The last time Oralia Guadalupe Villaseñor Vázquez’s saw her husband José Fortino Martínez Martínez was the middle of the night on June 5th, 2011. Víctor Tadashi Suárez for Al Jazeera America

But a few minutes later, they returned and said they needed to take José’s fingerprints. He complied and stepped outside. He would never set foot in his home again.

Villaseñor still doesn’t know if José is dead or alive. “This is the place where I cry, where I ask God to bring him back,” she told Fault Lines, while standing by the dresser where his photo is displayed next to pictures of their children.

José is one of tens of thousands that have disappeared in Mexico over the past few years, as the government struggles to battle cartels. Since assuming office in 2012, President Enrique Peña Nieto has attempted to project an image to the world of a Mexico that has turned the page on its violent past. TIME even heralded him for “saving Mexico.”

But in the past month, Peña Nieto’s curtain has been pulled back after 43 young students were detained and then forcibly disappeared in Iguala, a town in the Mexican state of Guerrero. It might seem like the work of cartels, but as Mexican citizens told Fault Lines during the filming of the episode, “The Disappeared,” (which airs Saturday, November 1, at 7 p.m. Eastern time/4 p.m. Pacific on Al Jazeera America), it is hardly ever that black and white.

Last week, Mexican Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam stated that not only had police officers detained and then handed the students over to a cartel, but that they did so on orders from the town’s mayor and his wife.

“Iguala has been a surprise to people, and it shouldn’t be a surprise,” said Edgardo Buscaglia, a prominent economic and judicial investigator in Mexico. “You have to start from the premise that there are dozens of thousands of forced disappearances, and 97 percent of those have not been judicially prosecuted.”

In the more than three years since Oralia Villaseñor’s husband Jose—along with at least five other men—went missing in Tamaulipas, no one has been prosecuted for their disappearances.