The missing Kidnappings and cartel violence tear a town apart

María Zapata Escamilla woke to the sound of shattering glass. Armed men in military fatigues had burst into her home: they dragged her disabled husband outside, along with her 14-year-old son, still in his pyjamas

- Oscar Lopez

Then they drove away into the night.

Two weeks later, her husband’s brutalised body turned up along with nine others. But after more than a year, her son remains missing. “I was left navigating alone,” she said through tears. “If they told me ‘give up your life in exchange for your son’, I would.”

Zapata’s ordeal has become terrifyingly common in Fresnillo, a city in the central state of Zacatecas which is being torn apart by a battle between the Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels. More than 70 people went missing between January and March – a fivefold increase on the same period in 2020. Over four days in February, 10 men vanished without trace.

“Every day there are kidnappings, every day there are shootouts, every day there are deaths,” said Zapata.

Families of the Fresnillo victims say they have not received ransom demands – any they did turned out to be scams. Their ordeals mirror a nationwide trend: after dipping in 2022, disappearances across Mexico surged by almost 30% in the first three months of this year, government data shows.

Once relatively calm, Zacatecas, which borders eight other states, has become fiercely contested by criminals. Murders have skyrocketed; cartels block roads and set trucks on fire.