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Thousands of Mexican families mourn the ‘other disappeared’

In this April 21, 2015 photo, snapshots with brief descriptions of missing people are tacked to a board in the San Gerardo Catholic Parish in Iguala, Mexico. Little attention had been paid to the many people who have disappeared or been kidnapped in this region until 43 students from a rural teachers college disappeared in Iguala, Sept. 26, 2014. Two months after the students disappeared, hundreds of families began coming forward to tell their stories, emboldened by the international attention focused on the missing students. (AP Photo/Dario Lopez-Mills)
In this April 21, 2015 photo, snapshots with brief descriptions of missing people are tacked to a board in the San Gerardo Catholic Parish in Iguala, Mexico. Little attention had been paid to the many people who have disappeared or been kidnapped in this region until 43 students from a rural teachers college disappeared in Iguala, Sept. 26, 2014. Two months after the students disappeared, hundreds of families began coming forward to tell their stories, emboldened by the international attention focused on the missing students. (AP Photo/Dario Lopez-Mills)

By Associated Press 5 min read

COCULA, Mexico (AP) – The convoy of gunmen fanned out across the southern Mexico municipality of Cocula before dawn. Some carried names and blasted their way into homes. Others simply swept up whoever crossed their paths.

Seventeen people vanished from Cocula on this single day, July 1, 2013 – more than a year before the disappearance of 43 college students in the nearby city of Iguala would draw the world’s eyes to the mountains of northern Guerrero and to the issue of Mexico’s disappeared.

The disappearance of the students from the Rural Normal School of Ayotzinapa on Sept. 26, 2014, gave hundreds of other families who had loved ones vanish the courage to come forward, many for the first time, to report the crimes. These, they said, were the “other disappeared.”

Among them was Rosa Segura Giral, who waited more than a year to report the abduction of her 19-year-old daughter, Berenice Navarijo Segura. Berenice disappeared on that July day in Cocula, just hours before her high school graduation.

“What if I report it and my daughter is nearby and they know I reported it?” Rosa Segura Giral had wondered, could they “hurt her or something?”