MEXICO CITY (AP) — A Mexican volunteer searcher criticized by the government in the past has found more human remains in Mexico City and officials have attacked her for it — again.
The existence of clandestine body dumps is a sensitive issue for Mexico’s ruling Morena party. Morena, who is running as the former mayor of Mexico City for president in Sunday’s elections, claims the kind of violence plaguing other parts of the country has been successfully countered in the capital.
But volunteer searcher Ceci Flores, who has spent years searching for her two missing sons, says that’s because officials haven’t bothered to look for bodies. It is a common complaint from relatives of missing people in many parts of Mexico, where drug cartels and kidnapping gangs use shallow pits to dispose of the bodies of their victims.
On Thursday, Flores posted a video showing human femurs and skulls in the tall, dry grass of a hill on the east side of the city. She suggested there were at least three bodies, and noted there may have been more on the hill.
“We don’t want to disturb them,” Flores said in the video, pointing her shovel toward a pile of bones several feet away. “We don’t want to go in and disturb them.”
Flores has previously spoken to the government and accused officials of ignoring the plight of the more than 100,000 missing people in Mexico.
In late April, Flores drew the ire of prosecutors when she claimed she had found charred bones and identification cards of at least two people in another semi-rural area on the city’s east side. Prosecutors quickly concluded that the bones came from dogs and that the ID cards had been thrown away or stolen and their owners were still alive.
Shortly afterwards, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador played a government-produced video during his daily press conference, accusing seekers like Flores of morbidity and claiming they were suffering from “a delirium of necrophilia.”
But on Friday, Mexico City’s acting prosecutor Ulises Lara was forced to acknowledge that Flores had indeed found bones and that they were apparently human. Lara said police, forensic experts, National Guard officers and soldiers were sent to the scene.
That raised the obvious question of why the huge team of official troops could never have found the bodies, while a lone searching mother, armed with only a shovel, did.
Lara lashed out at Flores without naming her, claiming that “the chain of custody” of the evidence had been broken and the bones had been “treated.”
“This was a violation of the dignity and respect that people searching for the relatives deserve, and some of them have expressed their dissatisfaction with this situation,” Lara said, suggesting that it would have been better not to send them have found.
In a video posted to social media on Saturday, Flores reacted in disbelief.
“Serious? These remains were unknown. We did the work they had to do,” Flores said. “You (Lara) didn’t even know about them, weren’t aware of them, didn’t locate them.”
Regarding the accusation that other searching relatives were angry about her actions — mass searches like those Flores carries out in her native Sonora are not common in Mexico City — Flores responded: “They should be angry at you for not doing your job. ”
López Obrador’s government has spent far more time and resources searching for people wrongly reported missing — people who may have returned home without informing authorities — than it has on searching for grave sites that relatives say are urgently need for closure.
Flores is a very experienced searcher and like many mothers of disappeared people, she has a deep sense of mission. One of her sons, Alejandro Guadalupe, disappeared in 2015. Her second son, Marco Antonio, was kidnapped in 2019. Authorities have not told her about the fate of either of them.
In her home state of Sonora, authorities confirmed in April that they had identified 45 missing people from 57 sets of remains at a body dump known as “El Choyudo” that was originally discovered by Flores’ group, The Searching Mothers of Sonora.
The ‘madres buscadoras’ (searching mothers) usually try not to convict anyone for the disappearances of their relatives. They say they just want to find their remains. Many families say that not knowing clearly about a family member’s fate is worse than knowing a loved one is dead.
At least seven volunteer searchers have been killed in Mexico since 2021.
