WHEN 14-year-old Karen disappeared during a quick trip to a public bathroom, there was extra cause for concern.
It had happened in the State of Mexico, known locally as Edomex, a sprawling state that engulfs the national capital and where girls and young women are vanishing by the hundreds each year with tragic results.
Some of these girls end up being sex trafficked. Others are killed and their remains are found scattered along highways or regularly fished out of the state’s putrid Grand Canal, a 45-kilometre drainage ditch that has been dubbed “the canal from hell”.
But the fate of most will never be known.
So when Karen (not her real name) didn’t return from the bathroom one day in 2013, her parents, Elizabeth and Alejandro, feared the worst.
“I just knew it, I had an anguish that I’d never felt before. I searched the streets, called friends and family, but no-one had seen her,” Elizabeth (last name withheld) told the BBC.
“She’d gone to the public toilets with nothing — no money, no mobile phone, no clothes … We thought she’d been kidnapped.”
Elizabeth searched for her daughter for three frantic hours before contacting authorities. But as police in Mexico don’t open a missing person’s case until after 72 hours, there was little they could do
So Elizabeth and Alejandro took matters into their own hands. They launched a rouge investigation which included a thorough combing of their daughter’s social media accounts, including a secondary Facebook profile of Karen’s that had more than 4000 friends.
“It was like looking for a needle in a haystack,” Elizabeth said.
“But there was one man who caught our attention. (He) was photographed with girls wearing very few clothes and big guns, and was friends with lots of girls about the same age as our daughter.”
Alejandro added: “This man rang alarm bells: he talked like a drug trafficker, about territory, about travelling, that he was coming to see her soon.
“He’d been in contact with her a few days before she disappeared, and had given her a smartphone so they could stay in contact, and we hadn’t known.”
Karen’s parents feared that she would be taken out of the country. And it was not an unreasonable fear — about 20,000 people are trafficked in Mexico, according to the International Organisation for Migration, and most are forced into prostitution.
Elizabeth and Alejandro had to act quickly. They pressured police into issuing an “amber alert” and plastered missing posters all over Mexico City, even managing to get their daughter’s case onto television and radio broadcasts.
Karen had indeed been abducted by a trafficker — but the publicity surrounding her disappearance had spooked him, reported the BBC. He was going to take Karen and another missing girl to New York City but instead dumped them at a bus terminal. Two weeks after that fateful trip to the public bathroom, she was safe at home with her family.
“This man had promised her travel, money, a music career and fame,” Alejandro said. “He manipulated her really well, and in her innocence she didn’t understand the magnitude of the danger she’d been in.”
MEXICO’S MISSING GIRLS
But thousands are not as lucky as Karen.
A shocking 1,238 women and girls were reported missing in the State of Mexico in 2011 and 2012, according to the most updated figures, reported by the BBC. More than half of these girls were aged under 17.
Many are forced into prostitution, earning big money for their traffickers. The small town of Tenancingo, in the State of Mexico, is regarded as the sex trafficking capital of the world.
Others have been victims of horrific violence. There were 1200 women murdered in the State of Mexico during current Mexican president Enrique Pena Nieto’s tenure as governor between 2005 and 2011. Nieto has been criticised for doing little to tackle the crisis.
A newspaper’s front page that reads “Burnt alive”, posted under a bridge in Ecatepec in June 2015. Picture: AFP / Omar TorresSource:AFP
But this problem is nothing new in Mexico. In the city of Ciudad Juárez, right near the Texas border, more than 370 women were killed in a brutal wave of violence between 1993 and 2005. Many of those women were raped, mutilated and left in the desert, and their deaths lead to the word feminicidio (Spanish for femicide) entering the national lexicon.
While the Ciudad Juárez murders shot to global attention — they even inspired songs and a movie starring Jennifer Lopez — 10 times as many women were murdered in the State of Mexico in the same period. But those deaths went largely unnoticed, Cynthia Galica, a legal expert at the National Autonomous University of Mexico,told The Guardian.
“Edomex is a poor state,” she said.
“People are anonymous, and there are no campaign groups, so it has remained invisible.”
Only one in five murders — and a smaller number of trafficking cases — are successfully prosecuted in Mexico, so it is difficult to know the hows and whys of these tragedies.
Some experts say impunity is fuelling these crimes, as well as social norms that allow violence against women to be ignored or accepted.
“We can also hypothesise the violence is linked to big business owners, corrupt politicians and organised crime just like in Juárez, but we really don’t know as there are no investigations,” culture and gender academic Lucia Melgar told The Guardian.
“The impunity in Edomex is brutal.”
According to the United Nations, femicide accounts for seven deaths every day in Mexico, with just 10 people sentenced for the crime between 2012 and 2013.
Perseo Quiroz Rendon, the director of Amnesty International Mexico, said: “The dreadful inefficiency in the criminal justice means we don’t know why the violence has increased, or even exactly how bad it is.”
Women wear a huge black cloth to protest violence against women in Ciudad Juárez. Picture: AFP / Alfredo EstrellaSource:AFP
CALLS FOR CHANGE
In July, women held an eye-catching demonstration in front of the country’s Interior Ministry in Mexico City to call for urgent action on violence against women.
Congresswomen and activists lay on the ground, with chalk outlines around their bodies, chanting “gender alert in the State of Mexico”.
“The State of Mexico is the most violent state for women (in Mexico),” Congresswoman Xochitl Arzola Vargas told AP.
“In Ecatepec district, for example, the figures surpass those that for a long time made Ciudad Juárez, the ‘femicide city’.
“We have exceeded those figures by a lot, with nearly three times the number of female deaths.”
Other groups and activists are working hard across the country to bring an end to gender hate crimes and campaign for victims.
In Ciudad Juárez, Marisela Ortiz Rivera runs a group whose name translates into English as May Our Daughters Return Home. She started it with the mother of 17-year-old Lilia Alejandra Garcia Andrade, was abducted and murdered in 2001.
Norma Andrade, co-founder of May Our Daughters Return Home, with a picture of her daughter Lilia who was murdered in 2011. Picture: Jeff RaynerSource:News Corp Australia
“There are various aspects of this extreme violence against women here,” Ortiz Rivera told Canadian newspaper the Globe and Mail.
“There’s that machista culture, that male chauvinism, which is responsible for domestic violence, street violence, violence against women they don’t know. But there’s also groups — big syndicates — that exist on the border, that exist to kidnap and sell women. And there’s impunity … it’s big business.”
May Our Daughters Return Home stages mass demonstrations calling for an end to violence against women. But this kind of campaigning doesn’t come without risk.
“We received so many death threats, that we would be murdered, that our families would be murdered,” Ortiz Rivera said. Lilia’s mother Norma Andrade was shot multiple times by a group of men and later had her face slashed with a knife.
Last month, police found the bullet-ridden body of Miguel Angel Jimenez Blanco, a prominent activist who led search parties after the disappearance of 43 students in the town of Iguala.
Despite the danger, the calls for change are slowly being heeded.
After years of denial, in July State of Mexico governor Eruviel Avila finally admitted that gender violence was a serious problem and issued Mexico’s first-ever “gender alert” in 11 of his 125 municipalities.
This means federal authorities must investigate the causes of the high levels of gender violence and introduce emergency and long-term measures to protect women and girls.
While it is a step in the right direction, it will do little to bring back those who have already vanished from homes and schools across Mexico.
A mural at the Mexican foundation, Solidarity with Families. Picture: AFP / Omar TorresSource:AFP
After the ordeal they went through with their daughter Karen two years ago, Elizabeth and Alejandro have worked to unite 21 desperate families with their missing children.
One of the cases they are currently working on is of 17-year-old Syama Paz Lemus, who disappeared in October 2014 from Ecatepec, one of the 11 municipalities where a gender alert has been issued.
Like Karen, Syama had been targeted online. A hooded man arrived at her family’s home and she left with him, carrying two bags of belongings. She hasn’t been heard from since.
Her mother Neida found a secret folder on daughter’s computer that contained screengrabs of online threats Syama had received in the weeks leading up to her disappearance.
“The threats were very direct: they said that if she didn’t go with this person, her life would be made impossible, that they would publish her life on social networks, and that she and her family would regret it,” Neida said.
Police are still investigating Syama’s disappearance and her family is optimistic.
“Karen’s story does give us hope that my daughter could return one day,” Neida said.
“But it’s very hard, because you realise how unsafe it is here — you’re not even safe in your own home.
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