Hardly a block has been untouched - missing sons, loved ones murdered, houses abandoned. Circumscribed by the violence, many live reduced lives. Living in San Fernando means accepting certain realities.įamilies have suffered kidnappings and cartel-imposed curfews much as big city residents endure traffic and pollution. Her mother was a different person after that. Azalea watched as her mother’s sadness hardened into resolve and her hope gave way to revenge. She would hunt them down, one by one, until the day she died. She told her daughter that she would not rest until she found the people who had taken Karen. She said it matter-of-factly, as though describing her sleep. One morning, a few weeks after the last payment, she came downstairs and told Azalea that she knew Karen was never coming back, that she was most likely dead. Rodríguez, already separated from her husband, moved in with her older daughter, Azalea. They either purge it and try to move on from their loved ones, or they sustain it, and it destroys them. Hope is a toxin that poisons many families of the missing. And with every failed bid to reclaim Karen, she fell further into despair. With every payment, a new hope sparkled for Mrs. Rodríguez, San Fernando grew quiet for a time, as if spent by its own tragic history. Scarred by a decade of violence, a brutal war between cartel factions, the slaughter of 72 migrants and the killing of Mrs. The authorities pledged to capture her killers. Her son, Luis, took over the group she had started, a collective of the many local families whose loved ones had disappeared. The city placed a bronze plaque honoring her in the central plaza. People took heart at her fight, and found indignation in her death. Her stunning campaign - recounted in case files, witness testimony, confessions from the criminals she tracked down and dozens of interviews with relatives, police officers, friends, officials and local residents - changed San Fernando, for a while at least. The country is so torn apart by violence and impunity that a grieving mother had to solve the disappearance of her daughter largely on her own, and died violently because of it. She held him there for nearly an hour, awaiting the police to make the arrest.įor many in the northern city of San Fernando, her story represents so much of what is wrong in Mexico - and so remarkable about its people, their perseverance in the face of government indifference. “If you move, I’ll shoot you,” she told him, according to family members involved in her scramble to capture the florist that day.
Rodríguez, 56 at the time, grabbed him by the shirt and wrestled him to the rails.
He sprinted along the narrow pedestrian pass, hoping to get away. When she finally found him, she got too excited, and too close. On the bridge, she scoured the vendors for flower carts, but that day he was selling sunglasses instead. Without showering, she threw a trench coat over her pajamas, a baseball cap over her fire engine-red hair and a gun in her purse, heading for the border to find the florist. Now he was on the run and back to what he knew, selling roses to make ends meet. She knew the florist had sold flowers on the street before joining the Zeta cartel and getting involved in her daughter’s kidnapping. She knew their habits, friends, hometowns, childhoods. She wrote everything down and stuffed it into her black computer bag, building her investigation and tracking them down, one by one. She invented excuses to meet their families, unsuspecting grandmothers and cousins who gave her details, however small. She cut her hair, dyed it and disguised herself as a pollster, a health worker and an election official to get their names and addresses.
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