Relatives of the disappeared resort to closing avenues to put pressure on authorities

Given the lack of quick action, information or interest from the authorities, the relatives of people who disappear for different reasons have resorted in recent weeks to closing streets, avenues, highways to put the absence of their loved ones at the center. and thus force the authorities to respond to their cases.

Mexico City, February 11 (However).– They are desperate people: mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters, children, nephews, uncles. Neighbors, friends, colleagues, colleagues and acquaintances. protest and streets and avenues closed more or less big, even freeways. They demand the performance of those who govern them: they are people who have found in this type of locks and closures A way of put pressure on the authorities to look for their missing or missing.

It has happened above all in recent months: a child, or adolescent, or young woman disappears in Mexico City or in the State of Mexico. Given the slowness of the search, they take to the streets to protest. They close roads, main avenues, with banners with the name of their relative. With hashtags. With photos and with the amber or disappearance alerts issued.

One of the most emblematic cases occurred just this month, when Ángela Olguín, a teenager, was reported missing by her mother, who entered the bathrooms of the Indios Verdes whereabouts, in the north of the CdMx, and when she left she no longer saw to your daughter.

Family and friends protested in the area and also closed the Mexico-Pachuca highway, which connects Indios Verdes with the State of Mexico and is one of the main arteries of the Metropolitan Zone. The case reached great media coverage and the young woman appeared three days later. The capital’s Prosecutor’s Office affirms that she was not deprived of her liberty and that she “voluntarily” left her from where she supposedly disappeared.

The same weekend as Ángela’s appearance, Karla Itzayana Guadalupe Morales was found alive 20 days after she was last seen in the Ajusco neighborhood of the Mayor’s Office coyoacan and two days after his family blocked the highway Mexico–Pachuca to speed up their search, according to the Mexico City Attorney General’s Office (FGJ–cdmx).

“They located a young woman reported as absent since January 5, safe and sound, due to which there were blockades on the Mexico-Pachuca highway,” explained the agency’s spokesman, Ulises Lara.

Another recent case was that of the child Dilan Soto, who got lost in the Venustiano Carranza City Hall. His relatives and acquaintances blocked the Calzada México.Tacuba and extended their protest to the connection with Circuito Interior on Thursday, one day after he was reported. The police found him walking in the same area on the day of the demonstration.

A similar case occurred in recent days in Ecatepec, a Mexican municipality adjacent to the capital. The boy Juan Carlos Ramos left his house to do school work with a classmate on Wednesday, but never came home. The parents reported him missing and made a cut on Central Avenue.

The blockade, carried out at the height of the Ecatepec Metro, was replicated by his neighbors and family members on another important avenue in the area, R-1, a few hours later. On Thursday, elements of the Ecatepec search cells found him at an aunt’s house and he was later delivered to his parents safe and sound.

In other states, such as Jalisco, Guerrero and Colima, this type of protest and blockade has been replicated, as a way of putting pressure on the authorities to advance in the investigation of each case.

“IT IS FOR URGENCY, FOR NEED”

The protests became demonstrations in front of prosecutor’s offices and government buildings to be taken –literally– to the streets and avenues, and even highways.

This form of pressure on the authorities generates two situations: a blockade that could draw the attention of the media, and therefore publicize a particular case, and the need precisely for the authorities to respond to the call for justice.

“It is not a strategy, it is urgent, it is necessary, one is not thinking about what is going to happen, what one is going to do is complain and tell the authorities to do something because one feels despair,” he assured However a companion of a young woman who disappeared in the State of Mexico who prefers to identify herself as “Sally”.

“I did it for a relative of mine who did not appear and you see that they do nothing and the only thing that occurs to us is to block the avenue, to see if they even tell you if they are already looking for him. And well, in my case, we found him alive, and they did help us, it was the police who found him, but it wasn’t until you do something like that, that they tell you something, otherwise it’s as if it were a favor, that’s how it happened to us, no I know others,” he adds.

However, he denied that it is a “strategy” or a “plan”. “A real one that in those moments when you don’t know anything, when you see that they don’t help you, that they don’t even move their paw to tell you ‘yes, no, this, that’, one enters a crisis, one wants to shout at everyone. the world if they have seen such a person, that they put the photos, all that”, assured “Sally”.

Other people who have resorted to this type of protest prefer not to speak. Some justify their caution because they did find their relative and prefer not to touch the subject. However, it is not an infallible method.

PENDING CASES

In Jalisco, for example, Miguel Lozano, an engineer and small businessman from Guadalajara who went out to a work meeting that was apparently a hoax to kidnap him and two of his workers.

The family organized a protest at the end of January to demand that the authorities speed up the investigations, since, according to their complaints to the local press, they were progressing very slowly or were frozen outright.

Lozano’s body, however, was found a week after he disappeared. He could be identified with genetic tests due to “the state he was in,” explained the Jalisco Prosecutor’s Office.

In addition, there are pending cases. On January 12, relatives of two underage siblings, Selena and Angelo de la Rosa –12 and 14 years old, respectively– closed the federal highway that goes from Cuautla to Cuernavaca in both lanes for a couple of hours to demand the appearance of the children, who had gone out for a walk with the goats and never returned.

The minors have still not appeared and only on Monday they demonstrated again, this time in the Plaza de Armas in Cuernavaca, where they demanded from the authorities of the state of Morelos a report on how the investigation is going after almost a month after the brothers disappeared. . The family assured that they had not yet received information from the State Prosecutor’s Office.

On Friday, February 3, in the middle of the “bridge” weekend, due to the following Monday holiday, the relatives of Carolina Islas, a 29-year-old girl who disappeared in the center of Mexico City, closed the Viaducto-Tlalpan avenue, one of the main avenues in the south of the capital and which gives access to the Mexico-Cuernavaca highway.

The Secretary of Government, Martí Batres, even came to the place to request the opening of the road, in which they agreed to open a lane to expedite circulation. On her part, Carolina’s mother and brother went to the CdMx Attorney General’s Office (FGJ-CdMx), where they were received by Prosecutor Ernestina Godoy that same afternoon.

Carolina, who has not yet been found, was last seen with her boyfriend on January 27, when they allegedly went out to a bar in the Historic Center.