BAHÍA DE KINO, Sonora — The sun low and orange behind her, Ceci Patricia Flores Armenta leaned her weight onto a tall metal rod she’d driven deep into a scorched area of desert, the sandy soil blackened by ash.
Flores lifted the pointed end of the rod to her nose and inhaled, searching for the tell-tale odor of ammonia and decomposition that could signal human remains and a potential resolution for a family somewhere, trapped between grief and hope.
Flores is the leader of the Madres Buscadoras de Sonora, the Searching Mothers of Sonora, one of about two dozen mostly women-led collectives across the state seeking missing loved ones.
Members of the collectives have lost sons, daughters, husbands, brothers — relatives who didn't come home one day, or who were seen being taken by force. Many searchers say their disappearance was never or barely investigated.
The collectives scour the countryside in the face of threats and violence from criminal groups who want the missing to remain hidden. Searchers have developed chronic health problems related to stress, or lost friends and family who think the search is too dangerous.
But they've found another family among their fellow searchers.
“When you lose a child, you lose your fear. I feel at risk constantly, but I can’t stop searching,” Flores said in Spanish. “Because if I don’t search for my sons, no one will look for them.”
More than 113,000 people are missing in Mexico, according to the country’s National Registry of Missing Persons, in a crisis only recognized by the country's leadership in recent years.
They are known collectively as los desaparecidos, the disappeared.
With names like “searching mothers” or “warrior searchers,” family-led collectives have emerged across the country to take up the work that they say their government has abdicated: that of locating, identifying and laying to rest their relatives.
In the sparsely populated state of Sonora, there are 4,400 missing.
On this mid-October search, Flores and her collective have spent the day probing the land for signs: depressions in the soil that could signal a burn pit or hidden grave. Dirt that feels less compact than it should. Dark ashes mixed with the sandy soil, or animal bones that could camouflage human ones.
Flores knows this isolated stretch of desert — south of the road between Sonora’s capital of Hermosillo and the coastal town of Bahía de Kino — has been used repeatedly by criminal groups to dump bodies, and the ground is still blackened with ash from their efforts to burn them. Her search group found 25 sets of human remains here last year, following an anonymous tip.
The searchers face real danger as they traverse these remote and at times violent places.
Six search-collective volunteers have been killed in Mexico since 2021, The Associated Press reported. That includes Gladys Aranza Ramos, 28, a member of the Warrior Searchers of Guaymas, who was kidnapped from her home in 2021. She was found dead with three gunshot wounds, according to the Sonora Attorney General’s Office. Investigators linked the shooting to her work searching for her missing husband.
A man was sentenced to 63 years in prison for Aranza's murder last year, a rare moment of justice in a country where 93% of murder cases go unsolved.
Soon after Aranza's death, Flores had to flee the state following threats to her safety.
In September, armed men fired warning shots near the Madres Buscadoras while they were on a search in Guaymas.
That night, Flores tweeted a message to the criminal groups, a plea that has become a kind of mantra for many of the search collectives: No buscamos culpables, ni justicia, ni verdad.
"We're not looking for the guilty, nor justice, nor truth," Flores wrote. "We only want to stop crying into the wind. Let us embrace the remains of our children."
At the end of a long mid-October search day, Ceci Patricia Flores Armenta leans her weight onto a varilla, a tall metal rod her search group uses to try to detect the smell of decomposition that might signal buried human remains. Flores, leader of the Searching Mothers of Sonora collective, is missing two sons whom she says the government has abandoned. “I can’t stop searching,” she said. “Because if I don’t search for my sons, no one will look for them.” Behind Flores are fellow search collective members, state police and members of the Sonoran Search Commission, one of 32 state-level commissions established in Mexico to support families in their search efforts and act as a liaison with the authorities on the groups’ findings.
"Marked forever"
Around 8 a.m. on Oct. 16, a dozen members of the Madres Buscadoras met at a gas station in Hermosillo and piled into trucks provided by the Search Commission of Sonora, one of 32 state-level searching groups created since 2018 to support families in their searches, coordinate their work with forensic experts and follow up on their findings.
The caravan also included National Guard soldiers and state police officers assigned to protect the searchers, as well as agents from the Agencia Ministerial de Investigación Criminal, or AMIC, the criminal investigation arm of the state Attorney General’s Office.
Almost all the family members on the search wore tee-shirts printed with the faces and names of their missing, along with the date they were last seen.
Rosa Maria Atondo Rivera and her husband Oscar Sánchez are searching for their son, Gilberto Sánchez Atondo, who was 34 when he disappeared four years ago. Sánchez said he’s lost 10 kilograms, about 20 pounds, since the disappearance.
Martha Juan González and her husband Clemente Corrales Quijano are searching for their daughter, Perla Julissa, who went out on Dec. 31, 2021 to buy New Year’s Eve party supplies and never came home. The police response to her disappearance was "apathetic," Corrales said.
Perla’s daughter Arleth, now almost 3, doesn't remember her mother. She calls her grandparents "Mamá" and "Papá," Corrales said.
“I don’t know how we’re going to tell her about her mom,” said Corrales, who said he and his wife are overcome with guilt whenever they’re not out searching. “There are no words to describe it. It changes your life. You’re marked forever.”
Martha Juan González, right, and her husband Clemente Corrales Quijano joined the Searching Mothers of Sonora collective for an Oct. 16 search near Bahía de Kino. The couple is searching for their daughter, Perla Julissa, who went out on Dec. 31, 2021 to buy New Year’s Eve party supplies and never came home. “There are no words to describe it," Corrales said. "It changes your life. You’re marked forever.”
Jazmin Jimenez Sánchez, 36, is looking for her brother Aarón Fernando, taken by armed men in 2021 during a violent kidnapping that left her father beaten unconscious.
Previously strong and active, her father died suddenly of respiratory arrest last year, at age 62, a loss which Jimenez Sánchez attributes fully to the chronic stress resulting from her brother’s disappearance.
“They also took my dad, the day they took my brother,” she said.
But today, all of them are focused on a search for Flores’ son Marco Antonio, kidnapped by armed men in 2019. An anonymous call told Flores she could find his body at a remote site where the search collective has previously found multiple sets of human remains.
Flores has thought she'd found her son before. Last year, an anonymous tip said he was buried at another site near Bahía de Kino, she said.
She and a fellow searcher, Luz Montes Alvarez, were the ones who uncovered the set of skeletal remains there and painstakingly gathered every piece.
Believing her son was dead, now beyond a doubt, Flores recalled, “I suffered unimaginably. I can’t describe the pain.”
But two weeks later, the DNA results showed the bones belonged to the son of Montes Alvarez, the same searching mother who had helped Flores recover them.
“I had to give the news to her that the remains she was piecing together with so much love, thinking it was my son, was actually her son,” Flores said.
First search
Arriving at this first search location, about an hour southwest of Hermosillo, the searchers disembarked quickly, donning hats and wrapping their heads in scarves for sun protection. They spread out into the desert, spotted with cacti, thick desert brush and large gray piles of apparent construction debris.
The searchers began studying and prodding the soil with shovels, picks and varillas, the long rods used to try to detect the smell of decomposition.
Before long, they uncovered new evidence of burned human remains.
The searchers gathered the bone fragments as carefully as they could, including pieces of a cranium and finger bones, hastily passing around plastic gloves and consulting with one another over their findings.
Jimenez Sánchez handed a small white object to Flores, asking, "It’s a tooth, right?”
Flores turned the object over in her hands and said, “No, it’s a fang.”
The buscadoras are not forensic experts and don’t claim to be. Their search sites aren't treated as crime scenes. But they’ve gained a lot of experience in their years of excavating remains. They've learned to differentiate rocks from burned bone fragments, and human bones from animal ones; to recognize the smell of decomposing human bodies; and to determine which charred fragments are likely to yield DNA that could help identify a missing person.
Holding a fist-sized bone fragment encrusted in dirt, Flores pointed out a knuckle joint connected to a long bone, part of either a hand or foot.
The Searching Mothers of Sonora collective discovered a number of charred bone fragments during their Oct. 16 search near Bahía de Kino. The searchers have gained a lot of experience in differentiating human bones from animal ones, and determining which charred fragments are likely to yield DNA that could help identify a missing person.
Many of the fragments they find are so burned that there’s little chance for DNA recovery. But some pieces, like this one, are large enough that DNA could be found in fat or bone marrow still inside, Flores said.
Within two hours, AMIC’s forensic experts arrived from Hermosillo and began to process the group’s findings.
As Flores rested in the shade, her anxiety was evident. Last time they were here, the forensic experts left behind a number of tiny bone fragments they must have considered too small, she said. On their next visit here, the searchers buried them and marked the spot with a small wooden cross.
“I don’t believe they take as much love and interest in this handful of bones as we do,” she said.
Flores says her hopes are conflicting: To find her son's remains would bring the peace of knowing where he is, and that his remains are in a dignified place, somewhere she can visit and mourn.
But she doesn’t want to let go of the possibility that he could still be alive.
“This is how we live every day,” she said. “The mothers go out to search, hoping not to find their children and that we can continue believing that in some place, some day, they could arrive at home.”
A forensic expert with the Agencia Ministerial de Investigación Criminal, or AMIC, the criminal investigation arm of the Sonoran Attorney General’s Office, begins processing bone fragments uncovered by the Searching Mothers of Sonora during an Oct. 16 search near Bahía de Kino, Sonora. State authorities — including AMIC, National Guard soldiers and police — now accompany the search collectives on most of their searches, which can take the civilian group into remote and violent areas where criminals dispose of their victims’ remains.
Search for peace
The rate of disappearances in Mexico surged after 2007, when violence exploded in Mexico with the launch of the war against drug cartels, under President Felipe Calderón, said Natalia Mendoza, an anthropologist based out of Hermosillo and her hometown of Altar, in northwest Sonora.
While the state search commission also conducts searches without the family-led collectives, in Sonora the vast majority of forensic findings are made by the civilian groups, said Mendoza, co-founder of the nonprofit Altar Desert Research Center, which documents violence, ecological damage and the overall impact of border militarization.
Mendoza and her research partner Miguel Fernández de Castro began an informal field study of the search collectives in 2019. They’ve spent long hours with the Madres Buscadoras to understand their techniques, bureaucratic challenges and how the act of searching affects them. They’ve also participated in searches and helped the groups with advocacy and fundraising, Mendoza said.
Their research has become part of a binational collaboration with Robin Reineke, assistant professor at the University of Arizona, aimed at building an oral and visual history of the parallel search efforts, and "citizen forensic" techniques, underway on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border.
In Arizona, search-and-rescue groups scour the desert for another kind of missing: the thousands of migrants who have died while crossing the perilous Southern Arizona desert.
Tucson artist Álvaro Enciso wants to make a largely invisible tragedy unfolding in the Southern Arizona desert more visible to the world. For the past decade Enciso and his team of friends and volunteers from the Tucson Samaritans, have spent every Tuesday placing his hand-made crosses at the site of migrants' deaths.
For the searchers in Sonora, the act of searching can be an end in itself, Mendoza said, a way to claw back some agency in a situation of maddening powerlessness.
Amid their tears, searchers have found a fierce camaraderie with one another, and laughter can be heard during their searches, she said.
"These are women that are carrying in their bodies a lot of pain," she said. “Sometimes just the act of walking and talking and laughing, that in itself is a little bit healing."
That's true for Montes Alvarez, the searcher who recovered her son Juan Roberto's remains last year, during the search for Flores's son.
The discovery has not dampened her need to be in the field with her fellow buscadoras, Montes Alvarez said during the mid-October search day, her head wrapped in a green-and-yellow scarf.
Since finding her son, “a desperation to be in the field, in nature, took hold of me,” she said. “The only time I feel at peace is when I’m on a search, or in church."
Families face revictimization
For many families of the missing, their trauma has been compounded by the dismissive attitude and prejudices of law enforcement, searchers say.
“When our children disappeared and we sought support from the authorities, we only found re-victimization,” Flores said. “Telling us, ‘Why are you looking for them? They were criminals, they were selling drugs.’ They look for thousands of excuses not to do their job. So we had to do it ourselves.”
Flores is one of the more public faces of the search collectives. She’s been vocal in her criticisms of the government’s handling of the disappearances. She’s been recognized in Forbes México for her activism, and the BBC named her one of the 100 most influential women in the world last year.
Ceci Patricia Flores Armenta, left, is one of the more public faces of the family-led search collectives in Mexico. Flores, who is missing two sons, has been vocal in her criticisms of the government’s handling of the tens of thousands of disappearances in the country. Beside her, Rosa Maria Atondo Rivera, center, and Martha Juan González consult over possible bone fragments the group excavated on its Oct. 16 search near Bahía de Kino, Sonora.
The "Madres Buscadoras de Sonora" Facebook page has nearly 700,000 followers. It regularly posts missing person reports and photographs of unidentified corpses. When they have cell phone reception, the searchers live-stream their field work on Facebook.
It’s a form of self-protection, Jimenez Sánchez said: They broadcast their location to the world, so people will know if the searchers themselves go missing.
As her fellow searchers fanned out behind her, Jimenez Sánchez held up her phone and spoke to however many Facebook followers were watching.
“We meet again, the Searching Mothers, for another search,” she said. “We hope that it is positive and that we can return an angel to their home.”
As of mid-November, the searchers hadn't yet received any news on whether the day's findings generated a DNA match.
Dangerous route
On another mid-October morning, Cecilia Delgado leaned her torso out of the passenger-side window, the wind tossing her black hair around her cheeks as the truck bounced down an unpaved road in northwest Sonora, north of Saric.
As the high-desert landscape rolled past, the cacti green after a cool morning rain, Delgado scanned the roadside for signs of disturbance in the land.
Delgado is the leader of another Hermosillo-based search collective, Searchers for Peace Sonora. On this day, she was also searching for a vehicle that carried two missing men through this area two years ago. Their families in Mexico City requested Delgado’s collective help to canvass this stretch of highway, after their loved ones didn’t return from a work trip to Nogales.
The out-of-town workers may not have realized the dangers in this region when they took this route, Delgado said. The ranching communities here are dominated by criminal groups who surveil everyone who passes. Migrant-smuggling routes throughout the region are also under criminal control.
Delgado’s own nightmare began nearly five years ago, on Dec. 2, 2018, when her 34-year-old son Jesús Martínez disappeared.
On Oct. 17 Cecilia Delgado, second from right, leads a search for two missing men north of Saric, Sonora. She’s joined by fellow searchers, from left, Maria Hernández, Eduardo Gomez and Alejandro Jimenez. Delgado is the head of the Searchers for Peace Sonora, one of dozens of women-led collectives in the state who are seeking missing loved ones. National Guard and police units often accompany the collectives on their searches, which can take them into remote and dangerous areas where criminal groups try to hide their victims’ remains.
A military nurse by training, Delgado finally got the answers the police couldn’t give her, when she excavated her son’s skeletal remains herself in 2021, during a search with her collective.
On that day, Delgado and other searchers found 18 bodies. Her son's remains were in the last clandestine grave they uncovered, she said.
As she beheld her son’s skull, Delgado said she immediately knew it was Jesús. She recognized his teeth before the DNA results confirmed it, even before she saw the pile of clothes she also recognized as his.
“I didn’t need them to take his DNA. My heart knew,” Delgado said, tears wetting her cheeks from behind her sunglasses. “I knew that I wanted to find him, but at the same time I didn’t. In this moment, my hope of finding him alive ended.”
It was early afternoon and Delgado's truck, plus the caravan of police and National Guard soldiers behind it, pulled over to search in a seemingly abandoned ranching neighborhood. Delgado and three other searchers started walking, ducking under barbed wire fences with shovels and picks in hand.
Delgado periodically stopped to tap the shovel into the ground. Finding a depression in the soil, Delgado and Alejandro Jimenez, a coworker of the missing men, began shoveling.
Trash started to emerge from the pit: clothing, shoes, dishware.
“It’s just trash, right?” Jimenez said.
“Well, yes, but often under the trash, we’ve found bodies,” Delgado said, so they kept digging.
Delgado has found human remains stowed under burned trash, buried under dead dogs or camouflaged among animal bones.
The Searchers for Peace Sonora have recovered more than 400 sets of remains so far, she said.
“The heat is our worst enemy,” Delgado said. In Hermosillo, temperatures can reach 50 degrees Celsius — more than 120 Fahrenheit — in the summer.
“We endure it, because our love is stronger,” she said. “Stronger than the heat, stronger than the fear of animals — the fear of people, too.”
But on this search, the group didn't make any findings.
Support from search commissions
Families of the missing say the support from the Sonora search commission is welcome. The commission helps with fuel costs and provides government vehicles — mostly white Dodge Rams — to help the collectives access rugged terrain. The commission provides tools like shovels and tire-sized drones, offering a birds-eye view to help the families focus their efforts and to make a photographic record of the land.
Two members of Sonora’s state search commission, Luis Hernández, left, and Alfredo Félix fly a state-issued drone overhead to assist the Searching Mothers of Sonora collective on their search near Bahía de Kino. Sonora’s state search commission is one of 32 commissions established to support the family-led collectives who are seeking their missing loved ones.
The state-level search commission in Sonora employs 23 people and has a 2023 budget of more than 26 million pesos, about $1.5 million, said Javier Ignacio Diaz Ballesteros, general director of the state search commission, in emailed statements to the Star.
Diaz Ballesteros said, since the commission's creation in 2020, “timely follow-up has been carried out on all disappearances, locating 700 people in less than one year.” A new genetic identification center is scheduled to open in Sonora in January, he said.
“We have not stopped working for and with indirect victims (families of the disappeared), giving them better treatment and what they deserve,” he said.
But the National Search Commission has come under fire by human rights advocates, and families say much more support is needed.
In addition to excavating clandestine graves and identifying the thousands of unidentified remains already in government custody, the families also demand more urgency in responses to missing persons reports and greater effort to find the missing while they're still alive.
This summer Mexico President Andrés Manuel López Obrador announced a recount of the number of disappeared listed on the National Registry, claiming the official number was impossibly high, The Associated Press reported. That prompted the resignation of Karla Quintana from her role leading the National Search Commission, which maintains the registry. She's argued the recount is an attempt at data manipulation to diminish the figure for political purposes.
Human rights experts say the tally of 113,000 disappeared is likely an undercount.
“It could be double that. We know that,” said Delgado, of the Searchers for Peace Sonora. For every family that reports their missing to the authorities, there are more who don’t contact the authorities out of fear or distrust, she said.
Defining "disappearance"
Public pressure has been the primary driver behind Mexico’s recent acknowledgement of the crisis of the disappeared.
Thanks to the vocal advocacy of victims' families, the Mexican Congress authorized the General Law on Enforced Disappearances in 2017, defining the crime itself and establishing the search commissions, a victims' rights commission and special mechanisms to address the crisis, said Maria Elizondo, legal advisor for the International Committee of the Red Cross.
While many of its programs are still being implemented, the general law was a major achievement for the national movement of families that helped write it, she said.
Before the law passed, "there didn’t exist (in Mexico) a framework that really recognized the rights of the missing person, like, for example, the right to be searched," she said. The law established the obligation of the authorities to search for the missing and recognized the rights of their families, including the right to seek their loved ones themselves and to be recognized as indirect victims of the disappearance.
The law established protocols to standardize missing person investigations and search efforts, and created mechanisms aimed at addressing Mexico's "forensic crisis" — the more than 50,000 unidentified bodies already in state custody and often stored in poorly managed "common graves," according to analysis by investigative journalist Marcela Turati.
The families also advocated for a more expansive definition of "enforced disappearance" to account for the likely involvement of organized crime in most disappearances in Mexico.
Under international law an “enforced disappearance” involves the illegal or arbitrary deprivation of a person’s liberty, and a refusal to provide information on their whereabouts, undertaken with the direct or indirect involvement of the government.
That definition emerged in the context of Latin American regimes in the '70s and '80s, as in Argentina, Chile and El Salvador, where military dictatorships — often with training and support from the U.S. — "disappeared" suspected communists and counter-insurgents, Mendoza said.
Importantly, Mexico's new definition of "disappearances" includes not only state-involved disappearances, but “desaparición por particulares” — disappearance committed by individuals, referring to organized-crime groups, Mendoza said.
“The law now contemplates the full range of possibilities,” she said.
In Mexico, some enforced disappearances are committed by state actors directly, but most involve the indirect participation of the state, through tacit support or acquiescence, said Juan Pablo Albán Alencastro, an international human rights attorney from Ecuador, who was elected to the 10-person UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances in 2021.
Last year, Mexican officials presented a report to the committee chronicling recent progress in addressing the crisis of the disappeared.
The committee's response stated that despite that progress, inadequate resources are devoted to investigations and some authorities still insist on waiting 72 hours after a disappearance to begin investigating. Much of the burden of investigation often falls upon relatives and friends of the missing, according to the committee's Mexico visit report.
"We think the state has to do much more in order to prevent and investigate these cases," Albán Alencastro said.
A few dozen cases in Mexico are currently under investigation as cases in which state actors are the perpetrators of the disappearance, he said.
In one of Mexico's most notorious cases of enforced disappearance, 43 students disappeared in 2014 after a violent confrontation with local police and soldiers in the southwestern state of Guerrero. Nine years later, their families still don’t have answers.
President López Obrador campaigned on a promise to find the truth of what happened to the students. But this summer an international panel of human rights experts, appointed by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in 2014, ended their investigation, announcing they’d been met with lies and obstruction by Mexico's armed forces.
Impunity equals acquiescence
Widespread impunity in disappearance cases amounts to indirect state support of the crime, Albán Alencastro said.
“The main preventive action any state can take in the face of systematic, massive disappearances is investigating,” he said. “If you avoid impunity, you are sending a very strong message to the perpetrators that, ‘Your actions are not tolerated. We are going to find you.’”
But in Mexico, 98% of disappearance cases are unsolved, he said.
With that record, “of course the message the state is sending to perpetrators is, ‘Nothing is going to happen. Life in Mexico costs nothing, and you can do this without having any sort of consequence,’” he said. “We can not assert that all disappearances in Mexico have some sort of involvement of the state. But I would risk to say most of them do.”
Many of Mexico's missing have connections to criminal activity, which doesn’t negate their right to be searched for, Albán Alencastro said.
“They’re still human beings,” he said. “We are all protected against enforced disappearance. Whatever the background of this person — age, sex, sexual orientation, profession — the state still has an obligation to search for the disappeared and to investigate."
Among Mexico's disappeared are children and adolescents, migrants from other countries, human rights defenders, environmental activists, sex trafficking victims, as well as police officers and Army and Navy soldiers, Albán Alencastro said. One-quarter of the disappeared in Mexico are women.
Rosa Maria Atondo, left, consults with fellow search collective member Martha Juan González over possible human remains they’ve discovered on an Oct. 16 search, near Bahía de Kino, Sonora.
The UN committee's concluding report also cautioned against Mexico's increasing reliance on the military to carry out public services and law enforcement.
Under President López Obrador, funding for the armed forces makes up 20% of the proposed budget for 2024, eight times more than in the previous administration, according to an October analysis by México Evalúa.
Argentine Team training
Some search collectives like Delgado’s have received training from the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, founded in the 1970s with a mission to help identify the remains of the thousands who were disappeared under Argentina’s brutal military dictatorship.
The Buenos Aires-based group’s co-founder, Mercedes Doretti, said the family-led collectives should not have to be doing the field work that is the responsibility of the authorities.
But their work is responsible for the recovery of many of the nearly 5,700 clandestine graves that have been discovered in Mexico, said Doretti, who is now based in New York.
In 2019, the Madres Buscadoras recovered 52 bodies outside Puerto Peñasco, known as Rocky Point to Arizonans. The collective had to pause their searches in the area soon after, following threats from a large group of armed men who brandished their weapons and warned the searchers not to return, Flores said.
At the search collectives' request, the Argentine Team’s training has focused on data management: how to document their findings to hold authorities accountable for follow-up, Doretti said.
In northwest Sonora on an Oct. 17 search, Cecilia Delgado, right, and María Hernández study the soil for signs of disturbance that could indicate buried human remains as a state-issued drone, piloted by a Sonora search commission member, flies overhead. Delgado is the head of the Sonoran Searchers for Peace, based in Hermosillo, one of dozens of women-led collectives in the state who are seeking missing loved ones.
Too often, missing persons’ families suffer a “second, bureaucratic disappearance,” when there is a DNA match found, but the remains are still lost in one of the country’s common cemeteries used to store unidentified remains, she said.
The Argentine Team also offers suggestions of technology that search collectives could request of their state's search commissions, such as the drones that are now common on the searches, she said.
Less common is technology like ground-penetrating radar, which could allow searchers to focus their searches without prodding the ground with intrusive tools like shovels which risk destroying remains, she said.
“The families are a major engine of change,” she said. “That’s the idea, that we can elevate the techniques and methodologies that have been used to search for people."
Moments of joy
In the early afternoon in northwest Sonora, Delgado asked her driver Daniel, a member of the state search commission, to pull over beside an abandoned ranch house, the roof long blown off.
The entire caravan disembarked. Delgado and her fellow searchers stepped carefully through the yard and property. Dried grape vines dangled from a trellis out front. The searchers didn't make any findings there, but they noticed walnut and lemon trees in the back, and a peach tree on the side, laden with small hard fruit.
As National Guard soldiers waits in the background, María Hernández, center, and Cecilia Delgado take a break from searching to harvest ripe peaches from an abandoned ranch north of Saric, Sonora. Delgado is the head of the Searchers for Peace Sonora, based in Hermosillo, one of dozens of women-led collectives in the state who are seeking missing loved ones. National Guard and police units often accompany the collectives on their searches, which can take them into remote and dangerous areas where criminal groups try to hide their victims’ remains.
Delgado grabbed a peach and took a bite, finding with surprise that it was sweet. In one of many moments of levity during the long search day, everyone paused to harvest some fruit before it spoiled.
Back near Bahía de Kino, laughter and jokes were sprinkled throughout the day's search, as well. Before heading to their final search site, Flores and her collective took a break to celebrate one of their members' birthdays.
Two state search commission members, Alfredo Felix and Luis Hernández, set up a white tent on the side of the road near a farm house, in the community of Pilares.
Dropping the truck's tailgate, Rosa Maria Atondo Rivera opened up the coolers and started making tortas for the crew, stacking cheese and lunch meat on rolls, occasionally tossing pieces of bread to a ranch puppy who squeezed her head through a wire fence on the roadside.
Flores lit candles on a birthday cake for Florentino Gimenez Nunez, whose son Jesús's body was discovered earlier this year by the Madres Buscadoras. He said he continues to search with the collective out of gratitude for the resolution they brought him.
Holding up her cell phone as it played the traditional Mexican birthday song, “Las Mañanitas,” Flores said with a smile, “He’s celebrating with the madres buscadoras!”
Until we find them all
As the sun sets, the searchers in Bahía de Kino finally returned to the state vehicles after hugging goodbye, and started the 90-minute drive back to Hermosillo under dark skies.
Back in northwest Sonora, Delgado and her crew were also wrapping up.
As the National Guard unit gassed up their vehicle outside Nogales, the searchers passed a bag of Doritos around the cabin of the search commission's Dodge Ram before hitting the road back to Altar, where everyone had met that morning.
Driving toward the setting sun, Delgado responded to a flurry of voice messages from friends, sang along to ballads playing on the truck’s radio and gently ribbed Daniel, the search commission member in the driver’s seat. He's become a friend after long hours traversing the state together, she said.
Even with her son's body recovered, Delgado still has a mission: Her nephew is now missing, among the tens of thousands of others.
“I tell the mothers, the aunts, the sisters, it’s forbidden to give up," she said.
It's a search without end for some.
Luz Montes Alvarez, who excavated her son's remains last year with Flores, said the pain she feels is only matched by her gratitude for the searching mothers collective. She will keep accompanying them as long as she's physically able, she said.
"I feel that every disappeared person is my disappeared," she said. "I will keep searching as long as God gives me life, until I can't anymore. If it takes my whole life, I will continue searching."
It’s another mantra of the searching families: Hasta encontrarlos a todos.
Until we find them all.
At the end of a long search day near Bahía de Kino, Oscar Sánchez, right, and José Zavala talk with their fellow members of the Searching Mothers of Sonora, a women-led collective searching for missing loved ones. Sánchez said he’s lost 10 kilograms, about 20 pounds, since his son Gilberto Sánchez Atondo disappeared four years ago at age 34. The motto on the back of his shirt reads, “I will keep searching for you until I find you.”
About this story
To report this story, Arizona Daily Star border reporter Emily Bregel accompanied two family-led collectives on searches for their missing loved ones in Sonora. She joined the Madres Buscadoras de Sonora on their search near Bahía de Kino on Oct. 16 and accompanied the Buscadoras Por La Paz Sonora on their search near Saric, in northwest Sonora, on Oct. 17.
All interviews with search collective members were conducted in Spanish.
Emily Bregel was an investigative reporter at the Star for six years before moving to Sonora in 2019. She taught English as a foreign language and freelanced for the Star for four years, until she returned to full-time reporting in August.