Reportage • Dawn Marie Paley with photos by Erika Lozano • May 12, 2023 • Leer en castellano

“May 10th is a day of struggle, not celebration!”

In Mexico, May 10th is Mother’s Day. Over the last 12 years, the occasion has been resignified by mothers and family members of the disappeared in Mexico.

The longest running and largest such protest action is the March for National Dignity in Mexico City, where thousands gathered again this year to demand the return of their loved ones. 

The ranks of family members of the disappeared have swelled since Felipe Calderón took office in 2006. By May 10, 2011, when the first Mother’s Day march took place in Mexico City, there were 11,159 people reported disappeared, mostly in the northern states of Tamaulipas, Nuevo León and Coahuila.

That number has since grown tenfold. Today there are over 112,000 people disappeared in Mexico. At least 7,295 people were disappeared in Mexico since last year’s march, many of them in Mexico City and Mexico State.

Among those who marched are veterans of the searches and the agony of having a disappeared family member. María Herrera, from Michoacán state, has four sons who are disappeared—two in 2008 and two in 2010. Her unflinching commitment to finding her sons has helped drive the articulation of local family groups at a national level over the past decade.

Over the past years, Mother’s Day protests have proliferated throughout the country. In the city of Puebla, the first Mother’s Day action took place in 2018, when around fifteen people protested in front of the State Attorney General’s Office. 

The march has grown over time and, like collectives around the country, Puebla’s Voice of the Disappeared Collective has carried out their own searches for their disappeared loved ones, and work to de-stigmatize disappearance. 

Two years ago, collective members slept for 44 nights outside of the state congress to pressure authorities to comply with a federal mandate and legislate on disappearance. Esmeralda Gallardo, a member of their collective, was murdered in October.

This year, members of the collective pulled a banner reading “Truth, justice and non-repetition” across the fence outside the State Attorney General’s office. 

“If bodies are found, and people who were disappeared are found, it’s because we are the ones out looking,” said Victoria Morales Camacho. “We’ll never stop searching for them, because we love them.”

Morales Camacho has been searching for her daughter Nadia Guadalupe Morales Rosales since October 27, 2017. Nadia was 17 when she was last seen getting on a bus to go to school. 

Mothers of the disappeared and other family members called out slogans and sang together before joining hands in prayer during a morning mass. As local journalists snapped photos, a small group of cyclists showed up, calling out “You are not alone!” 

Protest and pressure on local authorities is crucial in forcing states to live up to their legal duties with regards to disappearance. Unless there are elements linking a public servant or a member of state security forces to a disappearance, the case file and investigation corresponds to state authorities.

And while the federal judicial apparatus is notoriously inept, incompetence and complicity is even clearer at the local level. In states around the country, family members have reported experiencing reprisals including threats, harassment and even killings, for attempting to register a disappearance locally.

The unwillingness of local governments to search for the disappeared or cooperate with family members is a big part of why family groups have come together in towns and cities throughout the country.

Family members searching for their disappeared loved ones have also increasingly come under threat, often from the same individuals or networks responsible for the disappearances. 

Mother’s Day events around the country now incorporate demands and actions for family members killed in the course of seeking their loved ones. At least 17 family members involved in collectives carrying out searches have been killed in past years.

Just over one week ago, Teresa Magueyal, who was part of the A Promise to Keep Collective, was killed in Celaya, Guanajuato. She is one of five family members involved in searches to have been murdered in the state since 2020.

Collectives of family members of the disappeared have been mobilizing since the 1970s, over 500 leftists and dissidents were disappeared, often at the hands of state forces. By 2011, when the first March for Dignity took place in Mexico City, families of people disappeared in the context of the so-called war on drugs had started to come together in a more organized way.

After the disappearance of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Teacher Training College, which shocked the world and drove hundreds of thousands of protesters into the streets, more and more local collectives began to carry out their own searches for human remains. 

The Red de Enlaces Nacionales was founded in 2013 as a means of creating a network of collectives. Initially, there were eight collectives from eight of Mexico’s 32 states that were part of the Red de Enlaces. 

“The Red de Enlaces Nacionales has evolved since 2013, when it started with eight collectives, and today it’s an articulation of 169 collectives in 27 states of the republic,” said Monserrat Castillo, who has been accompanying and organizing with family members of the disappeared for 11 years. There are also collectives that are not part of the Red de Enlaces, pushing the potential total of search groups nationally even higher.

Castillo recalls how initially, there was resistance to land searches for human remains, especially on the part of authorities. In 2016, she helped organize the first National Search Brigade, drawing a new level of attention to the victim-led process of searching for the disappeared and educating the public and local officials about disappearance. There have been seven National Search Brigades since.

“I’ve seen changes socially, there is still a narrative undercurrent that criminalizes and stigmatizes the victims,” said Castillo. “We’ve also seen a sort of transformation in terms of accepting and recognizing that the families are living through something very difficult that’s taking place in Mexico, a very painful reality.” 

It’s a reality that’s hard to accept. How can normal life go on if a loved one could be disappeared at any moment, while stepping out to buy a soft drink or getting on a bus to school? “It’s a very painful reality and I think that’s why there’s a sort of resistance to seeing it, to understanding it and to standing in solidarity [with the victims].”

As mothers of the disappeared protested from Baja California to Chiapas, their collective power echoed throughout the country.

The rest of the year, their collectives help search for the disappeared in hospitals, on streets, in prisons and in country hills and abandoned properties. They counsel and guide families just beginning to grapple with a disappearance, and push authorities at all levels to react to the crisis. These collectives are engaged in dangerous work, their members risking their lives to search for their loved ones. 

That’s why, on May 10th, they raise their voices in protest and song.

“Porque vivos se los llevaron, vivos los queremos.”