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I have been following the many groups of madres buscadoras (groups of women looking for their missing and dead children and spouses). There are currently 230 groups working in Mexico. That should give you an idea of how big this problem is.
How many of you have children or grandchildren who are graduating in the last weeks of June or the beginning of July? I ask because from Thursday to today (Saturday) there have been six unrelated kidnappings of graduates on vacation or in their cities. The situation has become desperate. Organized crime is looking for younger, healthier, and educated recruits to do their dirty work, sex trafficking, and organ harvesting.
There are 40 people in this photograph holding a picture of their missing family member. Multiply this picture times 3250, and that gives the magnitude of this tragedy.
Imagine if this were to happen in your family? I put AI to work regarding the madres buscadoras, and this is what I found. It is concurrent with my own research, albeit more in-depth. My issue is that the government's methods for searching and returning bodies or remains, in most cases, have had little to no results. In fact, the madres buscadoras were invited to work around the area that encompasses the investigation into the kidnapping and death of Nancy Guthrie because they have become very good at finding bodies.
The government conducts field searches, but they operate differently than the collectives of "searching mothers." While families often head into the field motivated by anonymous tips and using their own resources, authorities follow a legal and inter-institutional protocol. The work of the National Search Commission (CNB) and local commissions in the field is structured around the following dynamics: coordinated field searches and use of specialists, unlike families who use improvised tools like "T-rods". Official brigades include archaeologists, forensic anthropologists, forensic experts, and geologists who utilize technology such as drones or ground-penetrating radar.
Official searches are carried out with the deployment of security forces—such as the National Guard, the Secretariat of National Defense (SEDENA), and local police—to secure the perimeter in high-risk areas. Often, the CNB and local prosecutor's offices organize field search operations alongside the mothers' collectives, focusing on locations previously mapped out by the families.
Despite the existence of these government brigades, organizations like Amnesty International and media outlets report that institutional capacity is often overwhelmed by the country's forensic crisis. There are currently 72,000 cadavers or parts thereof, sitting in morgues around the country awaiting identification. Frequently, it is civil collectives that first locate clandestine graves and subsequently notify the government so that the relevant prosecutor's office can arrive to officially recover and secure the human remains.
The Guardia Nacional and the Mexican Army (SEDENA) act primarily as a militarized security shield for local forensic experts and state prosecutors during exhumations. For example, in massive recent joint sweeps by State Prosecutors and the Guardia Nacional in northern regions like Chihuahua, security forces successfully protected forensic teams extracting 73 bodies from clandestine graves in a single month. The government has prioritized creating structural forensic hubs. They have completed specialized regional centers for human identification and temporary body storage units in heavily impacted states like Tamaulipas, Jalisco, Sinaloa, and Coahuila to process the high volume of human remains recovered during Guardia-escorted operations. Independent monitoring platforms like the Plataforma Ciudadana de Fosas(mass graves) and human rights entities like Amnesty International highlight serious discrepancies in the government's claimed results.
While state-level prosecutors report thousands of graves, federal tracking often undercounts them. Civil tracking platforms frequently note that the government's official numbers are much lower than the actual totals published daily by independent media and civilian searchers. Most of the graves officially "recovered" under the protection of the Guardia Nacional were actually first discovered and physically excavated by the mothers' collectives. Family organizations heavily criticize the state for taking statistical credit for discoveries that civilians achieved through their own dangerous fieldwork.
As of today, over 30 madres buscadoras and other participants have been murdered by organized crime upon discovery of mass graves. This issue is not being taken seriously. Comments include the comparative aspect of the issue. For example, someone will quote the high number of missing persons in the U.S., not knowing that 85 to 91% of those missing are actually found. Most of those cases are family-related, where one spouse takes off with the child or a runaway case.
How does this affect you? Probably not much at all. Why is it so important to all of us? Because as RVers, tourists, and expats, we are supporting a country and a regime that has done little to nothing to end the tragedy. I find it interesting that some tourists who regularly visit Mexico have decided to make the trip by air to avoid travel through the U.S. during the North American political conflict. I guess that doesn't compare or measure up to the war that is being waged in Mexico, including the disappearance of our children. I'm not pointing fingers but solely making a point of how desperate the situation has become and how little attention it is receiving from Canada, the U.S., and the United Nations.
Send letters or emails to your embassy and to Mexican consulates, letting them know how you may feel about this.
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