Editor’s note: Marcela Turati, one of Mexico’s finest investigative journalists, a winner of the Maria Moors Cabot Prize, and cofounder of the investigative nonprofit Quinto Elemento Lab, has spent more than a dozen years documenting the stories of Mexico’s disappeared and of its more than 2,000 narcofosas, a shocking series of recently-discovered hidden graves. Her first encounter with one of the most notorious mass graves came in 2011 at a crossroads called San Fernando, a picturesque community known, among other things, for its shrimp cocktail.
Over time, Turati revealed that many people buried under unmarked mounds in San Fernando, (and in narcofosas elsewhere), held uncounted victims of a drug war that raged in the states along the Texas border under the six-year-term of President Felipe Calderon, which ended on November 30, 2012. That militaristic federal government crackdown and related prosecutions of so-called cartel kingpins were largely funded by the United States through the so-called Merida Initiative and prompted widespread turf battles between organized crime groups, including a particularly brutal conflict between Gulf Cartel and their former violent partners, the Zetas.
Over time, Turati learned that the many people killed and secretly buried in the narcofosas had little or nothing to do with the drug trade. She found families, befriended forensic experts, and unearthed tales of people, some of whom had headed toward the Texas border to buy a new part for a mechanic workshop, to visit family, or to cross into the United States to work or to shop.
