Mexico wouldn't solve his father's murder, so he had to do it himself
TEPOZTLAN, Mexico - Juan Carlos Quiroz was working late in Mexico City on March 16, 2017, when his older sister called with distressing news. That afternoon, in the family's hometown a few hours away, their 71-year-old father had gone missing.
A retired middle-school principal who often had his nose in a newspaper, Albino Quiroz Sandoval had left home that afternoon to run an errand at a nearby hardware store.
Family members searched the cobblestone streets of Tepotzlan, a town of 14,000 set high in a mountain range in the state of Morelos, and eventually found his Toyota sedan nearly a mile from the store.
Going on the assumption that his father had been kidnapped, Juan Carlos set out the next morning to file a missing person's report - a process that took 12 hours and required him to visit four separate government offices.
That same day, police sent a lone officer from the state capital of Cuernavaca to investigate, but she left after finding no leads. As the hours passed and nobody called demanding ransom, it became clear Albino had not been kidnapped.
The story might have ended there: another unsolved disappearance in a nation where more than 40,000 people are registered as missing and the homicide rate this year is at a record high, with more than 31,000 killings.
Rampant impunity prevails in Mexico despite a 2016 overhaul of the justice system aimed at winning more convictions. At least in the short term, the sweeping changes appear to have only made it harder to prosecute crimes, as new due-process requirements are routinely violated by under-equipped forensic agents, poorly trained prosecutors and bribe-taking police officers.
