THE DISAPPEARED

In The Last Seven Years, Hundreds Of People Have Vanished From Ciudad
Juarez, Mexico, Casualties Of The Drug Trade. Their Families Suspect That
The Desert Is Hiding Their Bodies.

Deserts everywhere are mysterious, daunting landscapes. But in Ciudad
Juarez, Mexico, it is not just nature that holds the most vexing secrets.
Those involve the fate of hundreds of people who have vanished.

No one knows where their bodies are buried.

Some of their relatives cling to fantasies that the missing are still alive.

But most believe that the remains of los desaparecidos are out there,
somewhere, in the barren sea of sand that surrounds this industrial city
and stretches along the United States border.

As she stands at the desert's edge, a nervous silence falls over Claudia
Escobedo, as if the arid ground beneath her feet is cursed.

Six years ago, her parents left home and never returned. "What's hardest is
that there are times when I think that maybe they are alive," says
Escobedo, who seems poised beyond her 22 years. "But then I try to face
reality and let myself accept that they are probably dead. I go from one
extreme to the other every day. I don't know how I will ever have peace
until they are found."

More than 200 people from Juarez have disappeared over the past seven
years. Most are thought to have been killed as a byproduct of a ruthless
and flourishing drug trade.

The victims are often targeted because they have run afoul of drug
traffickers or corrupt law-enforcement officials.

Indeed, say members of an association for relatives of the disappeared,
some of those missing had played with fire by participating in the
activities of the drug traffickers. Others, it appears, thought they were
working with the good guys, but in the end made a deadly mistake.

Claudia Escobedo says that was the case with her father and mother -- Saul
Osvaldo Sanchez and Abigail Concepcion Sanchez. The couple left home one
evening in May 1994 to see a play. Claudia was 16 at the time, and her
parents told her little brother that she was in charge until they got home.
They never came back.

Saul Sanchez, a 39-year-old communications specialist, had been helping
Mexican law enforcement officials set up cell-phone listening devices aimed
primarily at intercepting drug traffickers' communications. On the
afternoon before they disappeared, his daughter says, a man whom she
recognized as a federal agent who had been working with her father
delivered two theater tickets to her house and said that they were a gift
for her parents.

Claudia clearly remembers the agent, a portly, green-eyed man with lots of
curly gray hair who was known by associates as Panda. And although she says
she has talked to the police about him "thousands of times," he has never
been questioned about her parents' abduction.

The exact numbers of the missing have been hard to track because many of
their relatives are afraid to cooperate with the police, who have been
widely accused of serving as accomplices in the attacks.

And they are even more afraid of retaliation from drug lords, who often
orchestrate these disappearances -- snatching many victims off busy streets
in broad daylight -- in order to silence or scare those who might testify
against them.

The world was alerted to the plight of the families of the disappeared last
December, when federal agents from the United States and Mexico converged
on an isolated horse ranch outside of Juarez to search for mass graves.

Relying on an informant's tip, the Mexican attorney general and the
director of the F.B.I. announced that the ranch had been used as a human
dumping ground by the powerful drug cartel controlled by the Carrillo
Fuentes family.

At last, many thought, the mystery of the missing bodies would be revealed.

Relatives of the missing gathered around the excavation site to await the
gruesome discoveries. "We thought we'd find everyone there," says Lorenza
Magana, coordinator of the association for relatives of the disappeared.
But after nearly two months of digging, agents came up woefully short of
their projections. Nine bodies were found, including the remains of three
Americans.

For many family members, the result was bittersweet. It stoked new hope
that their absent loved ones might still be alive.

But it also meant that closure is elusive, that their search is not over,
nor their agony. "We were all there, hoping that they were not in that
grave, but at the same time hoping that they were," says Magana. "We are
desperate for answers.

We are desperate to have our relatives back, dead or alive."