In Mexican Desert, Digging for a ‘Miracle’: Bringing the Missing Back Home

The cardboard box was light, barely big enough to hold a baby, much less an athletic 26-year-old. Yet, it held Diego Fernando Aguirre Pantaleón, or at least his remains, excavated from a common grave in a desert in northern Mexico.

His family does not know how he ended up in the grave in Coahuila state. The authorities said he was abducted in 2011 on graduation day with six other classmates, all promising recruits for a new specialized police force trained to combat organized crime in Coahuila. Armed men had broken into the bar where the young police officers were celebrating and taken them away.

“We were dead in life, all of us,” Mr. Aguirre Pantaleón’s father, Miguel Ángel Aguirre, 66, said of his family. After his son disappeared, he would sleep on the living room sofa, waiting to hear his son’s footsteps.

It took 12 years — until February 2023 — for his son’s remains to return home in a box. His parents refused to look inside. Scientists told them his body had been burned.