Around 100,000 people are missing in Mexico. These mothers are trying to find them

Cecilia Flores has been looking for her two sons for nine years.

Alejandro Guadalupe Islas Flores disappeared in 2015; then Marco Antonio Sauceda Rocha disappeared in 2019. After all this time, she has not lost hope of finding them.

She leads Madres Buscadoras in Sonora – a group of mothers and volunteers who go searching for missing people throughout Mexico. Recently, in late May, the group conducted research near the base of the inactive Xaltepec volcano, just outside Mexico City.

They had been trying to search this area – a mound of dirt, red ash and gravel with trees growing in it – for about a month. They believe it's a place where people could dispose of bodies. Ash and gravel cascade down regularly, so anything dumped here can quickly be covered up. Flores has done research like this in triple-digit temperatures, in different terrains. Fortunately, on this day, it is only about 85 o'clock.

“The satisfaction of finding a person is worth it,” said Flores, who wears a white scarf to protect herself from the sun and to partially hide her face from police. She knows that if she is spotted, they will force her to leave.

In 2023, Mexico will exceed 110,000 disappearances. Then, last December, outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador ordered a recount at the National Research Commission, claiming the numbers had been “manipulated.”

The new missing persons database was initially reduced to around 12,000 people. Families and advocates objected to the recount and led them to say the president was making them relive the trauma. Eventually, the number of missing people was largely restored, and as of March, the number of missing people stood at 99,729. But that number is growing because people are disappearing every day in Mexico.

In 2014, 43 students from a normal school in Ayotzinapa disappeared. The incident, involving local police, the military and organized crime, was labeled a “state crime” by the government and placed Mexico's missing persons epidemic in the international spotlight.

Searching for the missing can be intimidating. Flores said they sometimes have to ask the cartels for permission to search certain areas.

“I’m risking my life, but what won’t we do for our children? said Flores.

Madres Buscadoras received an anonymous tip that human remains might be on land at the base of the volcano and allowed NPR to track them.

A dozen people joined the search. Although this group was mainly made up of women, a handful of young men came to help.

A local police officer arrested the group as soon as they entered the area. The officer asked them to park their car and told them they could only travel within a radius of about 30 feet. There wasn't much around except some stray trash, a tent belonging to homeless people, and some stray dogs.

The area the group was trying to search, the officer said, is an illegal dog crematorium.

Virginia Ponce, one of the volunteers, said they were there to prove that bodies could be found there and not animal remains. Ponce wore a white T-shirt with a printed photo of her missing son before the search began, but she took it off so she wouldn't be easily identified as a searching mother.

Her son Víctor Hugo Meza Ponce disappeared at the age of 30 in 2020. She is part of the Madres Buscadoras chapter of Jalisco but joined Flores in this search.

“I am here to support the women of Mexico because we all feel the same pain and we are here to help each other,” Ponce said.

She decided to start looking for her son herself after waiting a year and ten months for the attorney general to give her answers about his disappearance. She is convinced that mothers across Mexico must do the work themselves, or their loved ones will remain missing.

Unable to do much, the researchers take out their drone and fly it across desert terrain and over the supposed tomb. Even if this eye doesn't see much in the sky.

Local police chief Erika Estrella Omega arrived 30 minutes after the search party's efforts began.

She was flanked by a dozen other police officers. The group was unable to enter, Omega said. This area had been under surveillance for a month due to mothers' interest in research.

“They came looking because they were told there were clandestine graves here, but there weren't any,” she said. “There are a lot of animal remains here, because a lot of people come here to dump their dead dogs.”

The search ends. They will continue their journey, in the hope of finding the remains of the missing elsewhere.

The next site is only about 800 meters away. The Madres Buscadoras believe that three bodies were left there. As soon as they arrived, they started digging. They dug up a tattered shirt, belt and sock from a six-foot-deep hole.

They can usually only dig so deep. They said they could use an excavator, but people are afraid to let them borrow one. Flores claims people's homes were burned in retaliation for sharing information with the group.

Mexico would elect its first female president. These mothers thought that little would change with these historic elections.

Flores said she has felt what she calls apathy from the highest levels of government. AMLO ridiculed his work as a “necrophilia illusion,” the Associated Press reported.

“I'm not your enemy,” Flores responded in a video on X.

Flores believes authorities fear mothers because they do the government's work and expose its failures.

Flores said she had no hope that things would be different after the election of AMLO's successor and close ally, Claudia Sheinbaum, who won a landslide victory and will serve for six years.

“She’s going to put her foot on our heads and not let us accomplish anything,” Flores said.

While Flores was searching during the second search, she received two calls in the span of four minutes. First, a woman called to inform the group that her son, who had been missing for four months, had been found alive. A second woman asked for more photos of a man whose remains were found in Hermosillo, Sonora.

Flores kept digging. Other people would go missing across the country that day and the days that followed. She has no intention of stopping trying to find them or her sons.

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