A Ministerial Federal Police truck blocks the entrance to Rancho La Mesa Ecological Park in Tlalmanalco, during the discovery of seven corpses on the outskirts of Mexico City on Thursday.
AFP/Mexico City
Families of 12 young people who vanished from a Mexico City bar clung to hope yesterday that their relatives were alive even as officials checked if they were in a mass grave.
Investigators dug for more remains after finding seven decomposed bodies on a ranch 30km southeast of the capital a day earlier, but officials warned it would take at least two days to identify the remains.
“The excavation continues to check if there are more bodies,” Mexico City’s top prosecutor, Rodolfo Rios, told MVS Radio, adding that the cause of death remains unknown.
The wait is arduous for parents, grandparents and siblings who have agonized over the whereabouts of the group since they were kidnapped three months ago.
“I feel sick, sick,” Leticia Moreno, mother of missing brothers Aaron and Josue Piedra, told AFP. “But I don’t lose hope. A mother has a sixth sense, and I sense that my sons are alive.”
The abductees, aged 16 to 34, were taken from the Heaven after-hours bar by a group of men who whisked them away in several cars on a Sunday morning in May. The bar is a short walk from a federal police headquarters and the US embassy on the busy Reforma Boulevard.
The case has marred the city’s image as an oasis from the country’s raging drug violence. Mass kidnappings and mass graves are more common near the US border and western states.
Prosecutors have linked the mass abduction to a dispute between two local gangs known as La Union and Tepis, but Mayor Miguel Angel Mancera insists that the bigger cartels do not operate in the capital.
Two bar owners have been arrested, while the charred remains of a third associate were found in the central state of Morelos last month in a gangland-style murder.
Most of the kidnap victims hail from the rough Tepito neighbourhood, notorious for a massive street market packed with contraband DVDs and CDs, pickpockets and small gangs.
Two of them are sons of men jailed for being gang members, but their parents insist they never followed their fathers’ footsteps.
One of the missing is 16-year-old Jerzy Ortiz, son of Jorge Ortiz Reyes, alias “The Tank,” who was sentenced to 23 years in prison in 2003.
Jerzy Ortiz worked in stalls managed by his 66-year-old grandmother, Maria Teresa Ramos, using the long arms of his 1.85-m (6-ft-1) frame to lift tables and hang T-shirts of rock and roll bands such as the Beatles, Led Zeppelin and Metallica.
“Someone said there is an 80% chance that it’s them (in the mass grave). I’m clinging to the 20% that they’re alive,” she said, wiping away tears from behind the counter of her T-shirt store, next to a pile of posters with pictures of the missing.
“We haven’t lived for 90 days. Two more days of waiting is not easy.”
The teenager’s cousin, 26-year-old gastronomy graduate Penelope Ramirez Ponce, said she and her friends are now more careful when they go out at night, checking for suspicious cars outside clubs.
“Now when you go out you don’t know if you’ll return home,” she said.
Relatives must now wait for news on the discovery made at the Rancho La Mesa ecological park in the municipality of Tlalmanalco, a mountainous area of pine trees, corn fields and humble rural homes.
A federal police officer at the scene said authorities had searched the ranch for weapons on Wednesday, finding firearms in a parked trailer before stumbling onto a mass grave covered in cement.
A lawyer representing some victims’ relatives, Ricardo Martinez, said on Thursday he “wouldn’t doubt” the remains are of the 12 young people after speaking with a police officer who was at the site.