An activist who searched for her disappeared brother killed in Mexican border city

MEXICO CITY — A gunman has killed an activist who led a group of volunteers searching for some of Mexico’s over 100,000 missing people, prosecutors said.

The killer burst into a beauty salon Thursday in the northern border city of Mexicali and shot to death Ángela León, who apparently ran the shop.

León was at least the seventh volunteer searcher killed since 2021. An eighth activist was abducted in January and has not been heard from since.

Prosecutors in the northern border state of Baja California pledged Friday to investigate the crime, which is all the more shocking because most searchers say they are not trying to put anyone in jail.

León was the head of the search group “Union and Strength for Our Disappeared,” and had been searching since 2018 for her brother, José Juan Vázquez, who disappeared in Tecate that year.

The group said in a statement that “she had received threats and filed complaints, but they (authorities) did nothing!”

In January, gunmen burst into a home in the central Mexico state of Guanajuato and abducted search activist Lorenza Cano, and killed her husband and son. Cano remains missing.

Mexican drug cartels and kidnapping gangs frequently use shallow graves, vacant lots or caustic chemicals to dispose of the bodies of their victims.

The volunteer searchers often conduct their own investigations — sometimes relying on tips from former criminals — because the government has been unable to help.

The searchers, mostly the mothers of the disappeared, usually aren’t trying to convict anyone for their relatives’ abductions. They just want to find their remains.

The Mexican government has spent little on looking for the missing. Volunteers must stand in for nonexistent official search teams in the hunt for clandestine graves where cartels hide their victims. The government hasn’t adequately funded or implemented a genetic database to help identify the remains found.

Victims’ relatives rely on anonymous tips — sometimes from former cartel gunmen — to find suspected body-dumping sites. They plunge long steel rods into the earth to detect the scent of death.

If they find something, the most authorities will do is send a police and forensics team to retrieve the remains, which in most cases are never identified.

It leaves the volunteer searchers feeling caught between two hostile forces: murderous drug gangs and a government obsessed with denying the scale of the problem.

In July, a drug cartel used a fake report of a mass grave to lure police into a deadly roadside bomb attack that killed four police officers and two civilians in Jalisco state.

It is not entirely clear who is killing the searchers. Cartels have tried to intimidate searchers in the past, especially if they went to grave sites that were still being used.

Searchers have long sought to avoid the cartels’ wrath by publicly pledging that they are not looking for evidence to bring the killers to justice, that they simply want their children’s bodies back.