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From Our Own Correspondent: Searching for Mexico's drug-war 'disappeared'

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Image: A relative searches for human remains in Sonora, Mexico. Credit: BBC

22/01/2022 GMT

Searching for Mexico's drug-war 'disappeared'

BBC World Service - From Our Own Correspondent, Searching for Mexico's drug-war 'disappeared'

Hunting for traces of missing relatives; plus tales from Kazakhstan, Somalia and Germany

Trying to find traces of missing relatives in the Sonora desert; destruction in Kazakhstan's capital; a survivor in Somalia; the suspicions dividing Syrian refugees in Germany

Pascale Harter introduces insights and analysis from BBC correspondents and journalists around the world.

It’s a myth that the only people who die at the hands of drugs cartels are somehow mixed up in the business. In Mexico, they don’t just kill rival narcotraffickers - or the police and soldiers sent to fight them. All too often, their vendettas, gun battles and hitmen end the lives of people who had nothing at all to do with the drug trade. In Mexico, government statistics put the number of people currently missing across the country at more than 95,000. The true number could be far, far higher. So there are many families out there searching for clue to the fate of their relatives, often with little help from the state. Will Grant joined a group of relatives combing a remote part of the Sonora desert for clues. 

On the sixteenth of January 2022, there was a suicide bombing in the Somali capital, Mogadishu. Attacks like this are so frequent they aren’t always even reported in the local media, let alone by international news outlets. Somalia has been in a state of conflict for more than thirty years now. Yet although this bombing was “small” by Somali standards, it did make the news -  including reports on the BBC - because of who was involved. Our Africa Editor, Mary Harper, is a regular visitor to Somalia – and she’s often worked with the man who was targeted.

At the start of 2022, Kazakhstan was convulsed by unprecedented mass disorder and anti-government protests. The  security forces cracked down hard – and even called in help from Moscow to reassert control on the streets. The violence has left at least 225 people dead. Thousands of protestors are still in detention. Abdujalil Abdurasulov lived in Kazakhstan for years, and returned to its capital Almaty in the middle of the protests. It was not the same city he remembered.  

Germany currently has the largest Syrian refugee population of any country in the European Union, numbering more than 800,000. You might expect it to be a very tight-knit community, with people who’ve survived similarly harsh experiences looking out for each other and helping each other to rebuild their lives. But when Michael Ertl talked to some Syrian refugees living in Berlin, he found things are not nearly so simple.

(Image: A relative searches for human remains in Sonora, Mexico. Credit: BBC)

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