Some spend Mother’s Day looking for missing children

While most Mexicans celebrate Mother’s Day on Tuesday, thousands of women will mark the occasion by continuing their desperate mission to find out what happened to their missing children. Five of Maria Guadalupe Camarena’s nine children are among the more than 95,000 people who have disappeared in the violence-plagued Latin American country.

“There are five empty chairs. There’s nothing to celebrate here,” said the 61-year-old domestic worker from the western state of Jalisco.

Asked about her plans for Mother’s Day, she answered without hesitation: “Look for my children.”

Jalisco is the Mexican state with the most missing people — nearly 15,000.

Camarena’s daughter Lucero vanished in 2016 after going to a job interview. Four of her sons disappeared in 2019 when they were travelling by road to visit a relative and were detained by police. Although two officers were accused of forced disappearance, they have not been tried and there has been no official search operation.

The United Nations Committee on Enforced Disappearances in April urged Mexico to tackle an “alarming trend” of rising enforced disappearances, facilitated by “almost absolute impunity.”

Araceli Hernandez, 50, has photos of her daughter Vanessa and son Manuel, in their 20s, on an altar in her home. She has not heard from them since 2017 when first Vanessa disappeared and then her brother while he was looking for her.

“They had been missing for about four months when I grabbed a backpack, some bottles of water, a wooden stick and started walking in the hills,” Hernandez said. She joined the growing number of mothers who have formed associations that comb the countryside for clandestine graves that might hold their children’s remains.

She also walks the streets of the city of Guadalajara putting up missing person posters, tearfully kissing the images of her son and daughter. “It’s my mission as a mother,” she said. —