Workers from the mining sector, students, family members, and friends of the miners who disappeared and were killed in the municipality of Concordia, Sinaloa, marched on Saturday in several states of the country to demand justice and security from the Mexican state in this economic activity, which represents 2.5% of the national GDP. Under the slogan 'We miners are in mourning,' the mobilizations called by the Association of Mining, Metallurgical, and Geological Engineers of Mexico were held in Sinaloa, Sonora, Chihuahua, Guanajuato, Guerrero, Zacatecas, Durango, San Luis Potosí, and Hidalgo, among other states. The participants marched in silence, dressed in white shirts, vests, and helmets, as per the call. In the early morning of January 23, several armed men arrived at the La Clementina residential complex, in the municipality of Concordia, where the Canadian company Viszla Silver Corp was conducting exploitation work and had rented some apartments for its workers, who were kidnapped. According to the official version, derived from the statements of four detained suspects, the miners had been confused by members of the Sinaloa Cartel as members of a rival criminal group. María Elena Morán, wife of Francisco Antonio Esparza Yáñez, one of the disappeared who has over 40 years of experience working in mines, said that her family still holds hope that those who took him will return him alive. 'So far there is no official information about his whereabouts, in everything they have found there is no trace of engineer Esparza, so far all the DNA samples that the FGR has done, none correspond to him, that is why we can still maintain the hope that they will return him to us alive,' she said. 'Days before the kidnapping he told me that he saw a lot of insecurity in Sinaloa, but that they had a very good security body, that they had negotiations with the people who asked them for money to let them work,' added the wife. President Claudia Sheinbaum affirmed last Friday that the Attorney General's Office (FGR) maintains a 'much deeper' investigation into the murder of five miners linked to the Canadian company and indicated that extortion is not ruled out as a possible motive for the crime. Last Monday, the FGR confirmed the discovery and identification of the bodies of five of the ten missing miners, who were found in a clandestine grave in the municipality of Concordia, Sinaloa, and indicated that five more bodies are in the process of being identified. In the group of people who marched in Hermosillo, Sonora, there were also the relatives of the miner found dead, José Antonio Jiménez Nevárez, who left his wife and two young girls. 'José Antonio did not deserve to die in these circumstances, everyone who knew him knows that he was a cheerful and very responsible young man,' his wife said while thanking the participants of the march. Sinaloa, one of the main mineral-producing states in the country, also faces a persistent problem of violence and insecurity linked to organized crime, which has affected both local communities and productive sectors, including the mining industry.
