As Mexico hosts the World Cup, families of the disappeared keep searching

0:00This message comes from Mint Mobile. If you're tired of spending hundreds on big wireless bills, bogus fees, and free perks, Mint Mobile is for you. Shop plans at mint mobile.com. slash switch. Taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details. Today on State of the World, Mexico welcomes the World Cup as families search for the disappeared. You're listening to State of the World from NPR. We bring you the day's most vital international stories up close where they're happening. I'm Greg Dixon. The World Cup is starting with games being played in Canada, the U.S., and Mexico. For a country obsessed with soccer, Mexicans are celebrating the moment.

0:45Host cities are preparing for hundreds of thousands of visitors with giant fan zones and watch parties. But the tournament comes at a complicated moment. Mexico is facing a crisis of disappearances linked to organized crime. More than 130 ,000 people are officially reported missing. Families spend years searching for loved ones who vanished without a trace. Guadalajara is one of the host cities and the capital of one of Mexico's most violent states. Some families of the missing there say the World Cup risks overshadowing a tragedy that continues to unfold. NPR's Eder Peralta takes us to Guadalajara.

1:27The families of the missing gather in the shadow of the golden spires of Guadalajara's Metropolitan Cathedral. On one side, workers put the finishing touches on a massive TV screen in the middle of FIFA's fan zone. On the other, the bells announce a mass. And in the middle of the square, the families begin their ritual. The most important thing is that their faces are visible, Ruth Alejandrina says. The families shuffle hundreds of posters with pictures, mostly of young men, but also women and kids who are among the more than 130 ,000 Mexicans who are reported missing. Alejandrina warns, paste the pictures only on the bollards.

2:10If someone screams at you, don't pay attention. It's people without a conscience. They grab paintbrushes and buckets full of glue, and they fan out onto the street. They do this every week because the government removes the posters, sometimes the day after they put them up. Héctor Flores moves with intensity.

2:36Visibility bothers governments, he says. Five years ago, his son Dani was picked up by local authorities, and he hasn't heard from him since. They don't want tourists or people who are going to buy their purchases to see the reality of the state. The government doesn't want tourists or people out shopping to see the reality. The reality is that Flores never stops thinking about his son, who was 19 the day he disappeared. Every week he puts up posters, nearly every week he picks up a shovel and digs through fields trying to find him.

3:17We say the families of the disappeared die every night, only to be reborn every morning. And we suffer the worst kind of torture, which is hope. It's not wrong to celebrate the World Cup, he says. It's not wrong to cheer on your national team. What is wrong, he says, is to forget.

3:45What's wrong is to stop searching, to stop naming the people we miss. But as he moves from bollard to bollard, papering the city with the faces of the disappeared, the world around him keeps spinning.

4:05The construction crew puts up a bright pink stage. A group of young women practice Shakira's latest dance moves. And as the street musicians begin their set, the families of the missing play a pickup game of football. For as long as anyone remembers, football in Mexico has had mystical powers. The great Mexican soccer scribe Juan Villoro once wrote that football is a profession that authorizes the use of magic.

4:50Andres Fabregas, an anthropologist who studies football, says football can do great things. He remembers when the southern state of Chiapas got a football team. It came after an armed rebellion by the Zapatistas, at a moment when that part of the country felt left behind. Their first game was against the Chivas of Guadalajara, Mexico's de facto national team. People faced a major dilemma, and they solved it by cheering for both teams. As soccer gods would have it, the match ended up tied.

5:27People were so happy. They had won the national identity and local identity. Both the national and the local identity had won, and the local soccer team took on a greater meaning. As a symbol of reunification. Like others, Darwin Franco, a journalist in Guadalajara, says he also believes in the magic of football. But things have changed. With prices so high, FIFA has made tickets to the stadium unaffordable. A tight security perimeter keeps most people away. The FanFest the government built in downtown Guadalajara, he says, has used up nine times more money than what they spend yearly looking for the disappeared.

6:14The government, he says, has bet on a lie instead of reality.

6:22And the biggest affront, he says, is that the government has never acknowledged there's a crisis. I meet Leticia Ramirez at a neighborhood a stone's throw from Guadalajara's International Airport. Leticia is part of a collective of mothers who searches for their missing children. A few weeks ago, her group received an anonymous tip that there was a mass grave in the patio of an abandoned house, less than two miles from the airport where most soccer fans will fly into. They dug and found human remains, and that's when they turned the scene over to authorities. So far, she explains, they have found 60 bags full of remains, mostly extremities.

7:10This is remarkably common in Mexico. By the government's own accounting, in the past eight years, there have been 242 clandestine graves found in the state of Jalisco alone. Human bodies are dismembered and then buried in graves as deep as 10 feet. This grave was in the middle of a residential neighborhood with lots of traffic, with lots of life. Esto fue porque la gente no denuncia y porque también la policía no hace sus rondines como debiera. This happens because people don't say anything and because the police don't do their job. Mira como ahorita están llegando los caninos. As we talk, a truck full of cadaver dogs arrives and Leticia says goodbye.

7:53She crosses the police line to supervise to make sure authorities count all of the dead. We walk down a hill across a ravine to a little farm just below the mass grave. From there, we can see investigators working the scene. But here, things feel oddly normal. Jorge Luis Reyes sells pajaretes, a traditional breakfast drink made with raw milk and moonshine. You want to try it? Reyes asks. He pours a little agave honey, a little instant coffee, into a mug.

8:32He reaches under a goat and squeezes its milk right into the mug.

8:40I take a drink. It's warm and sweet and a little bitter. I ask him, did you know about the mass grave? He bought this place 15 years ago, but he would come and go. Then a memory surfaces.

9:04Two and a half years ago, he said, they found a head. They reported it, but that was that. Sometimes, he says, you think about what's happening and you can't explain why or how.

9:20It's like we have a veil over our eyes, he says, and we don't realize what's right in front of us. We're full of distractions, he says. And this week, there's one more, FIFA's World Cup. That's NPR's Eder Peralta in Mexico. and that story was produced by Fernando Naro.

9:46And that's the State of the World from NPR. Thanks for listening. This message comes from Mint Mobile. If you're tired of spending hundreds on big wireless bills, bogus fees, and free perks, Mint Mobile might be right for you with plans starting from$15 a month. Shop plans today at mintmobile.com slash switch.

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11:03Watch the favorites, the underdogs, and the Americanization of the world's game. Listen now to the Sunday story from the Up First podcast on the NPR app.