here [on the Ajusco]. What we need is for [the Commission] to do its job.”