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This could have happened to the Buendía family in “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, the masterpiece of magical realism by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
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Ernesto Manjarez was dead, or so his family believed. The young man had jumped on a bus that links La Cruz de Elota, about 60 miles north from the sea resort of Mazatlan, to the state capital Culiacan. He said he was going to his girlfriend's but didn’t come back, neither this day nor the following, remaining unreachable and unfindable under the dazzling blue sky of the Mexican Pacific coast.
In a forensic medical facility of Culiacan, his sister Janneth Manjarrez recognizes the body that is handed over to her. “Not only the face, but even the ulcers on his stomach and feet : everything on that body was like him”, Janet told Telesur Yucatán and local newspaper Diario Noroeste. Ernesto's two brothers and mother are as positive as Janet when it is their turn to see the body: it is him.
Disappeared but Not Dead
The funeral of whoever was supposed to be Ernesto was organized in El Quelite. However, after only two weeks of mourning, Janet receives a call by Ernesto saying that he is “okay.”
Janet doesn't believe it. It must have been his murderers recording him.
Several months later, Ernesto calls again.
“But Ernesto, we buried you, so how could it be you!?”
Janet recognizes Ernesto’s voice and sense of humor but still doesn't buy it. Until Ernesto sends pictures of him in the U.S., where he had been working a few months after crossing the border illegally, in order help his family make ends meet.
The exhumation is not the end of the process, as judicial authorities are now compelled to identify the DNA of the body. The latter did not announce any deadline. Not a single genetic test, as regional prosecutor Juan Carlos Carreon confirmed, had been carried out on the body presented to the Manjarez family.
"We will get back to you, señora"
The mysterious body, one year and a half after Ernesto returned to El Quelite, was finally exhumed from the grave it should never have occupied. Janet Manjaret was not expecting this moment. They had gotten used to the presence of a body under the name of Ernesto Manjarez in the cemetery of the village. They had been bringing him candles and flowers, feeling sorry for the poor boy.
The request of the Manjarez family for the exhumation of the body was almost two years old. "We will get back to you, señora," forensics told Janet in the prosecutor's office.
"I insisted and called back but nothing happened. Until, thanks to God, I came across these people."
Janet was referring to volunteers and families of disappeared people who introduced themselves to the inhabitants of El Quelite at the end of January. She means that the exhumation would have never happened if it hadn’t been for the presence and pressure of the national search squad for the disappeared, whose third mission took place in the state of Sinaloa from Jan. 22 to Feb. 4.
"We didn't want to hear any ´We will get back to you´ anymore"
But there is another reason why the last two years were particularly long and painful for the Manjarez family. Less than one year after Ernesto had come back, his younger brother Cipriano and elder brother Jorge Umberto disappeared – this time, for real.
“We had no idea what to do … We went asking the neighbors, searching local ranches … We hadn’t filed any complaint up to the day before yesterday. We didn’t want to hear any ´we will get back to you´ anymore”, Janet comments.
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Sinaloan journalist Marcos Vizcarra, who covers disappearances for the local newspaper Diario Noroeste, confirmed that the exhumation of the false Ernesto Manjarez and the report of the two brothers' disappearances took place as a result of the requests activists and families of the national search squad had sent to state prosecutor Martin Robles.
Disinterring the Truth
The national search squad for the disappeared is an interstate association of citizens and local collectives. It gathers families of disappeared people from eleven Mexican states. One of its prominent leaders is Mario Vergara, who is well-known for having organised the “Collective of the Other Disappeared of Iguala” after the Iguala disappearances of September 2014, in the state of Guerrero. Since July 2012, he hasn't stopped digging up bones and skulls in all parts of the country in search for his disappeared brother.
Another important member of the search squad is the lawyer and human rights defender Monserrat Castillo Portillo. Commenting on the case of Ernesto Manjarez, the latter says that the main success of the national search squad, apart from finding human remains in clandestine pits, is the connection its intervention establishes between the families and the society.
"Breaking the isolation is what we aim for. Reconstructing social ties. We do not pretend to replace the judicial system, we just want the society to stick together and the families to find a peace of mind. We invite all families of disappeared people to join hands with us and to have the state understand the degree of humanitarian emergency".
Mario Vergara adds that the stakes in this struggle are the basic truth that lie behind the disappearances. He says that what search squads do is "disinter the truth" about the "violence, hypocrisy and carelessness of the Mexican state".
The Official Number of Disappearances and the Real One
Mexican authorities still do little to find the 29,917 people that are officially missing in the country. While the number of disappeared people has been growing exponentially since the launch by former president Felipe Calderon of the so-called "Drug War" in 2006, the long promised bill on enforced disappearances is still under the draft.
For more than two years, the United Nations' Committee on Enforced Disappearances has been regularly urging the Mexican government to implement new legislations and pushing for an update of the official statistics on disappearances, which are considered unreliable and unclear (for failing to distinguish, in particular, common disapperances from enforced disappearances).
In January 2017, fifty-four additional people went missing in the state of Sinaloa alone, completing an official state record of 2,385 disappeared since 2007. The National search squad, in less than two weeks, documented at least four undeclared cases of disappearances, in addition to all the cases that had been left without response for years by the prosecutor's office.
Many Sinaloan families said they were afraid to report disappearances and even to talk about them, as their state is a stronghold for Mexico's most notorious drug kingpins.
The incredible case of the Manjarez family is only one example of all the information on disappearances that the Mexican people have been gathering in place of their authorities for more than two years, demonstrating that the well-known Iguala disappearances are not an isolated case. It has become obvious that the real number of disappeared people in Mexico is far higher than the official one, which is already the third highest in the world.
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