Elizabeth Alvarez has been searching for her brother since 2013, when the 31-year-old left his home to run an errand in Mexico City.

For 12 years she had no news of his fate until she learned in early November that he had been run over and may be buried in a mass grave in a cemetery some 20 kilometers (12 miles) from her home.

The news brought a measure of

"It's been so many years. You don't want to find him like that," Alvarez, a 45-year-old housewife, told AFP.

Victor Manuel Alvarez is one of the more than 120,000 people that have vanished in Mexico since the 1950s -- the population of a small city -- many of them abducted and killed by drug cartels.

The number rocketed after 2006 when the government went to war against drug traffickers, touching off a conflict that has left nearly

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