Nearly 20 years after Mexico declared war on organized crime, the violence has metastasized into a crisis of disappearance which implicates both the state and cartels. With official figures now surpassing 133,000 missing, the ‘madres buscadoras,’ or ‘searching mothers’ stand as the last line of accountability in a country where silence is enforced as brutally as violence itself.
At approximately 8pm on 11 January 2007, Diego Hernández Leyva, an investigative police officer in the state of Baja California, dropped his girlfriend off at her home in Mexicali as he had done countless times before. She would later tell Irma, Diego’s now-elderly mother, that her son had developed a doting routine: as she walked up the front steps, Diego would circle the block, returning minutes later to confirm that his girlfriend had made it safely inside. But this time, as she waited by the window for the glow of his headlights to return, minutes turned to hours; Diego, it seemed, had disappeared into thin air.
The disquieting mystery soon unravelled. In May 2007, four months after his disappearance, the weekly Zeta published a cartel-made video in which the former commander of the Baja California State Judicial Police, José Ramón Velásquez Molina, made a series of revelations about the deep entanglement of state authorities with organized crime. Velásquez Molina admitted to personally running a Sinaloa Cartel (CDS) cell in Mexicali and accused then–state Attorney General, Antonio Martínez Luna, of working with the CDS to defeat the rival Tijuana Cartel. Velázquez Molina further recounted, in chilling detail, how the group abducted Diego Hernández Leyva, tortured him, and ultimately buried him on a ranch allegedly owned by fellow police officer Adolfo Roa Lara. Roa Lara was imprisoned in 2009 at the ‘El Altiplano’ maximum-security facility in the State of Mexico on federal charges linked to organized crime, but managed to avoid the court order filed by Diego’s mother to compel authorities to reveal information about her son’s whereabouts when he was acquitted and released by the prosecuting judge just days before his hearing.
A few days after the narco-video was published, Velásquez Molina’s own mutilated body showed up in a truck abandoned on Martínez Luna’s girlfriend’s doorstep. His tip-off about the ranch, and the various state actors involved in the disappearance, brought the Leyva family no closer to bringing Diego home. Almost 19 years later, they still search for him every day.
Diego Hernández Leyva is one of more than 133,000 people officially registered as missing in Mexico – though civil society groups claim that the actual number is likely far higher. The sheer scale of the crisis has turned Mexico into one of the world’s largest open-air graveyards, with new clandestine burial sites uncovered almost weekly. Though the disappearances predated Felipe Calderón’s ascension to the presidency in 2006, his ill-fated ‘war on drugs’ is widely seen as the spark that unleashed the wave of violence and impunity with which Mexico grapples today. Former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, eager to distance himself from the militarized approach of his predecessors, adopted the so-called ‘hugs, not bullets’ doctrine as an alternative means of combatting Mexico’s epidemic of violence. But in a country where an average of 42 people now disappear every 24 hours, it is clear that the soft-touch ‘education, sport, culture, and employment’ approach which has persisted under Claudia Sheinbaum is proving insufficient as a means of combatting organized crime. And then there are those cases like Diego’s, which is by no means an isolated incident: in Nuevo León, a 2017 study found that almost half of the disappearances analyzed in that state were committed by government authorities.
The government’s chronic failure and complicity in the crisis of enforced disappearances has given rise to the phenomenon of madres buscadoras – mostly mothers, but also sisters, daughters, and wives – who assume the role of search teams, investigators, and advocates all at once. Their work is as harrowing as it is dangerous: a report published in July by Amnesty International revealed that 97 per cent of buscadoras surveyed had experienced some form of violence or harm in the context of the search for missing persons, while 30 relatives of disappeared persons have been killed since 2011. ‘We’re risking our lives,’ says Golondrina*, whose elderly mother, Adulfa Pomposa Cerqueda Martínez, was kidnapped in the State of Mexico in 2016. ‘But still, we go – because if we don’t, no one will.’
‘Searching for your children piece by piece’
Following Zeta’s publication of the narco-video, Irma’s efforts to locate her son Diego only intensified. But so, too, did the threats made against her. ‘My advice to you is to be careful,’ a delegate from the Attorney General office once told her. ‘You look much prettier when you stay quiet.’ A murmur of recognition ripples through the other members of Madres Fuertes y Unidas assembled in Irma’s front room one summer afternoon that I visited her in Mexicali; all of the women here have received more threatening phone calls and letters than they care to count. But Johana, whose eldest brother Juan Antonio Medina Roblada disappeared in August 2023, knows better than most that such threats should not be taken as empty. After her remaining brother, Antonio, began to investigate Juan Antonio’s disappearance, the family received a string of ominous phone calls: ‘if you keep getting involved in things you shouldn’t, you’ll get what’s coming,’ they warned Antonio. Just eight weeks later, Johana’s worst fears came true when Antonio was found dead; while suicide was never ruled out by the authorities, Johana suspects foul play. Eyes brimming, she recalls how a third and final tragedy left her with little choice but to flee her home: ‘And then with my sister-in-law, the same thing – they abducted her right in front of my house, took her away, and about two hours later I found her body, dumped in an empty lot. Because of all that, I had to leave.’
In addition to threats from the authorities and criminal groups, the buscadoras must also contend with hostility from neighbours, strangers, and even their own families. ‘Wherever we go, we face aggression: I’ve been bitten by a dog, people have thrown boiling water at us, they chase us out because they think we’re “heating up the area” [putting the area at risk of cartel violence],’ says Golodrina, who founded her own collective in 2019 when it became too risky to continue searching alone.
For Camila*, whose son, Aarón Andrés Anhedo Gutiérrez, went missing in 2022 during a nightshift as an Uber driver in the Guanajuato state capital, the animosity came from closer to home. Her family, who had grown increasingly distant after Aarón’s disappearance, cut her off entirely when they heard that she had been the victim of an extortion. ‘I have three sisters. None of them talk to me,’ she explains. ‘When they found out that I deposited money to the criminals who claimed to know where my son was, they banned me from attending family events. They say they’re scared the mafia might show up.’
But the fear of potential reprisals from those responsible for the disappearances only partially explains society’s hostility towards the buscadoras; another key factor is the popular narrative that victims of enforced disappearance ‘en algo andaba’ – were ‘up to no good.’ This cruel yet commonplace suggestion that victims somehow ‘deserved’ their fate perpetuates both impunity and harmful misinformation.
While data covering the whole country remains scarce, the same 2017 study conducted by the universities of Oxford, Minnesota, and FLACSO-México found the state to be culpable in 47 per cent of cases in Nuevo León. It also revealed that over 90 per cent of enforced disappearance victims in that state had no links to organized crime. Yet, the vicious myths which swirl around the figure of the disappeared in Mexico stubbornly remain; even Golondrina’s mother, Adulfa, who devoted her life to the local church, was accused of having ties to a money laundering operation. ‘This is one of the most painful aspects for the families,’ says Golondrina, shaking her head. ‘Society treats us like we’re criminals.’
The bureaucratic labyrinth: institutional failures
On top of the risk of violence and the stigma ascribed to them by their own communities, the buscadoras’ search also confronts them with the horrors that lurk within Mexico’s bureaucratic labyrinth. Once first contact has been made with the State Attorney General’s Office – responsible for filing the official missing person’s report and conducting preliminary enquiries – victims’ families frequently report being shuffled between government agencies that operate in isolation, with little coordination or communication between them.
Among the most traumatic of these lopsided interactions is arguably that which occurs with the State Forensic Services. While this is seldom the first port of call for victims’ families, hopeful as they are that their loved one will be located alive, the absence of a cohesive national database means that many buscadoras are forced to attend the morgue to personally identify human remains. When Camila received a call from the Attorney General’s office in Guanajuato asking her to identify a human head suspected to belong to Aarón, she was resolute: ‘You have no right to destroy me,’ Camila spat back, ‘when all you need to do is take a DNA sample. You’re not doing your job.’ Sure enough, a few days later, another call came through: ‘You were right, Ms. Camila. That head didn’t belong to Aarón.’
But many are not so fortunate as to escape the graphic agonies of the morgue. Golondrina recalls attending the forensic services in Guadalajara – which made headlines in 2021 when the smell of decomposing flesh alerted local residents to the presence of bodies being kept in makeshift trailers – some six hours from where her mother disappeared. After confronting a string of impassive bureaucrats apparently unmoved by the cruelty of her task, Golondrina and her sister were forced to wade through mutilated body parts and poorly-preserved viscera sprawled on countertops in the hope that an answer as to their mother’s whereabouts might be among them.
For Felipe Takahashi, who served as the Director of the Mexico City morgue (INCIFO) for almost 30 years, the plight of buscadoras like Golondrina can be understood through the interplay of three interrelated institutional failures: inadequate resources, a ‘total disarticulation’ between state forensic services at a national level, and, crucially, ‘a lack of political will.’ Without established channels through which each of Mexico’s 32 forensic laboratories might communicate, news of human remains in one state rarely reaches victims’ families in another.
Moreover, the muddled demands of the country’s legislation regarding the handling of unidentified human remains often puts an end to the buscadoras’ search before it has even begun. While Mexico’s General Health Law mandates the interment of unidentified bodies with 72 hours, both the General Victim’s Law and the Minnesota Protocol dictate that all reasonable efforts must first be made to identify the deceased and preserve forensic evidence, thereby creating a legal contradiction that wholly undermines the rights of victims’ families and hampers the search for the disappeared. ‘In Mexico,’ Takahashi wryly noted, ‘we are very good at legislating, but not so good at complying with those laws.’
Beyond these legislative paradoxes and the breakdown in communication between state forensic services, many buscadoras report a staggering lack of coordination even within individual state-level institutions. Prosecutors, investigators, and forensic offices often operate in silos, with little to no exchange of crucial information.
In Mexicali, Irma recalls the heartbreak of such dysfunction. She and her group had accompanied the sister of a missing young man named Juanito on a life search, at the end of which their assigned investigator assured them that another would be conducted the following week. But mere hours later, the family received a call: Juanito’s body had already been in the morgue for over a week when the collective began their search. ‘It means the investigator doesn’t even read the case files,’ Irma said. ‘There’s no communication between them.’
‘It started as a human rights crisis. But it became a political crisis’
In addition to the egregious ineptitude of state authorities, Mexico’s institutionalized denial of the scale of the crisis is yet another burden the buscadoras are forced to bear. While this obfuscation is particularly pronounced at the national level, it also manifests in the attitudes of individual officials who deal directly with victims’ families.
Speaking with Ernesto Álvarado, Head of the Victims’ Commission for Mexico City, I could not help but recall López Obrador’s claims that the buscadoras were suffering a ‘delirium of necrophilia’ when the Commissioner insisted that the crisis is better understood as ‘a brutal confusion that unfortunately generates a social psychosis’ than an actually-occurring reality. While it is true that the dynamics of disappearance in the capital vary considerably from those which occur in cartel-saturated states like Sinaloa and Michoacán, the notion that the majority of disappearances in Mexico City are in fact ‘voluntary absences’ spurred by domestic disagreements is as insulting to the buscadoras as it is harmful to the national efforts to locate Mexico’s 133,000 missing persons.
The notion that the majority of disappearances in Mexico City are in fact ‘voluntary absences’ spurred by domestic disagreements is as insulting to the buscadoras as it is harmful to the national efforts to locate Mexico’s 133,000 missing persons.
Few political figures in Mexico have been quite so vocal as Emilio Álvarez Icaza in challenging these harmful narratives as they play out on the national stage. Outraged by the violence unleashed by Calderón’s militarized drug war, Álvarez Icaza co-founded the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity (MPJD) with Javier Sicilia in 2011, organizing nationwide ‘peace caravans’ and successfully lobbying for the passage of the eminent General Victim’s Law. The 2013 Law transformed victims from passive participants in criminal proceedings into rights-holders with active claims on the state. It marked an unprecedented victory in the fight for human rights and transitional justice in Mexico and would not have been possible were it not for the MPJD’s efforts. But like all those who dare to confront Mexico’s highly politicized crisis of enforced disappearances, and the culture of denial that surrounds it, Álvarez Icaza has paid a high price for his activism.
During Icaza’s tenure in the Mexican senate, then-president AMLO used several of his hallmark mañaneras (daily press conferences) to denounce him as a ‘pseudo–human rights defender’ who he accused of ‘manipulating’ the parents of the 43 Ayotzinapa students to turn them against his government. Prior to his election to the legislature, Álvarez Icaza’s time as Executive Secretary of the Inter‐American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) was likewise blighted by political slander; an orchestrated smear campaign on behalf of state-aligned media and conservative groups linked to the Peña Nieto government falsely alleged that he had misappropriated funds directed to the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts appointed by the IACHR to provide technical assistance for the Ayotzinapa case. Although the IACHR and the OAS unequivocally dismissed these allegations as baseless, the incident nonetheless cast a long shadow over the Ayotzinapa proceedings, raising doubts about the committee’s important findings of state complicity and coverup. ‘It started as a human rights crisis,’ laments Álvarez Icaza, ‘but it became a political crisis.’
‘Instead of changing the reality, they change the numbers’
When an ebullient Claudia Sheinbaum announced in August that homicides in Mexico had fallen by 25 per cent over the past 10 months, she neglected to mention the contradictory data on enforced disappearances. Between January and June of this year, 7,399 people went missing across the country, constituting an 18 per cent rise from the same period last year. Notwithstanding the ostensible reduction in homicides, this is to say that Mexico is currently experiencing its highest ever number of enforced disappearances.
The U.N. Committee on Enforced Disappearances estimates that it would take more than a century to identify the 52,000 people whose unclaimed remains awaited processing as of 2020.
With the crisis reinforced on so many fronts, there is little reason to expect the upward trend to slow. Large swathes of the country have been reduced to a battleground for warring drug cartels, who operate under a logic of ‘no body, no crime’ with almost complete impunity. The government departments tasked with handling the fallout of the violence offer little in the way of support; the Attorney General’s Office has not updated its map of clandestine graves for more than two years, while the U.N. Committee on Enforced Disappearances estimates that it would take more than a century to identify the 52,000 people whose unclaimed remains awaited processing as of 2020.
However, it is the state itself – whether actively committing atrocities against its own citizens or simply failing to implement policies which might ameliorate the crisis – which presents perhaps the most insurmountable challenge of all to ending the cycle of disappearances. ‘Instead of changing the reality,’ quips Álvarez Icaza, recalling AMLO’s cynical cuts to the official registry of missing persons ahead of the 2024 elections, ‘they just change the numbers.’
But while the government attempts to ‘disappear the disappeared’, the buscadoras resolutely persist. Armed with little more than shovels and metal rods with which to defend themselves as they sift the soil for bones, their work comprises a formidable resistance against oblivion. ‘If we stay quiet our whole lives, then there will never be a solution to the problem of the disappeared,’ Irma concludes, locking eyes with Diego who gazes silently back at us from his missing poster on the far wall. ‘Of course we’re scared; but love is stronger than fear. And so we keep searching.’
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*Some names have been changed in this article to protect interviewees’ identities.
