Mothers lead search for Mexico’s missing
Raging drug war doesn’t deter hunt for loved ones
HERMOSILLO, Mexico — With shovel in hand, Cecilia Flores took a wide stance next to a hole that a group of middle-aged women had been digging for two hours.
She gently began to dig up soft, brown dirt. She was careful not to strike with the shovel the black tennis shoe protruding from the hole, an indication that they have uncovered a body.
After a few minutes, Flores stopped. She handed the shovel to a fellow volunteer and began to sob, collapsing into the arms of a woman, another mother like her searching for a missing son.
Flores was thinking about her two missing sons, including her son Marco Antonio who disappeared May 4 in this part of Mexico.
“It’s so painful to think that the body you’re digging up could be your son,” she said later. “You try to dig it out with as much love as you can, as if it was your son, treat him in the same way.”
About an hour later, forensic workers for the state of Sonora arrived to the remote desert ranch land about an hour west of Hermosillo, the state capital. To get here, they had to drive past the city limits, through dirt roads and puddles from heavy rains.
Three forensic workers put on white suits and went to work retrieving the human remains. The process took them more than an hour to complete.
By that time it was dark, but Flores and her fellow volunteers lingered. They are part of the Madres Buscadoras de Sonora or Searching Mothers of Sonora. The group, made up of women searching for missing loved ones, in
less than a year has had tremendous success in their search for buried bodies.
“I need to know what clothes he’s wearing,” Flores said.
She and the other women anxiously waited for any information from the forensic workers and police officers. They are hoping for clues to the identity of the body, the 78th they have discovered since the group started digging in May.
It could be one of their missing relatives.
Mothers taking lead in search for relatives who disappeared
Flores has emerged as the local figurehead in a movement where family members, specifically mothers, have taken the lead in the search for relatives who have gone missing as cartel violence rages throughout Mexico.
The women-led movement has been concentrated in northwestern Mexico, home of some of the most powerful cartels and key trafficking and smuggling routes to the United States.
The exact number is unclear, but several dozen colectivos, or mothers’ groups, have emerged in the past few years in northern Mexican states such as Baja California, Sinaloa and Sonora.
Flores founded the Madres Buscadoras after splintering from another search group in Hermosillo, the Guerreras Buscadoras or Searching Warriors. That group had split off from yet another group from neighboring Sinaloa state to the south, the Rastreadoras de El Fuerte, or the Trackers From El Fuerte.
The founding members of the Madres Buscadoras said they left the other group because it had stopped looking for bodies during the hot summer months, despite the desperation of several members who subsequently joined Flores in her search.
Baudelia Castillo was one of the members who joined Madres Buscadors in May. Her 31-year-old son, Jose Guadalupe Rosas Castillo, a taxi driver in Hermosillo, disappeared more than two years ago.
Castillo said her son’s disappearance has hit hard, especially because his twin brother had died as a toddler.
“With the other twin, Rafael Guadalupe, I can go take him a flower, I’ll go and talk to him when I go to cemetery,” she said. “But the other one, where do I find him? Where do I search for him?
You will see me in the mountains, wherever they tell me there could be a body, I will be there.”
Since May, the group has twice a week scoured remote, and oftentimes risky, areas of Sonora, mostly around Hermosillo, but also around the state.
In October and November, the Madres Buscadoras gained international attention by uncovering 52 bodies inside mass graves just outside of Puerto Peñasco, a beach resort town that is very popular with American visitors and is a three-hour drive from Phoenix and Tucson.
The work is physically and emotionally grueling.
“It’s hurts us how we find them. Cut in pieces, tied up, beat up, anyway that you can imagine, we find them,” Castillo said.
Since 2007, 40,000 people have disappeared
As Mexico’s drug war continues with no end in sight, the mothers have their work cut out for them.
The Mexican government began to deploy its military to fight the cartels around the country in 2007.
The violence has resulted in an estimated 150,000 deaths, according to the U.S. Congressional Research Service. During that time, an additional 40,000 people have gone missing, according to observers.
“The suspicion is that the majority of them have been killed,” said Vidal Romero, a professor and expert on cartel violence at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico, or ITAM, in Mexico City.
Romero said the mothers’ groups represent the latest wave of a movement fueled by relatives frustrated by the lack of a government response.
Perhaps the most notorious case involved 43 student activists who in 2014 went missing in the southern state of Guerrero.
They are believed to have been kidnapped by police officers and delivered to the cartels. Families pressured the government and even led searches on their own, but the 43 students have never been found.
More recently, three women and six children in November were slain in an ambush in La Mora, Sonora, just 70 miles south of Arizona. Their relatives have joined the ranks of family members pressuring the Mexican government for justice.
Romero said those cases exemplify the government’s inability to control cartel violence, to find those missing and to bring the perpetrators to justice.
“The government has 40,000 cases they need to tend to, but clearly they don’t have the resources, the technology or know-how to look into these cases,” Romero said. “So what the families end up doing to position themselves before the government is to try to organize themselves and to try to get attention some way. Unfortunately, it’s systematic now.”
And while the general attitudes from Mexicans are that most of the victims from the drug war were involved in the criminal groups themselves, the process has been agonizing for their family members who don’t know where else to turn to.
Flores said her group is not interested in finding out who is responsible for the disappearances or even what their
missing loved ones did.
They just want to find them to give them a proper burial and bring peace of mind to their families.
“They have a father, they have a mother, they have family members that love them,” Flores said. “My son, guilty or innocent, good or bad, I love my son, and I’m gonna look for him until the ends of the earth.”
Tension between families of missing, local governments
Around Mexico, local and state governments are incredibly ill-prepared to deal with the disappearance crisis, Romero said.
The local governments often lack the necessary resources to investigate the disappearances.
That has created tension between the local governments and the families, including Madres Buscadoras and other mothers’ groups.
Gladys Estrada said that after her youngest brother, Manuel de Jesus Estrada, 27, went missing in June, she got tired of sitting in her house, tormented by her thoughts about what had happened to her brother.
Armed men kidnapped him from his car, while he was with his wife, who was left unharmed.
They haven’t heard anything about him since.
Estrada said she doesn’t trust the government to find her brother.
“They won’t do it. They will look for them from behind the desk, and that’s not the place to do it,” she said. “We’re searching in open fields. If they’re alive, God willing, we’ll look in hospitals, prisons, rehabs.”
The only peace she finds, Estrada said, is by continuing to search on her own.
In Sonora, the state’s Attorney General’s Office is responsible for investigating and prosecuting the missingpeople cases, as well as the homicide investigations for the more than 100 bodies that several mothers’ groups have found throughout Sonora in 2019.
The office declined The Arizona Republic’s interview.
In the past, the office has acknowledged budget challenges and resource limitations.
A spokeswoman for the attorney general told The Republic they are about 40 years behind in terms of staffing and that their diminutive budget accounts for just 3% of spending from the state government.
The office’s limitations were on display after the Madres Buscadoras located the 52 sets of human remains in Puerto Peñasco. State workers ran out of space to hold the bodies, so authorities asked the mothers to stop searching.
The Attorney General’s Office said they only have two morgues in the entire state, concentrated in the more populous southern half of Sonora. They reached a deal with two funeral homes in Peñasco to store the remains while the investigation is underway.
In the meantime, they have continued asking family members with missing relatives to provide blood samples so they can do DNA comparisons with bone fragments collected from the 52 remains.
The process is long, but the state has boasted about new capabilities. This January saw the opening of a new forensic lab, making it one of only a handful of states in Mexico to have a fully functional lab with chemical, ballistic, genetic and criminal elements. Other challenges remain.
On the recent December evening, when the Madres Buscadoras uncovered a body in Kilometro 21 west of Hermosillo, the forensic workers had to borrow a shovel from the mothers because they didn’t have enough of their own.
The mothers’ group has turned up 78 bodies in nine months
The Madres Buscadoras also are having to do more with less.
Members often spend their own money and drive their own aging trucks. They also solicit donations of money or equipment to support their work.
The group’s process is rudimentary. Once they decide where to look, they meet up and drive to the site as they did with Kilometro 21.
The members fan out across the search area, carrying radios to communicate in case they come across something of interest.
They scan for signs of tampering with the ground. They have learned to identify the signs over time from their experience finding bodies and from their training with other search groups, such as the Armadillos, a San Diegobased group that searches for bodies along the Arizona-Sonora border.
Some of those signs include areas that are clean from vegetation, an indication that it had been dug up and cov
ered again, or mounds of rocks that give the appearance of a makeshift grave.
They will follow tire tracks or re-examine holes they’ve previously excavated to see if they’ve been used again.
Once they come across a place of interest, they use four-foot metal rods in the shape of a T to dig into the ground.
The members do a sniff test. They have become all-too-familiar with the distinct smell of decomposing bodies.
It’s not a precise method, but it has worked for them so far. They have turned up 78 bodies in nine months.
The work is not without risk. The women search areas where cartel members feel comfortable dumping and burying bodies. The areas are remote with little cellphone service.
When searching around Hermosillo, the women usually get some protection from the military and local police.
During their recent search in Kilometro 21, they had a local police cruiser and two military trucks, each with a half a dozen soldiers.
But they have had close calls. The week after the discovery of additional remains in Rocky Point in November, the Madres Buscadoras went back to the site to search for more mass graves.
As they were digging, a group of armed men showed up, guns drawn. They asked everyone to get on the ground and took away everyone’s phones. The men then asked the mothers to leave.
“‘If they’re buried underground, it’s because they deserve it,’” Flores remembered one of the armed men telling her.
“Then I told him, ‘Look at me as if I was your mother. Because of the life you’re living now, it’s likely your mother will end up in my shoes.’”
When the men departed, they took the phones and left them on the main road leaving the site. The group left the area.
Still, such scary incidents haven’t deterred the members.
Their work has generated lots of goodwill among Sonora residents. That, in turn, has helped them find more bodies.
They created a hotline, posted to their social media accounts, that directs callers to Flores’ mobile phone. She regularly receives anonymous tips about places where they should look.
That’s how the group ended up in Kilometro 21.
An eyewitness anonymously reported seeing several men drive up two weeks earlier and drop off the body that the group found.
The Attorney General’s Office has recognized that gives the group a distinct advantage because people are more willing to provide that sort of information to the mothers than the government.
One other place the mothers have struggled to find support has been among their own family members.
Castillo said at times their spouses or other children have questioned why they keep searching and reliving the pain of the disappearances, and why they keep putting themselves at risk of harm.
“They get mad at me. They don’t want me to expose myself. They get mad because they tell me I don’t have a life because I just want to keep searching,” she said. “But I tell them, ‘You live your life, and let me look for what was taken from me.’ Life took him away, but I’m going to look and find him.”
‘It’s worth the suffering’
After waiting about three hours near Kilomero 21 for the forensic workers to remove the body they found, a state police officer walked up to the mothers and shared what he learned.
The man was in his 40s, measured 5 feet 3 inches, had a full beard and was wearing blue jeans, a navy blue shirt and the black Puma tennis shoes that the mothers had uncovered.
The shirt also had a name embroidered on the chest area. The mothers will run the name through their database of missing people to see if they find a match.
Despite the physical and emotional toll, the Madres Buscadoras said they will continue searching and attracting attention to their cause.
As the holidays approached, the group was planning a posada, a traditional Mexican holiday party.
They were using it as a fundraiser to gather shoes, blankets and toys for the children of the missing people, a reminder of the consequences the families must live with resulting from their disappearance.
“It’s worth the suffering. It’s worth the pain. It’s worth the many hours walking, being without water,” Flores said. “All the effort and sacrifice is worth it, so that the families get peace and so that we have peace as well, knowing that we’re doing good work and that God will reward us with finding our children.”