COUNTRY WHERE WOMEN VANISH WITHOUT A TRACE

Thousands of women and girls disappear in Mexico every year - many are never seen alive again. When one couple realised their daughter was missing, they knew they didn't have long to find her.

Elizabeth realised something was terribly wrong within 15 minutes of her teenage daughter, Karen, disappearing.
"I just knew it, I had an anguish that I'd never felt before. I searched the streets, called friends and family, but no-one had seen her," she says.


"She'd gone to the public toilets with nothing - no money, no mobile phone, no clothes… We thought she'd been kidnapped."
Karen disappeared in April 2013 when she was 14 - one of thousands of girls to have gone missing in recent years in Mexico state - a sprawling administrative region which wraps around the capital, Mexico City.
A staggering 1,238 women and girls were reported missing in the state in 2011 and 2012 - the most recent figures available. Of these, 53% were girls under the age of 17.
No-one knows how many have been found dead or alive, or are still missing. This is the most dangerous Mexican state to be a woman - at least 2,228 were murdered here in the past decade.

Elizabeth reported her daughter missing after three hours of frantic searching. But in Mexico police will not open a missing person's file until someone has been gone for 72 hours, not even for a child.
So, Elizabeth and her husband, Alejandro, started their own investigation, which began by going through their daughter's social network accounts. 
 
"When we got into her Facebook account, we realised that she had a profile that we didn't know about, with more than 4,000 friends. It was like looking for a needle in a haystack, but there was one man who caught our attention. His was photographed with girls wearing very few clothes and big guns, and was friends with lots of girls about the same age as our daughter," says Elizabeth.

He manipulated her really well, and in her innocence she didn't understand the magnitude of the danger she'd been in

Alejandro, father

"This man rang alarm bells: he talked like a drug trafficker, about territory, about travelling, that he was coming to see her soon. He'd been in contact with her a few days before she disappeared, and had given her a smartphone so they could stay in contact, and we hadn't known," says Alejandro.
Each year it's estimated that 20,000 people are trafficked in Mexico, according to the International Organization for Migration. The majority are forced into prostitution. Authorities say a growing number are being targeted online.
Karen's family realised they didn't have long to stop her being taken out of the country. They put pressure on the police to issue an "amber alert", and plastered official missing posters at every bus terminal and toll booth around Mexico City. They managed to get their daughter's case on television and radio news bulletins. 

Their tenacity paid off. Sixteen days after Karen disappeared, she was abandoned at a bus terminal, along with another girl who was registered missing in a different state. The publicity had spooked their trafficker who was planning to take them to New York. He has never been caught.
"This man had promised her travel, money, a music career and fame. He manipulated her really well, and in her innocence she didn't understand the magnitude of the danger she'd been in," says Alejandro.

At first, Karen was angry with her parents for ruining what she believed could have been her big break in the music business. So Elizabeth took her to a conference where she met girls who had been trafficked.