Angelita Almeras helped to locate the remains of several hundred missing Mexicans while looking for her own brother — a search that ended abruptly this week when a shooter killed her.
In the Latin American nation, even trying to track down one of the more than 100,000 people who have disappeared can be fraught with danger.
Almeras, a 27-year-old single mother of two, had asked the government for protection a week ago due to intensifying threats by telephone and social media, people close to her said on Friday.
Photo: AP
Yet help never arrived, and on Thursday she was gunned down at the beauty salon where she worked in the city of Tecate across the border from the US state of California.
Ahe is one of eight people killed since 2021 while searching for missing persons in Mexico, activists said.
“This should never have happened,” said Paula Sandoval, a friend of Almeras who is also searching for a brother kidnapped in 2020.
“If the authorities had done their job, this wouldn’t have happened. Neither she nor her family deserved this,” she added.
Almeras’s brother, Jose, disappeared along with his girlfriend in 2018, when violence linked to drug trafficking escalated in Tecate.
As part of their effort to find him, Almeras and her mother founded a group called Union and Strength for Our Disappeared.
Sandoval remembered her as a “warrior” with a big heart who was committed to the cause.
“She always helped the victims... She always ran to them if called on,” she said.
Almeras — who after her death was initially identified by a local human rights commission as Angelica Leon based on her second surname — filed three complaints about threats she received, her friend said.
“They told her that they were going to come after her; they asked her why she was uncovering graves. They told her that she was going to end up just like the people she was finding,” Sandoval said.
The threats came from unknown telephone numbers and social media accounts.
“The authorities did nothing to identify them,” Sandoval said.
Almeras had become a prominent figure in the defense of the missing and their families, “which put her in a position of vulnerability in a state and a country mired in violence,” rights group Elementa Derechos Humanos said.
Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on Friday said that Almeras had protection from the local authorities and that the alleged perpetrator had been identified.
“Everything indicates that there is no connection” to her work looking for the missing, he said, alluding to Almeras’s former partner who voluntarily wen to the prosecutors’ office after her murder.
“There is possibly another reason, but I can’t say more than that,” Lopez Obrador added, in remarks met with skepticism from those close to Almeras.
“It’s unfortunate that the authorities are looking for a scapegoat ... to close the case as soon as possible,” Sandoval said.
“But this really has to do with her search work,” she said, adding that Almeras “got along very well” with her former partner.
More than 114,000 people have gone missing in Mexico, mostly since 2006 when the government of then-Mexican president Felipe Calderon deployed the military to fight drug cartels.
Since then, a spiral of violence has left more than 420,000 people dead.
Despite the risks, Sandoval said that she plans to continue with her own search, although with each grave found “things are uncovered that make certain people uncomfortable,” including authorities.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the