Tourists Killed in Mexico Were Lucky to Be Found

Australian brothers Callum and Jake Robinson and their American friend, Jack Carter Rhoad, met a horrifying death—each shot dead in an apparent car-jacking before their bodies were dumped in a well. But in one sense, the tourists were lucky. "The robust operation to quickly find the remains of three foreigners ... felt like a rare exception" in a country where more than 100,000 people are missing, the New York Times reports. "It is very difficult, except for high-profile cases like the one that just happened, for the authorities to immediately trigger the search," says Adriana Jaén, a sociologist based in Ensenada who supports families of missing people. "The message those of us who work on these issues get is that there are lives that matter and there are others that don't."

There are more than 17,300 active disappearance investigations in Baja California, considered one of Mexico's most violent states, where the three tourists were killed, according to government data. "This is an ongoing phenomenon, and it's increasing exponentially," driven by drug trafficking, internal displacement, migration and gender violence, says Renata Demichelis, the Mexico director of Elementa DDHH, a human rights group that studies disappearances in the state. "Some cases even lack even basic information for beginning a search," per the Times.

Mexico's government recently faced accusations that it was wiping names from the official record of missing people ahead of national elections in June. Authorities said they were clearing false entries, duplicates, and the names of individuals who'd resurfaced. But families say the names of loved ones still missing have been erased, per the Los Angeles Times. At a weekend news conference, a reporter asked Baja California Attorney General María Elena Andrade Ramírez whether a missing person had to be a foreigner to get the attention of state authorities. "Every investigation has its own process," she replied. The mother of a man who vanished in Coahuila state in 2009 has a different take. "They make me feel like missing people come in levels of importance," she tells the Times. (More Mexico stories.)