Horror on the coast of Oaxaca, a tourist paradise plagued by mass disappearances

Jaqueline Meza was taken from the paradisiacal beaches of Oaxaca a week ago. It was her mother who raised the alert: she was kidnapped while she was having dinner in a restaurant near the beach. Seven men disappeared from this same area in January. Another nine young men, at the end of February. Nothing has been heard of the first group. The bodies of the second group were found 250 miles away, in another state, inside an abandoned car. What happened in between remains a mystery, but the authorities have acknowledged that they are investigating possible involvement by the police. The crimes have shattered the idea of peace on this drop-dead gorgeous stretch of coastline. This holiday haven for artists, destination for two million tourists a year and a favorite spot for Instagram photos is now also the scene of brutal mass disappearances.

Life goes on along the coast of Oaxaca, with the raging waves of the Pacific in the background. The usual routines go on at the beach: vendors offering massages, spicy peanuts, handmade earrings. In Zipolite, Mexico’s only official nudist beach, reggaeton and electronic music play in bars that are still running at low energy. These weeks represent a trough between the peaks of Christmas and Easter. But this year, in the interim, tragedy has struck. Between this town and Huatulco, 31 miles away, 10 people have gone missing. They were between 19 and 29 years old. Only one has been found alive.

On February 28, Lesly Noya, 21, and Jaqueline Meza, 23, disappeared from Zipolite. So did Raúl González and his girlfriend Yamileth López, both 28. All of them were seen for the last time, according to their families, in this town of just 1,000 residents with a reputation for being bohemian and free. “Please, I ask for your help, my daughter disappeared last night, they took her and so far we know nothing,” pleaded Andrea Cazares, Jaqueline’s mother. This is how the message ended: “Two little ones, five and three years old, are waiting for her.”

At about the same time, two other families were crying out in despair over their children’s fate in Huatulco, a paradise spot with nine bays that is considered one of the region’s jewels in the crown. The municipal police, they said, had taken Brenda Salas, 19, and Angie Pérez, 29. The agents had reportedly beaten them and taken them to another place, according to the request for help shared with journalists. Four more people went missing in the same approximate time period: Guillermo Cortés, Jonathan Uriel Calva, Marco Antonio Flores and Rolando Armando Evaristo, who were between 22 and 29 years old. It is not known where or when exactly they were taken.

The 10 young people all came from Tlaxcala, in central Mexico, and lived in towns very close to one another (Apizaco, Santa Úrsula Zimatepec, Yauquemehcan). No one has confirmed whether they all knew each other before they were taken in Oaxaca. But what is certain is that their lives came together in the end. The bodies of nine of them were found inside a black Volkswagen, on the side of the highway that connects Oaxaca with Puebla. In a strange event that no authority has yet explained, the attackers left one survivor: Brenda Salas.

It is more than a six-hour drive from where the youths were abducted to where their bodies were dropped off. How did the killers do it? Did they transport nine bodies for 250 miles or did they take them while they were still alive? If so, where were they killed? “How much power do you have to have to be able to drive across a state with a vehicle loaded with corpses? Or how much impunity?” asks a local journalist, who prefers not to give his name for security reasons.

The bodies were placed exactly at the point where Oaxaca ends and the Mexican state of Puebla begins. The intention and effect of the transfer is not a coincidence: attention was diverted from the Oaxacan coast and also from its authorities. The bodies of the young people had not yet been returned to their families and Jesús Romero, Secretary of Government of Oaxaca, was already insisting to the press: “Huatulco is a safe destination for all families, for all Oaxacans, for all travelers, and there are all the conditions here to come and travel.”

Tourism is a driving force and a source of hope in this southern state, where 60% of the population lives in poverty (20%, almost 600,000 people, in extreme poverty). In Huatulco and Puerto Escondido alone, the two main attractions on this stretch of coast, 50,000 jobs depend on tourism. The economic impact left by visitors in 2024 exceeded 12.7 billion pesos (about $626 million), according to data from state tourism authorities.

While tourists keep coming (including more and more foreigners), the governor of Oaxaca, Salomón Jara, from the political party Morena, recently boasted about the low crime rates. “It is the fifth state with the fewest crimes per 100,000 inhabitants,” the official boasted, deploying a narrative about effectiveness, meetings, team creation and coordination. This was on February 17, nine days before everything unraveled.

The case has shocked the country, both because of its savagery and its strangeness. Oaxaca had so far stayed clear of the massacres that have devastated other areas of Mexico. There is no case here like that of the 43 missing students from Iguala (Guerrero), or that of the 72 migrants executed in San Fernando (Tamaulipas). In a country with 110,000 missing persons, only 746 went missing in this state, according to figures from the Ministry of the Interior. This registry, which lists people who have not been located since 1952, includes the seven people who disappeared in May 2024 in Puerto Escondido and seven more who vanished on their way to this town in early January. After them, there were the young people from Tlaxcala. That is to say: in less than a year, 25 people have vanished from these beaches, 16 of them in the last two months. The question comes back again and again: what is happening on the coast of Oaxaca?

“Zone of tolerance”

This wild stretch of coastline is considered an arrival, storage and distribution zone for drugs en route to the rest of the country. Local residents talk about planes landing in the middle of the jungle and boats arriving at night with their shipments to the sand coves. Two weeks ago, the Navy seized a boat with more than 670 kilos of cocaine in Huatulco. How many make it through for every one that they catch? “It is a very important place for transit that until now had not recorded serious violent incidents,” says a reporter. Discretion is the best ally of drug trafficking.

A businessman from the region describes it as “a zone of tolerance.” No one — neither the population nor the authorities — reports organized crime because the latter boast of “protecting and caring for” the area: they prohibit robberies and extortion, they do not approve of drugs such as crystal meth or the rape of women, they do not allow “excesses” because that scares away the tourists and disturbs business. This routine, which is neither new nor unique to the Oaxaca coast, allows criminal organizations to keep strengthening their tentacles: “It is like a power triad: drug dealers are businessmen, drug dealers are politicians, and drug dealers are drug dealers,” notes a local reporter.

11 murders in one weekend

The same day the boys disappeared, an environmental activist, Cristino Castro, was killed. He had spent his entire life defending his land, Barra de la Cruz, against the real estate developments that are fighting to turn this coast into the new Pacific Riviera, much as has already happened in Cancún, Playa del Carmen, Tulum, and even Acapulco. Also that weekend, a businessman from Huatulco, José Alfredo Lavariega, known as El Jocha, was found dead. His murder has been linked to the disappearance of the young men from Tlaxcala.

Following the most recent disappearances, an old pattern has been repeated that was created by the government of Felipe Calderón in the so-called war on drugs: the criminalization of victims of forced disappearance. The justification is that if they were taken away, they were surely up to something: that if they were killed, they must have done something.

A week after the kidnappings, there were no police or military personnel watching over Zipolite. Investigations into who and how the kidnappers were able to take 10 people are at a standstill. The official plan seems to be the same as always: wait until another tragedy takes place to draw attention away from what happened here. Meanwhile, the underground rivers continue to flow and the tourists keep coming, like an unconscious part of the scenery. They dance salsa and cumbia, they swim in the clean waters and walk naked on the sand, acting as if those who were taken were not, in reality, just like them.

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