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Wednesday, March 27, 2024 | Back issues
Courthouse News Service Courthouse News Service

List of forcibly disappeared tops 100,000 in Mexico

Having lost faith in the authorities to take action, despondent relatives of missing persons in Sonora have taken to pleading directly with criminals online to return their loved ones, and in some cases it reportedly worked.

MEXICO CITY (CN) — Ceci Flores’ son Marco Antonio went missing on May 4, 2019, in Bahía de Kino, Sonora. After his disappearance, she founded an organization to search for him and the thousands of others who go missing at an alarming rate in Mexico.

Three years later, Mexico hit a grim milestone in the seemingly unsolvable problem: the number of people on the National Registry of Disappeared and Missing Persons surpassed 100,000 on Monday.

“Forced disappearances in Mexico have gotten out of control, beyond the limits of the authorities,” Flores said in an interview. “The government shows no signs at all of wanting to stop it.”

This lack of official will to find Marco Antonio and so many others led Flores to found the Madres Buscadoras de Sonora (Searching Mothers of Sonora), and since then the organization has recovered the remains of over 900 individuals in clandestine graves and over 800 people alive who had been kidnapped, most of them by members of organized crime groups.

Flores cited President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s “hugs not bullets” approach to dealing with drug violence as a reason she has lost faith in the government to do the job that she and other grieving mothers have proven they can do. 

“They say the criminals are human beings with human rights and can’t be deprived of life, but why do the cartels have the freedom and the right to take the lives of our families?” she said.

The hopelessness has led some families in Sonora to make direct appeals to the very people who kidnapped their loved ones. Mothers and wives in communities like Caborca, Guaymas and Empalme have posted videos online pleading with criminals to return their sons and husbands. 

“I beg you from the bottom of my heart to return him. He’s innocent. He works in the mine with his wife. He has nothing to do [with organized crime],” begged the mother of Jesús Alberto Grijalva, whom she said was taken by masked men in Caborca, in a video posted online in April. 

In May, Fernanda Meraz said in a video that her husband Jonathan was taken by armed men, also in Caborca. In tears, she likewise implored the men who took him to return him, saying that he was not who they thought he was. “We can’t take this pain any longer,” she said at the end of the video. 

Photos of disappeared persons and the dates they went missing appear on the barriers set up at a traffic circle on Mexico City's Paseo de la Reforma Avenue. (Cody Copeland/Courthouse News)

María Elena Morera, executive director of Causa En Cómun, a Mexico City-based government watchdog focusing on security and militarization, said that she had spoken to families in Sonora whose loved ones were returned to them after posting such videos. 

“This means that they have more faith in the criminals than in the authorities to return their children,” said Morera. “It’s terrible to think that the searching mothers are the ones charged with looking for their children, and not the state, which is the responsible party, since it hasn’t been able to provide security.”

Morera also pointed to López Obrador’s laissez-faire security policy when saying that there is little hope to see a change in the problem of forced disappearances in the near future. 

“We have thousands of National Guard and other soldiers in the streets, and instead of solving these problems, we have more violence, because they have orders to do nothing, only keep watch. And it isn’t working,” she said.

What is needed is a strong investigative police force and a policy of arresting those who give the orders to kidnap in addition to those who carry out the crime, said Morera. 

“It all comes back to the issue of impunity, but now we add to that the problem of a desensitized society, in which people prefer not to talk about it, turn their heads and think nothing’s happening," she said. "But the truth is that something will happen to all of us if we don’t demand a change.”

José Alvarado knows what it means to keep up the call for change. He has spent much of the last four years at a sit-in campsite on Mexico City’s Paseo de la Reforma Avenue demanding justice for the 43 students from the Ayotzinapa teachers’ college who went missing in 2014. 

“López Obrador doses’t want to solve the problem of disappearances. You ask people what they think of him and they say he’s good because at least he’s better than other politicians, but that’s not the point. All politicians are the same. They’re all in the service of power,” said Alvarado. 

While Morera and Causa En Común have an ideological platform they will present to whomever takes the presidency in 2024, Flores, who now gets calls from mothers all over Mexico asking for help, said she has no plans for political action.

“Protesting is just wasted words. It only glorifies the authorities, as it puts us at their feet, on our knees,” she said. “I’m going to keep searching for our disappeared loved ones wherever it may be, wherever they ask me to go looking.”

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