Oscar Lopez
- 2023
Fellowship Title:
- Mexico’s Disappeared
Fellowship Year:
- 2023
Opinion: Mexico’s new president should tackle the country’s festering human rights catastrophe
New President Claudia Sheinbaum can do more than her predecessor to resolve the disappearances and murders of Mexicans by gangs and past governments. (Fernando Llano / Associated Press) Every morning when I walk to the park across from my apartment in Mexico City, I am reminded of an unspeakable tragedy that has befallen my country for decades. Steps away from my front door is a small plaque reminding passersby that the building beside my own, now a government human rights office, was once the headquarters of the Mexican secret police, “a center for forced disappearance and torture in the ’70s and ’80s.” In that period, as part of Mexico’s “Dirty War,” the government arrested thousands of young dissidents who had taken up arms against a violent authoritarian regime. Researchers have estimated that between 1964 and 1982, 3,000 people were imprisoned, 7,000 tortured and another 3,000 killed. Some 1,200 vanished, with many believed to have been murdered by the state. While some were buried in clandestine graves, others were tossed out of airplanes into the Pacific
They were 2 Chicago pizza delivery guys. Then, they ran a Mexican drug cartel, feds say
By Oscar Lopez and Frank Main The Guerreros Unidos cartel that authorities say brothers Adan and Mario Casarrubias Salgado led fueled Chicago’s appetite for heroin. It’s also blamed for the massacre of 43 students in Mexico. Adan Casarrubias Salgado (left), known as El Tomate, and his late brother Mario Casarrubias Salgado, nicknamed El Sapo Guapo, or the Handsome Toad. The Mexican government blacked out Adan Casarrubias Salgado’s eyes in the photo.Mexico attorney general’s office, Chicago Police Department Loaded with drugs, the buses left Iguala in southern Mexico every week bound for Chicago. Secret compartments made detection at the border almost impossible. At warehouses in Aurora and Batavia, the heroin was unloaded, then distributed around Chicago and across the country. Over a year, starting in July 2013, the Guerreros Unidos Mexican drug cartel imported about 2,000 kilograms of heroin to Chicago, authorities say. Millions of dollars were sent back to Mexico in the same compartments. “When we came to the realization as to the volume of heroin that they were trafficking, the significance really hit home to us,”
Land of no return: the Mexican city torn apart by cartel kidnappings
What woke María Zapata Escamilla was the sound of shattering glass. Armed men in military fatigues had burst into her home: they dragged her disabled husband outside, along with her 14-year-old son, still in his pajamas. Then they drove away into the night. Two weeks later, her husband’s brutalized body turned up, along with nine others. But after more than a year, her son remains missing. María Zapata Escamilla stands outside Mexico’s Congress holding a photo of her missing son. Credit: Oscar Lopez “I was left navigating alone,” she said through tears in a recent interview. “If they told me, ‘Give up your life in exchange for your son,’ I would give it.” Zapata’s ordeal has become terrifyingly common in Fresnillo, a city in the central Mexican state of Zacatecas that is currently being torn apart by a battle between the Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels. More than 70 people went missing in the mining city between January and March – nearly one person a day, and a fivefold increase compared with the same period in
Mexico army ignored cartel warnings before mass student kidnapping, emails show
Relatives and classmates of the missing 43 Ayotzinapa college students march in Mexico City, on 26 September 2022. Photograph: Marco Ugarte/AP Months before 43 Ayotzinapa students vanished, army was repeatedly warned of criminal gang presence The Mexican military received nearly a dozen complaints about cartel activity in the region where 43 students were abducted in September 2014, emails hacked from the country’s defense ministry reveal, but the armed forces apparently did little to tackle organized crime in the area. The students’ kidnapping and disappearance, which took place in the city of Iguala in Guerrero state, was one of the most horrific and high-profile human rights abuses in Mexico’s recent history, and remains unsolved despite years of protests and a relentless pursuit of justice by the students’ parents. In the eight months before the students were attacked, citizens of Iguala and surrounding towns wrote at least 10 emails to the 27th infantry battalion denouncing the presence of criminal groups and the apparent collusion of local authorities. Some included photos of alleged members of the Guerreros Unidos
A Mexican town celebrates even as it mourns the victims of forced disappearance: ‘There’s still this emptiness’
Cristina Bautista, center, walks with her mother, daughter and granddaughter in front of the procession heading to the church to celebrate Holy Saviour. Photograph: Luis Antonio Rojas/The Guardian Life goes on for Benjamín Ascencio Bautista’s family, although the unsolved case overshadows their festivities with grief The flowers were bought first: five dozen roses in crimson, coral, gold, pale yellow and white. Then 36 long candles at a market filled with the smell of cilantro. Finally, the first of three pigs was slaughtered, its death-squeals echoing over the mountains. In all, preparations for the feast took two days, a whole family called in to help, lugging sacks of corn to be boiled in huge steel vats on the street. The parts of the pig were washed in salt water and hung up to dry. Yolsitlalin Hernández, 11, and Joanna Hernández, 8, nieces of Benjamin Bautista, clean roses for the Saint Salvador celebration. On Saturday evening, it all came together: the pork and corn had boiled for nearly 12 hours to make a rich pozole in giant