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Horhey · Mar 7, 2017

Expired

waltky · Nov 24, 2015

People disappear at the hands of police in Mexico...

In Mexico, fear as victims vanish at hands of police
Nov 24,`15 -- Carlos Sanchez and his family had nearly completed the harrowing drive, hurtling along a dark and dangerous highway out of the mountains to a hospital when they collided with a state police truck parked across the highway lights out.

Before they knew what was happening, they were dragged from the car by uniformed police. Sanchez's wife, sister and cousin were loaded into the back of a police patrol truck. They would not see Sanchez, who hours earlier had been shot three times outside his home in Teloloapan, until they arrived at a walled compound in the mountains. They had been kidnapped by police. In April 2013, Sanchez and his cousin Armando de la Cruz Salinas became two more of Mexico's nearly 26,000 recorded disappearances since 2007. The abduction of 43 students from a rural teachers' college in the southern Mexico city of Iguala on Sept. 26, 2014, by local police drew attention to a remarkable fact of life in Mexico: Police are responsible for many disappearances.

Wildflowers grow in a field where the body of taco vendor Carlos Sanchez and dozens other were found almost a year ago, on the outskirts of Iguala, Mexico. After adding the names of their missing to the lists, many families organized to go into the hills around Iguala to search for bodies of the disappeared. Over many weeks and months, government crews dug up the remains of at least 104 people from unmarked graves found by the families, only 13 of which have been identified by DNA and telltale bits of clothing.

Mexico's deputy attorney general for human rights, Eber Betanzos, told The Associated Press in August that municipal police had participated in scores of abductions around Iguala during the term of Mayor Jose Luis Abarca, who faces charges in the case of the 43 students. Members of the extended Sanchez family agreed to speak about their missing on condition of anonymity. They wanted to tell the story of the violence that surrounds them like the air they breathe, and of police responsibility for many of what are now called "the other disappeared." But they are deathly scared of the captors and cops who still live among them and operate with impunity, returning at times to abuse or threaten those who might talk.

Sanchez, a 36-year-old taco vendor and father of three, had just returned home with his wife from the grocery store on the evening of April 2, 2013, when a white car pulled up. Two young men got out and confronted him. They tried to force him into the car, but he resisted, and they shot him three times before fleeing. At the hospital in Teloloapan, a city of 55,000 high in the mountains of Guerrero's Tierra Caliente, staff bandaged Sanchez's wounds, gave him oxygen and an IV, but told his family there was no surgeon to operate. They said he had to go to Iguala for surgery and wrote a letter to that effect to ensure his passage through three military and police checkpoints on the highway between the two cities. But the ambulance would only agree to carry Sanchez with an armed escort. Soldiers refused to provide one.

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