Advocates for migrant workers in Canada are concerned about a lack of information from authorities after the disappearance of a 30-year-old Mexican national who was working at a farm in Osoyoos.
Carlos Tomas Aranda Burgoin, who is from Oaxaca, Mexico, was last seen on July 7 and friends and family back home are worried.
Osoyoos RCMP says Aranda Burgoin is five-foot-10, 150 pounds, with brown hair and beard, brown eyes, and a mole on his neck. He was last seen wearing grey pants, a green and black hoodie, and black running shoes.
He “has only been in Canada for one month,” said RCMP Sgt. Jason Bayda in a release on Monday. “Police are very concerned for Carlos Aranda Burgoin’s health and well-being and friends and family report that it is out of character for him to be out of contact for this long.”
Edna Lalonde of the Dignidad Migrante Society, an organization that helps and represents temporary foreign workers in B.C., says a close friend contacted the society about the disappearance.
Lalonde says Aranda Burgoin was last seen by others at Brar Orchards in Osoyoos late last week. She says she called around to hospitals in the area on the weekend to no avail after the missing person report was filed.
Raul Gatica, also of Dignidad Migrante, is concerned that the Mexican consulate has provided little or no information about Aranda Burgoin’s disappearance despite being contacted by the society soon after he went missing.
Gatica also says Aranda Burgoin’s father went to international affairs back in Mexico and authorities there said they’d heard nothing from the consulate in Canada. He is urging both the consulate and police to coordinate the search effort with Dignidad Migrante.
Lalonde is worried Aranda Burgoin “might be in trouble and need search and rescue since (he) might be lost in the desert.”
Source: MVS
