When two Australian brothers drove to Mexico’s northwest coast from San Diego last week with their American friend, they were looking to catch the cool waves that make Baja California a popular destination with travelers from around the world.
But shortly after arriving in the Mexican city of Ensenada, Callum Robinson’s Instagram posts about his surfing adventure stopped. The group stopped responding to calls and text messages.
He and his brother Jake never showed up at an Airbnb they had booked, their mother said in a social media post, asking anyone who had seen her two children for help.
On Sunday, Mexican authorities announced that the bodies of the three tourists, found at the bottom of a well with gunshot wounds to the head, had been identified by their families.
The men had been killed in a carjacking gone wrong, authorities said, and the suspects had been arrested just days after they disappeared. More people are being investigated.
It was a tragic but somewhat quick resolution to a case that had drawn international attention.
For many local Mexicans, however, the quick response of authorities to locate the Robinson brothers and Jack Carter Rhoad, the American, and make arrests appeared to be an exception in a country where tens of thousands of missing persons cases have been in progress. process for years. without ever being solved.
The government said in March that about 100,000 people are missing in Mexico, although the United Nations says that could be an undercount.
“It is very difficult, except in high-profile cases like the one that just happened, for the authorities to immediately activate the search,” said Adriana Jaén, a sociologist based in Ensenada who provides legal, emotional and logistical support to people searching for their missing loved ones.
Federal and state officials in Mexico tend to claim that violence levels have decreased even when official data contradicts them. Local authorities themselves have been involved in disappearances: in Baja California, Ensenada municipal police officers were recently accused of the disappearance of a man. And then there is also a lack of resources to investigate.
That’s why it’s noticeable when a case seems to receive special attention.
“The message that those of us who work on these issues receive is that there are lives that matter,” Jaén added, “and there are others that don’t.”
There are more than 17,300 active disappearance investigations in the state of Baja California, according to government data provided to Elementa DDHH, a human rights group that has studied disappearances in the state.
In many cases, it is not clear whether the missing person has been found; whether he was the victim of a crime; and, if so, whether anyone was arrested. Some cases lack even basic information to begin a search, according to a government count of the missing found last year.
“We don’t know exactly how many people are missing and how many have been located,” said Renata Demichelis, director of Elementa DDHH in Mexico. “The authorities don’t tell us.”
The available data, however, offer an idea of the magnitude of the problem.
In 2017, state prosecutors opened around 760 disappearance investigations in Baja California. In five years, the figure multiplied by more than three, according to Elementa DDHH.
“This is an ongoing phenomenon and is increasing exponentially,” Demichelis said, adding that several factors are contributing to the worsening crisis of disappearances in Baja California, such as drug trafficking, internal displacement, migration and gender violence. .
State Attorney General María Elena Andrade Ramírez said in an interview that prosecutors have so far ruled out the possibility that the murders of the Robinson brothers and Mr. Rhoad were linked to organized crime groups.
Those responsible tried to seize the tourists’ van, he stated. When they resisted, a man pulled out a gun and killed them.
“This attack seems to have occurred in an unexpected and circumstantial manner,” said Mrs. Andrade Ramírez. “They took advantage when they saw the vehicle out in the open, in that secluded place, where they knew there were no witnesses.”
At a press conference this weekend, a journalist asked Andrade Ramírez if it is necessary to be a foreigner in Baja California for state authorities to act as quickly as they did in the case of the missing tourists.
“Each investigation has its own process,” the attorney general responded. “And there are times when we have to take care of every detail, which takes some time, to achieve a good result.”
On Sunday, after the victims’ families identified the bodies at the morgue, Adriana Moreno, a local resident, said she felt mixed emotions.
“I’m so glad they found them so quickly. That is my joy, my satisfaction,” said Moreno, 60 years old. She has been searching for her son, Víctor Adrián Rodríguez Moreno, since 2009, when he and two of his co-workers, employees of an import company, were kidnapped in the northern state of Coahuila.
“But 15 years after my son disappeared, there is nothing,” Mrs. Moreno said. “They make me feel like missing people come in levels of importance.”