Mother’s Day of Mourning: Mexican families rally for disappeared

Members of the congregation of the Sanctuary of the Martyrs church in Chilpancingo, Guerrero, during a mass on Mother’s Day. Photo © Itzel Urieta.

Reportage • Marlén Castro • May 15, 2025 • Leer en castellano

Gema Antúnez Flores’s son, Juan Sebastián García Antúnez, was disappeared on February 27, 2011. She is sure that he is alive, and this puts her at a crossroads.

Flores, a short, slight woman, spends her weekends searching for her son. During the week, she works as a nurse, in part to help fund her search for her son.

Over the course of her search for Juan Sebastián, Antúnez Flores joined three different groups in Guerrero between 2011 and 2019 before going on to co-found a collective called Searching Families María Herrera.

Antúnez Flores wants to see her son again, to rescue him, to snatch him back from his captors. She knows where he is and with whom. But she also has full knowledge of how organized crime would react if families tried to rescue the people they have working for them.

Juan Sebastián was 22 years old when they took him. He’s now 36. He’s been in the hands of organized crime for 14 years. Antúnez Flores got word that the group uses him as a driver.

Antúnez Flores has two other children who have made lives for themselves over the past 14 years—they have their partners and children of their own.

Nothing to celebrate

The Searching Families María Herrera Collective held a demonstration on Friday, May 9, in Chilpancingo, as part of the “Nothing to Celebrate” Mother’s Day campaign called by collectives around the country.

The following day, Antúnez Flores attended mass in the church of the Sanctuary of the Martyrs, which occupies a massive lot on a hilltop east of the city. The congregation dedicated prayers to the searching mothers and Father José Filiberto Vázquez Florencio, who leads the Minerva Bello Search Collective, on his fourth anniversary as a priest. Years of searching for her son and the children of other members of the María Herrera Collective have changed Antúnez Flores.

Juan Sebastián had two stalls selling hamburgers and hot dogs. He was a successful fast food entrepreneur. The night he disappeared, Juan Sebastián ran out of supplies at his hamburger stand in the mall, and to top it off, his car broke down. He was walking along the side of the boulevard when Rodolfo Mena drove by and offered him a ride. Both men disappeared that night.

Antúnez Flores has since learned that Mena was being followed that night. Today, knowing of the collusion between police and organized crime, she intuits that they would kill Juan Sebastián if a rescue operation were to be carried out. And it probably wouldn’t be a quick death.

When Antúnez Flores found out where her son was, she travelled near where he’s being held and gave a DNA sample. “I know that my son is alive, but my wish is to find him dead,” she told herself. She made that wish for the safety of everyone in her family.

She provided DNA samples to ensure that authorities notify her when the dead body of her son—the one who made her mother, the one who gave her so much joy—is found.

The dangers of searching

“I was kidnapped twice for searching for my son, I even asked the leader of the group that kidnapped him directly,” said another searching mother in an interview with Ojalá.

In Mexico, according to the Mesoamerican Initiative of Women Human Rights Defenders, 19 mothers who were searching for their children have been murdered. No searching mother has been murdered in Guerrero. 

In May 2023, Mario Vergara Hernández, from Huitzuco, Guerrero, died, supposedly in a work-related accident. Many in the community of searchers suspect his death was an accident. He was crushed to death in an accident in the recycling center where he worked in Huitzuco, a dangerous city in the north of the state.  

Vergara Hernández became a pioneer in ground searches for the disappeared in order to find his brother, Tommy, who disappeared in 2012.

The name of the second mother I spoke to remains anonymous, because her safety is at risk.

Her son was forcibly disappeared in 2023. He worked for a collection company and was disappeared after he approached a house to collect on behalf of a pawnshop.

The mother knew her son's work route. When he didn’t return, she went looking for him. She found out that he’d been disappeared by the armed men who patrol the small city where they were living with total impunity. We aren’t sharing the name of the city to protect the identity of this searching mother.

When she learned which organized crime group was responsible, she went searching with her mother-in-law and also her brother-in-law. Armed men intercepted them twice, forcing them into their truck and later dropping them off in deserted locations.

“I thought it was the end both times,” she said.

But no. The men threatened them, saying that they would pay dearly if they were seen there. That’s when this mother decided to go all the way to the top, to the leader of this criminal group. “I stood outside the man's house, asking to talk to him. He tried to ignore me, but I was right there outside,” she said. “When people saw me, they knew why I was there.”

Eventually, the crime boss agreed to talk to her. But to no avail. He claimed the group had not taken her son. She returned three more times with information corroborating that it had indeed been members of this group, but the criminal leader always denied it.

After her fourth visit, she was warned that if she came back again, it would be the last.

That’s when she stopped searching on her own and joined a collective. On May 10, she participated in the mass for the searching mothers, about two dozen of whom were members of the María Herrera and Minerva Bello collectives. During the mass, the priest, Velázquez Florencio, asked criminal groups to stop the disappearances and share information so that the mothers could find their children.

Vázquez Florencio, in his four years as a priest, has mediated between organized crime groups during the long crisis of violence that has plagued the city. He takes precautionary measures, traveling in an armored van with security guards. He’s already survived one attempt on his life.

Hidden in the guts of the state

On May 9, Brayan Maximiliano Ángel Jiménez got the news that authorities had identified the body of his father, Damián Ángel Jiménez, who disappeared in November 2018.

What Ángel Jiménez, who is also a member of the María Herrera Collective, has lived through is exemplary of the raw brutality of the humanitarian crisis in Mexico. Six months after his father's disappearance, his mother, Marla Jiménez Carachure was also disappeared.

Ángel Jiménez was 22 years old at the time. He dropped out of college—he was studying engineering—to work and support his two younger siblings, one of whom is autistic.

Antúnez Flores, who is the coordinator of the María Herrera Collective, was the one who told Ángel Jiménez and other collective members that the State Attorney General's Office (FGE) had positively identified his father's remains.

The Prosecutor's Office found his father’s body near Amojileca, a small community in Chilpancingo, three days after his disappearance in November 2018. During the six-year search for him, they combed through hospitals, prisons and graves, while the state’s Forensic Medical Service had his corpse in their possession the whole time.

Over the years, Ángel Jimenez's personality changed. He now talks very little, if at all. The afternoon he got the news that his father had been identified, he refused to read the confirmation out loud.

Armed men disappeared Ángel Jimenez’s father from his home in the city’s western neighborhood of Vista Hermosa. His mother, Marla, disappeared while traveling on the highway between Chilpancingo and Acapulco.

Searching in war conditions

There are nine collectives of searching mothers in the state of Guerrero: the mothers and fathers of the 43, the María Herrera Searching Families Collective, the Guadalupe Rodríguez Narciso Collective of the Disappeared and Murdered in Mexico, the Always Alive Collective of the Montaña Baja, the Iguala Mothers Collective, the Other Disappeared of Iguala, Tlapa Fireflies Collective, Acapulco Families In Search of their Disappeared, and the No+Disappeared Guerrero Collective.

Many of these collectives carried out their own activities as part of the national “Nothing to Celebrate” day.

On the afternoon of May 8, the No+Disappeared Guerrero Collective marched from the memorial of the disappeared in Alameda Granados Maldonado to the Santa Cruz parish, where they celebrated mass.

On Saturday, May 10, the Guadalupe Rodríguez Narciso Collective held a rally with students from the Raúl Isidro Burgos School in Ayotzinapa. They met at the anti-monument to the 43, a protest art installation at a spot known as Asta Banderas in Chilpancingo.

This collective called out Guerrero Governor Evelyn Salgado Pineda for minimizing the issue of disappearances. “Four thousand missing people are not isolated incidents,” they said.

Cristina Bautista Salvador, mother of Benjamín Ascencio Bautista, a student from Ayotzinapa, told Ojalá that mothers and fathers of the 43 have had nothing to celebrate since 2014, when their children were disappeared.

In a telephone interview, she lamented that young people continue to be disappeared, and that each day more families suffer from this kind of tragedy.