He spent years searching for Mexico’s disappeared – then he vanished

On a balmy day in early April, anthropologist Juan Carlos Tercero left his home in the city of Tepic, in western Mexico. Then he vanished.

In a country riddled with violence, where 25 people on average are reported missing every day, disappearances like this have become cruelly commonplace. But what makes Tercero’s disappearance particularly egregious is that he had devoted much of his life to trying to tackle this crisis.

An expert in subaquatic forensics, Tercero traveled across Mexico and throughout the region giving courses on recovering human remains and other evidence from under water. In Nayarit state, he was teaching at local colleges and helping groups searching for their loved ones. He was also about to officially join the state commission charged with locating the disappeared.

Instead, four months since he was last seen, Tercero has joined the ranks of Mexico’s more than 100,000 missing people.

“It’s not that his disappearance is more important than the others,” said Marisol Madero, a friend and fellow criminologist who has become a spokeswoman for Tercero’s family. “But if the people who are doing the searching are disappearing, imagine the fear for mothers or other groups dedicated to the search.”

In the face of government inaction, groups of women have become a driving force in the search for the disappeared in Mexico, traversing shrublands and deserts looking for some sign of their missing children, poking the dirt for the scent of rotting flesh.

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But in recent years, they too have become targets of violent crime: since 2021, at least six searching mothers have been killed across the country.

“No one is safe in Mexico,” wrote journalist Javier Risco in a recent column about Tercero’s case in El País. “Neither the relatives who are looking for their disappeared, nor the public officials who are in charge” of the search.

Most frustrating for Madero has been the apparent inaction from the state prosecutor’s office, which oversees the search commission Tercero was in the process of joining. The prosecutor’s office has denied the family a copy of Tercero’s case file – a legal right for victims of crimes in Mexico – and given little indication of how the investigation is progressing.

“We would have thought that we were going to be met with support, concern, with concrete actions that would give us the certainty that they’re helping someone from their own institution,” said Madero. “Instead, we’ve found just the opposite.”

A lawyer from the Nayarit state prosecutor’s office did not respond to messages seeking comment. Emails to the prosecutor’s office went unanswered. Shortly after Tercero’s disappearance was reported, the state prosecutor, Petronilo Díaz Ponce, said that the anthropologist might have gone missing because of “personal matters”, according to local media.

The suggestion has been roundly rejected by Tercero’s family and friends: although there is no direct evidence of foul play, Tercero left behind all his equipment, his camera, his hard drives, according to Madero, suggesting that, at the very least, he intended to return home.

“He is missing because they disappeared him, not because he wanted to disappear,” Tercero’s partner, María Antonieta Castañeda, told reporters in April. “It’s pretty painful that someone who dedicated his life to the search … now we’re having to look for him ourselves.”

Such apparent incompetence or indifference when it comes to disappearances is endemic in Mexico. In a statement last year, the United Nations found that just a fraction of disappearance cases had resulted in prosecutions: only 36 convictions had been handed down at the federal level.

“The alarming trend of rising enforced disappearances was facilitated by the almost absolute impunity,” the UN said.

At the state level, where most violent crimes are investigated, ineptitude and inefficiency are particularly rampant, human rights experts say.

“Nothing about the way this case appears to be being handled, the lack of communication with the family, the lack of apparent urgency, is surprising,” said Tyler Mattiace, a Mexico expert at Human Rights Watch. State prosecutors “are often very slow and very bureaucratic and focused more on numbers and processes than on cases and the truth”.

Nayarit has a particularly dark history with its state law enforcement officials: its former attorney general, Edgar Veytia, nicknamed “the Devil”, was sentenced to 20 years in prison in the United States in 2019 on drug-trafficking charges.

Meanwhile, violence in Nayarit has continued to spiral out of control. According to a 2021 government report, between 2016 and 2020, the number of disappearances in the state increased by 1,300%.

So far this year, more than 100 people have been reported missing or disappeared in the state, official figures show, including Tercero.

“The exhaustion, the emotional distress – it changes your life,” said Madero, of searching for her missing friend. “We’re in constant anguish.”