MEXICO CITY — Aleida Gallangos was 2 years old when a gunfight ripped her family apart, and 28 when she pieced together what had happened: Her parents and an uncle had been arrested and disappeared while in police custody, like hundreds of other leftists targeted in Mexico's underground conflict of the 1970s.
But the fate of 3-year-old Lucio Antonio Gallangos, who was wounded in the shooting and taken away by police, remained a mystery for three more years -- until an emotional reunion of the orphaned siblings last week.
In a rare story of closure to the conflict, Gallangos traced her brother to Washington, D.C., found him living under the name Juan Carlos Hernandez, and convinced him of his identity, making the immigrant construction worker the first of Mexico's more than 500 desaparecidos, the disappeared ones, to be found alive since the "dirty war."
"I wanted to know what happened to my brother. I wanted to see him," said Gallangos, recalling her "immense joy" at finally meeting him Dec. 29. "I had gone through so much anguish, not knowing whether he was alive or dead."
With DNA tests still pending, the Mexican attorney general's office said this week that it was convinced that Hernandez, 33, is the Lucio who vanished as a boy. Officials called the sibling reunion a result of President Vicente Fox's policies, which has led to the opening of secret archives on the dirty war and criminal investigations into the atrocities of that era.
But as Gallangos tells it, her search is an exception that proves a rule of government ineptitude or indifference to the fate of the missing. She describes a tenacious battle to pry information from bureaucrats and to use what little they offered to advance her own detective work.
A mid-level factory manager in Ciudad Juarez, Gallangos, 31, is one of hundreds of Mexicans trying to reconstruct family histories buried by government cover-ups and seeking justice for the killings more than a generation ago.
The results so far have been disappointing. Of 11 warrants issued, just three former officials have been arrested and charged. The government appealed to the Supreme Court last year after a lower court rejected its charges against former President Luis Echeverria in the slayings of dozens of student demonstrators in 1971.
And even though Fox appointed a special prosecutor in 2002 to investigate dirty-war disappearances, Gallangos said it took her two years of hounding that office before it cooperated.
