Mexico butterfly man feared murdered by illegal loggers

The day he disappeared, Homero Gómez González – a well-known conservationist in the troubled Mexican state of Michoacán – tweeted for the last time.

He announced with pride the uniforms that had arrived for the guides in the butterfly sanctuary he oversees. His final tweet was at 10:30am.

A week after he vanished, following what it described as the launch of a thorough investigation into Gómez González’s final whereabouts, the state attorney general’s office revealed that it was interviewing more than 50 municipal police officers in connection with his disappearance.

The sanctuary where the activist works is home to millions of Monarch butterflies who migrate to the hilly, forested area each year. The impressive spectacle is popular with tourists and a valuable source of income to the local area.

But the zone has been plagued by illegal logging over the years, and some observers fear that they may be behind Gómez González’s disappearance.

He was last seen in Ocampo, about a 40-minute drive from the sanctuary where he worked, according to the Human Rights State Commission of Michoacán.

Mayte Cardona from the commission said: “He was probably hurting the (business) interests of people illegally logging in the area.” But the possibilities behind the disappearance of the high-profile environmentalist are numerous.

Michoacán is one of Mexico’s most violent entities and territorial control is constantly being disputed by more than a dozen criminal groups who wish to profit from lucrative crime markets such as the drug trade, illegal logging and extortion as well as the state’s booming international avocado and lime businesses.

“There is a very wide array of threats precisely because the array of criminal activities and interests is so wide, and because these interests are being defended violently,” said Falko Ernst, Senior Analyst for Mexico at the International Crisis Group, who has worked extensively on issues of violence and human rights in the state of Michoacán.

For more than a decade, crime gangs with names like the Viagras and the Mohawks have fought each other for control, and in the last couple of years the aggressively expanding New Generation Jalisco Cartel has made a violent bid for control of the state.

That group was widely believed to be behind the ambush and slaughter of more than a dozen local policemen towards the end of last year. Mexico now has a tally of more than 60,000 people who have gone missing since the government began a crackdown on organized crime and drug trafficking networks in 2007 that continues to this day.

Many of those who have disappeared are believed to have been the victims of organized crime.