Drug war graves unveil drama of Mexico's disappeared

A skull is left next to a shovel at the site of a mass grave in Durango in this April 14, 2011 file photo.

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Reina Estrada lost contact with her husband just after he traveled to Mexico's border with Texas on business in March 2009, and has never heard from him or the colleagues he was with again.

One of more than 5,000 Mexicans to disappear since drug war violence escalated across the country in 2006, Estrada's husband, a paint salesman from central Mexico, is part of a phenomenon which until recently was eclipsed by the killings that fill newspapers and TV news bulletins daily.

The grisly discovery of almost 400 bodies in shallow graves in northern Mexico since early April has highlighted the terrible fate of many citizens who have been abducted by drug gangs and forced to work for the cartels, or killed and buried for refusing to do so.

"We never had word from him or the rest of them. It's like the earth just swallowed them," Estrada said, her voice quivering in despair.

In an echo from some of Latin America's military dictatorships of the 1970s and 80s, Mexico's National Commission Human Rights has documented 5,397 disappeared people since 2006.

But it says the real figure is much higher as many victims' families are too frightened to come forward, not trusting the authorities. In many cases, corrupt police are involved in the disappearances, or at least turn a blind eye to them.

"People are just disappearing, a lot of the time in groups, and there is no demand for ransom payments," said Blanca Martinez, a Catholic human rights group in the northern state of Coahuila that borders Texas. "A week doesn't go by without us registering a new case."

Local authorities suspect many of the disappeared are forced by the rival Zetas and Gulf cartels to work as hitmen, or pack drugs in basements as the cartels find it increasingly difficult to win new recruits to a brutal business where careers are short-lived and often end in capture or death. Others are killed for refusing extortion attempts.

Central American illegal migrants en route to the United States are also easy prey for the drug gangs, and many of the bodies unearthed in the graves are believed to be those of migrants who never made it to the border.

The disappearances are putting more pressure on President Felipe Calderon, who sent the army to fight cartels in December 2006 after his narrow election victory, with the death toll from the drug war during his government nearing 40,000.

Mexico's next presidential election is just 14 months away, and Calderon's conservative National Action Party (PAN) is trailing its main rival in polls amid widening despair at the government's inability so far to stem the bloodshed.

HOPE, FRUSTRATION

"There's no line you can draw that says: 'here ends the power of the criminals and here are the authorities'," said Gabino Gomez, a human rights worker in the particularly violent border city of Ciudad Juarez who has reported his findings to the U.N. High Commission for Human Rights.

"The gunmen simply turn up and take people away," he said.

The disappearances of people ranging from students to illegal immigrants make it harder for Calderon to argue that drug war victims are predominantly gunmen and traffickers, activists say.

The federal attorney general's office and a host of state governments across Mexico say they are working on tracking down those reported as missing.

With bodies still unidentified in cramped morgues after the discovery of the mass graves, some families still hope to at least find their loved ones and give them a proper funeral.

Dozens have traveled to the town of San Fernando in Tamaulipas, the site of Mexico's biggest drug war grave, clutching photographs of the missing and giving blood samples.

But there is increasing frustration.

The attorney general's office says the DNA tests will take three to four weeks and one forensic worker who declined to be named said authorities are overwhelmed. Only four of the 183 bodies found in San Fernando have been identified.

Activists and victims' families also complain that authorities are not doing enough to investigate.

"They say they are working, but they are not, because there are no results," said Estrada, who like many has taken to searching for her husband herself.

(Editing by Kieran Murray)