ECATEPEC, Mexico -- One evening in September 2014, Mariana Yanez left her home in a crime-plagued Mexico City suburb saying she was going to make some photocopies. Then she vanished.
Months later, authorities called her mother to say her 18-year-old daughter's head and thighs had been found in a sack in a sewage-choked canal, but provided no other details.
Yanez's disappearance is a story shared by all too many in Mexico and nowhere more so than Ecatepec, where Pope Francis is to hold the largest public event of his visit to Mexico when he celebrates Mass on an outdoor esplanade on Sunday just miles from that canal.
"It's not just one daughter," said Guadalupe Reyes, Yanez's mother. "It's thousands."
Francis has already denounced corruption, violence and drug trafficking in Mexico ahead of his visit, which starts Friday, and he is expected to address those same themes when he delivers his homily in Ecatepec, a sprawling, dangerous and mismanaged suburb of 1.6 million people.
The pontiff's decision to stop in Ecatepec shines a spotlight on the government's failure to solve entrenched social ills that plague many parts of Mexico -- inequality, rampant gangland killings, extortion, disappearances of women, crooked police and failed city services -- even as President Enrique Pena Nieto has sought to make economic change, modernization and bolstering the middle class hallmarks of his administration.
"His Holiness will be in the country's violent, poor and miserable places," and government officials will not be able to gloss over those ills, said a recent editorial in Desde la Fe, a weekly publication by the Archdiocese of Mexico. "The trash remains below the red carpet, and Francis is not coming for the tidy and whitewashed trumpery of the event, nor the colorful confetti."
Known for his work ministering to slums as a cleric in his native Buenos Aires, the Argentine-born pontiff is no stranger to places like Ecatepec.
It's the most heavily populated municipality in the country and part of Mexico state, where Pena Nieto was governor from 2005 to 2011 before leaving office to run for president. However, Ecatepec is usually all but forgotten except at election time, when political bosses arrive with handouts to try to mobilize voters.
Decades of unplanned and unrestrained development have fashioned the city into a carpet of gray slums that climb the surrounding hillsides, intertwined with some better-off areas and industrial zones that, along with the rest of the state, generate almost 10 percent of the country's GDP.
Its location on the northern edge of the capital also makes it a strategic point for drug cartels. Researcher Victor Manuel Sanchez said that as many as five were in operation there in 2014. Crime thrives in the shadow of the cartels, feeding off impoverished, unemployed youths and a police force so corrupt that last year the government temporarily barred officers from enforcing traffic laws to keep them from shaking down motorists for bribes.
Homicides rose 9 percent in Mexico last year, and some corners where the cartels are firmly in control suffer the kind of high murder rates seen in neighboring El Salvador and Honduras. Meanwhile, Mexico is also among the most corrupt countries in the world, according to Transparency International, and the second-least likely to punish crimes, according to the University of the Americas in Puebla.
More than 100,000 people have been killed and 27,000 have vanished in gang violence that exploded after the Mexican government launched an offensive against the cartels in 2006.
A number of victims' groups have requested meetings with Francis, though none have been confirmed. The Mexican Bishops' Council has not ruled it out but said his schedule is very tight.
Francis has met before with those who suffered from organized-crime violence, holding a March 2014 prayer vigil in Rome with families of mafia victims. He has called corruption one of humanity's worst sins and speaks pointedly against drug trafficking. In a private letter to an Argentine cleric that provoked contention last year, he worried about the prospect of "Mexicanization" in his home country and said Mexican bishops told him the drug violence was "terrifying."
On the eve of his trip, Francis said he would pray with Mexicans who confront such challenges. "Because the Mexico of violence, of corruption, of drug-trafficking and cartels is not the Mexico that our mother, the Madonna, wants," he said.
Information for this article was contributed by Nicole Winfield of The Associated Press.
A Section on 02/09/2016