“He told me: they deserved it. I answered, “No, they are our whole lives”: the crisis of the 100,000 disappeared in Mexico

Mexico is one of the few countries in which people learn to read the land to find their families, because in a country that is close to 100,000 missing persons and not officially registered localized, the need to search “even under the stones” ceases to be used figuratively.

The figure protects among numbers the names of mothers, fathers, brothers, daughters, and sons who left an empty chair. From the absence, various groups have appeared. This is the case of the Seeking Mothers of Sonora, where there are more than 6,000 missing persons in their entity alone, according to the National Search Commission.

MISSING AND UNLOCATED PERSONS BY YEAR PERIOD FROM 31/03/2006 TO 31/03/2022

- Get on the ground! Get on the ground! , heard Cecy, who refused to obey the order.

It was around 11:30 in the morning in Puerto Peñasco, Sonora, when the Sonora Seeker Mothers Group, along with a US collective, were intercepted by armed men, who pointed them at them from their vans.

Cecy Flores, mother of two disappeared children and the president of the collective Mothers Seekers of Sonora, narrates that this happened on November 2, 2020. She and her group had scheduled a search brigade with a collective from the United States, the purpose: to teach them how to search for bodies underground. Because they didn't know how, they just searched the surface.

That is why they started the work from November 1, but that day, after fieldwork, they found nothing, so Cecy decided to take them to another place they already had located: Puerto Peñasco, a place where 54 bodies were found in three days.

To attend the conference, Cecy requested the support of the protection elements from the Sonoran Prosecutor's Office, who in turn asked him for his name and that of his colleagues. Once on the spot, a security element arrived, who had the purpose of protecting the area while the search was carried out.

A few minutes later, that same officer retired, the reason, as he said: a colleague had a flat tire, he would return after he fixed it. After their departure, they continued their activities, going into the tenth pit when a group of men showed up in two vans, carrying long guns in hand and were aiming at them.

Thus, the mother of two missing children began to be questioned by the man who threatened her.

“He began to question me, as the authorities do, 'Why are you looking for them, who pays you, who sends you, who brings you, why did you come? '” They asked him why he “took scum out of society.”

“Those who are here deserved it, he told me, so I answered him that no one of those who were there deserved that, no one, no matter how bad it is, nor you, what do you do to kill and bury people you deserve it, because they are not God to decide that.”

Cecy told him that she was looking for two of her children, an innocent and a guilty one, “but I look for both of them because I love them”, even with that, the man kept questioning why they took out those who were buried.

It was on October 30, 2015 that their first child disappeared, in Los Mochis, Sinaloa. This is how his journey began, seven years have passed and Cecy has no trace of his son, no indication, (next April 1 will start a three-day brigade destined to look for him).

However, it was not until Marco Antonio's disappearance on May 4, 2019 in Valle de Equino, Sonora that the mother started with the Colectivo. It was on that day that the assassins took Marco Antonio and his youngest son, Jesús Adrián.

At that moment, Cecy went out to look for them in the mountain, as he could, waiting for the assassins who had taken them to be killed, because that was what he wanted: to die. After days of searching, he received a call on May 9. He was a person who assured him that he was going to give him his mother's day gift.

She was summoned in a mountain after talking to her children; at that point she didn't know what to believe, she thought it was extortion.

“I thought about it because with (the disappearance of) Alejandro they had taken away everything I didn't have.” At 12 o'clock in the evening they called him. “I am summoned on a mountain where I think that only a mother mad in pain and dead while alive could have gone, and when I arrived there I found my youngest son, he was alive, he was badly beaten, very hurt but my son was alive”.

He hugged him, took him home, all the way he asked about his brother. “He said, 'Mom, I think my brother is never coming back, they told me not to look for him because we were never going to find him. '”

That's why on November 2, 2020, in front of the armed men, in the middle of a place full of clandestine graves, he told him who he was aiming at: “If you kill me you just kill my body, because my soul has been dead for a long time.” Since that day when they took her children, she also lost her family, her marriage, even her own home, because she was no longer the same.

MISSING PERSONS, NOT LOCATED AND LOCATED BY STATE

On November 2, 2020, who threatened her told her to go look elsewhere, because “what she was taking out was making people upset”.

“How am I going to warm up the ground mijito, yes all I bring are shovels and picos, I told him” after what seemed like hours, Cecy said that he managed to sensitize the guy who was going for her. “She told me to leave, and don't come back, I don't want to see her around here anymore.”

“Then I realized from there that this was an attack by the government, not by the cartel because what does the cartel care what we do, if they have already killed them, what do they care about what we do.”

The president of the collective narrated that after what happened, she filed a complaint directly to the Prosecutor's Office against the person who had retired because her colleague had struck a tire. “Because they had been the ones who had asked me for my information, and the armed people came asking for me, how did they know I was going there? the only people who had the information were those of the prosecution”.

Currently, Cecy lives displaced from Sonora and has a panic button. Like many other mothers and relatives, she has denounced the lack of resources, the “apathy of the authorities and their bureaucracy”.

She has information on who could be responsible for the threats she has received since she began the search, even with it, she accuses that the prosecution has not responded to the complaint, but she will continue to look for her children.

“I think I deserve to give my son one last kiss, one last I love you, I think I deserve to give him his last goodbye”, this story is part of one of the relatives of the 98,508 missing and unlocated persons.

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