Frontera NorteSur

It’s not every day in the heart-breaking saga of missing migrants in Mexico that a story ends with a happy ending. But a caravan consisting of more than 40 Central American mothers and wrapping up a three-week long Mexican trek reports finding six family members alive and getting leads on the possible whereabouts of several others.

“I can’t contain the tears, I always believed you were alive,” Nicaraguan mother Teodora Namendiz said to her son during an emotional reunion in Tierra Blanca, Veracruz, late last month. A former combatant, Francisco Cordero Namendiz left Nicaragua 27 years ago and had not been in contact with his family. Cordero told reporters he fell into alcoholism and could not find his family, which had moved its residence, when he attempted contact years later.

“I thought about going to my country, but wasn’t able to scrape together the money to make the return trip to Nicaragua,” Cordero said.

In another reunion, Honduran mother Olga Hernandez found her son Gabriel, absent for six years, when the pair came together in a suburb of the northern Mexican city of Monterrey. And in a reverse probe of sorts, a Guatemalan man made an emotional appeal for help in reconnecting with relatives back home when he ran across the caravan in the Monterrey area.

“He came to us crying, saying that he had fled during the time of the guerrilla (civil war) and didn’t know anything about his family for the last 20 years,” said Martha Sanchez Soler, Mesoamerican Migrant Movement (MMM) member.

Backed by the MMM and other pro-migrant organizations, the mothers’ caravan, which is the eight such endeavor in Mexico, has held events in public plazas where large photos of missing sons and daughters are displayed; participated in public forums on the migrant issue; celebrated masses; visited graveyards said to contain the bodies of unidentified migrants; met with young migrants on their way to the United States; and held meetings with Mexican authorities and elected officials in a renewed attempt to clarify the fates of loved ones who vanished on the long land route from Central America to the United States.

As part of their agenda, caravan members planned to attend a Chiapas session of the Permanent People’s Tribunal, an international, non-governmental tribunal of conscience that is gathering evidence on the Mexican government’s complicity in human rights violations involving migrants.

Migrants passing through Mexico are frequently abused, raped, kidnapped for extortion purposes, trafficked as prostitutes and even murdered. Some are killed or mutilated for life in accidents on “La Bestia,” the infamous train migrants hop aboard to reach the United States.

Precise figures on the number of Central American migrants missing in Mexico are sketchy, but estimates by Mexican human rights officials and migrant organizations speak of somewhere between 20,000 and 70,000 people who have seemingly dropped off the face of the earth.

Naming their visit “The Caravan of Hope,” the Central American mothers insist that the search for “The American Dream” has led to the “The Mexican Hell.”

Mercedes Moreno, a Salvadoran immigrant mother residing in Los Angeles, California, accused police and immigration authorities in Mexico and the United States of corruption and a hard-line approach in dealing with the migrant issue.

Moreno and other mothers demand action in curbing crimes against migrants, and in fostering inter-hemispheric coordination and governmental support for locating living persons and identifying the remains of dead ones.

The MMM noted earlier this year that 13 of the 72 migrants who were murdered in August 2010 by a Mexican criminal organization in San Fernando, Tamaulipas, were interred as unknown individuals in a common grave.

In support of the mothers, a network of Mexican and Central American NGOs has issued several demands on the region’s governments. The activists call for the creation of regional DNA banks; trans-national cooperation and coordination in investigations; the involvement of experts like the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team; programs for relatives of missing migrants; and the formation of a specialized agency focused on crimes against migrants.

Organizations making the call include the MMM, the National Migration Roundtable of Guatemala, United Forces for our Disappeared in Mex-ico, and the Saltillo migrant shelter operated by the Roman Catholic Church, among others.

Since October 15, the mothers’ caravan has wound its way through 14 Mexican states situated on the highways and railways of the migrant route. The trip concluded with a ceremony on Saturday, November 3, in Ciudad Hidalgo, Chiapas.

In an assessment of the caravan’s impact, migrant activist Martha Sanchez Soler said the Central American mothers have now consolidated a movement similar to Argentina’s Mothers of the Plaza Cinco de Mayo or Mexico’s Eureka Committee, which raised the issue of politically-motivated forced disappearances committed by government security forces in the 1970s.

Frontera NorteSur: on-line, U.S.-Mexico border news Center for Latin American and Border Studies New Mexico State University Las Cruces, New Mexico