Sad day for moms in Mexico

Guadalajara – While most Mexicans celebrated Mother’s Day yesterday, thousands of women marked 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 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. 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.

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 Vanessa disappeared and then her brother while he was looking for her. 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.

Each morning, Rosaura Magana, 61, prays next to a photo of her son Carlos Eduardo. He disappeared five years ago when armed men who said they were from the prosecutor’s office arrived at his workplace and took him away with three others, two of whom were released but refused to say what happened.

Azulema Estrada’s son was taken by gunmen from his home in the state of Sonora along with his partner.

Disappearances began during the Mexican authorities’ so-called dirty war against the revolutionary movements of the 1960s-1980s.

They soared after the government launched a military offensive against drug cartels in 2006, since when more than 340 000 people have been murdered in a spiral of violence. –