MEXICAN FAMILIES MOURN THOSE WHO DISAPPEAR

They took him barefoot. Mr Jose Luis Osoria had been asleep when his
teenage daughter's screams pierced the sweltering night. Flinging open his
bedroom door, the carpenter found six men armed with semi-automatic
weapons. The men, some in black federal police uniforms, shoved past the
girl and grabbed Mr Osoria.

It was the last his family saw of him.

Now, after months of lobbying by officials, demonstrations and visits to
the morgue, Mrs Armandina Osoria still has no idea why her husband was
taken away on 13August 1998 or where he is.

"What we want to know is, if he's been killed, what happened? We want to
know, good or bad," said the mother of three, tears welling in her eyes.
"If he's buried, tell us."

Mr Osoria's kidnapping is part of a mysterious wave of disappearances in
Mexico in recent years that has alarmed human rights groups. In December
authorities in the United States and Mexico launched an unprecedented
search for mass graves in Ciudad Juarez after the revelation that more than
100 people had vanished in that border city near El Paso.

But the problem of "los desaparecidos" - the disappeared - is much broader.

Quietly, say human rights groups, the toll has soared in recent years, with
hundreds vanishing in a strange mix of drug violence in northern Mexico and
anti-guerrilla sweeps in the south. In most cases, the police or the army
are suspected, the groups say.

"It's a social phenomenon in the whole north, not just in Ciudad Juarez,"
said Mr Victor Clarke, a prominent human rights activist in Tijuana. "It's
an unusual, alarming phenomenon because of the method. And we always ask,
where are the disappeared? Where did they put 400 people?"

The precise number is hard to ascertain. The government's Human Rights
Commission registered 524 cases in the 1990s, many allegedly involving
officials, compared with 67 cases in the 1980s. The commission, which was
founded in 1990, says it has resolved more than half the cases from the
past decade, finding the victims dead or alive.

But private human rights groups believe that the tally of missing is even
higher. They say many disappearances are never reported because of
families' fear of vengeance or distrust of authorities.

Mr Clarke believes that as many as 400 people have been taken in northern
Mexico alone since the mid-1990s, some seized by soldiers fighting drug
lords, others by corrupt police working for the traffickers.

In the south, human rights groups have documented scores of cases in which
suspected left-wing guerrillas have vanished in recent years.

"There are different phenomena in Mexico that lead to a similar unfortunate
outcome: disappearances," said Mr Joel Solomon of Human Rights Watch in
Washington, who wrote a report last year on the problem. "There is,
however, one underlying factor common to all of the cases, and that is the
failure of the justice system to deal with disappearances properly."

While the problem seems to have grown sharply, there has been little public
outcry. Officials and human rights groups are stepping up their efforts to
publicise the problem. Congressman Benito Miron is now holding forums on
the issue.

Mr Manuel Miron, the legislator's brother and aide, said violence has grown
so much in recent years that many Mexicans have become desensitised,
especially when suspected lawbreakers are the victims.

"But whether someone's thought to be a guerrilla or a drug trafficker,
human rights are human rights," he said. "The state must respect those
rights."