Baja, Ca: “A Living Hell of Disappearances”

Translated by Yaqui for Borderland Beat from: Unimexicali/ Radioformula

                                   Just Another Day Somewhere in Northern Baja California
By: José Luis Camarillo
June 23, 2018

Recently the State of  Baja California has been enveloped in a dark cloud that casts uncertainty on families that incessantly search for those whom they have lost,  a figure of 14 women and 40 men have disappeared and/or vanished without trace. These are only the reported figures,  declared the president  of the Association United for the Disappeared of Baja California, Fernando Ocegueda Flores. 

He said that in Tijuana alone, plus one case from Mexicali, from last month to date there have been 16 missing women, where one of them was located another was found reported dead, and 14 remain missing. The ages of young women range between 18 and 24 years. All of them with a complaint reportedly lodged with CAPEA. (Spanish language acronym)

Along with these figures, the Municipality of Ensenada joins in with 89 disappearances, mainly in the areas of Valle de la Trinidad, San Quintín, El Maneadero and Ojos Negros, which qualifies this Municipality as an unexpected "red light" focal point.

Much of the responsibility for this problem, said Ocegueda,  is the inefficiency of organizations dedicated to the search for missing persons, and the need by authority figures to insist that there is no wave of disappearances in the state, which minimizes the actions of the Attorney General's office of the State on this issue.

"If you add all these disappeared and the anomalies in the attorney's office to the fact that the prosecutor already has almost all of the sexennium and part of the previous; I think we need a change within the structure of the heads that manage this area of the Peninsula," he said.

As a result of the above, Ocegueda stated that they have repeatedly demanded the resignation of the ex-judge Perla Ibarra, who in his opinion encourages this inefficiency, and although Perla Ibarra acknowledges that she will not answer that request, she assured CAPEA that she will not fail to point out the deficiencies of the Disappeared Persons Prosecutor's Office in Baja California.

Aggravating the conflict: the National Search Commission was created last year, which was approved by the senators in Congress and for that reason should be approved in each state of the country. However, after a conversation with the Governor of Baja California, Francisco "Kiko" Vega de Lamadrid, it was said that the decree was already signed but now the publication of the decree is still pending.

"I am extremely tired of the indifference of the Attorney General's Office of the State in the matter of missing persons, it is an institution completely overwhelmed by the high rates of homicides and insecurity," Oceguera said condemningly.

With Baja California in second place regarding the number of missing persons, Ocegueda said that it could even be the first if the authorities do not "manipulate" the figures, because there are five ways to catalog a disappearance, and it seems that organizations forget it and pigeonhole all in one, leaving the rest aside.

These classifications would be:

Not located

Kidnappings

Illegal deprivation of freedom

Missing

Domestic (those that reappear later and it is indicated that they were with a friend or sentimental partner).

WWW.SEMEFO.BC :

The obstacles in this topic do not stop there, since Fernando Ocegueda recalled that in 2008 the webpage www.semefo.bc had been created, which had photographs of the disappeared, and thanks to it they managed to find 23 people during the time that the website was active, but among the internal changes of the government, the site has been  forgotten, and now it is more complicated to access a public record of people not located.

DEMANDS :

For this reason, the President of the Association United for the Disappeared of Baja California, presented these demands addressed to the State Government to improve efficiency with respect to searches and records:

Insist the Governor  institutes the State Search Commission.

Create mechanisms so that prosecutors have sufficient resources to carry out a good job.

A operational structure for people looking for family members.

Genetic bank at the state level.

Reliable Missing Persons database in the state.

"This is a chain and if we start to run with it all, the negotiations between the municipal cemeteries and the authorities will come up and that issue is very rough; we might be better off not even touching it," he said sadly.

The Association's demands also arise because Ocegueda said that since 2010 there have been about 4,500 people sent to mass graves without their DNA being registered, an insurmountable problem in a case in which a relative came to look for, identify or claim a body.

Another big problem: when a person finds his family member in a common grave, the price to get that person out of it costs up to 60,000 Pesos, and therefore, the family decides to leave their loved one there, since the family can not afford that cost and thus cannot give them a decent burial.

Ocegueda reiterated that as an association they will  give the best of themselves to help people with missing relatives, while continuing  their insistence of pressuring the government to take action on the matter with greater precision.

"We have been in this struggle for 12 years already, we always behave truthfully, honestly, because we do not gain anything by discrediting the government, but we do want real investigations into the cases of these girls and the people who have been deprived of their freedom and/or lives.  I do not know when it's going to stop, this hell we're living through in Baja California," he concluded.

VIDEO:  http://www.unimexicali.com/videos/noticias/album/14/video18933.html
NOTE :  If you click on the Link from the source at top you should be able to watch the 2+minute Video, ie,  IN SPANISH of women protesting demanding a GENERAL ALERT for Baja California