Women Drive the Eternal Search for Mexico's Missing
Can joy be found amidst some of life's severest sorrow?
CULIACÁN, Sinaloa, Mexico - The claw of the excavator makes easy work of the sand. A silent crowd of women watch in silence as the hole that the machine is gauging into the ground grows. The pile of sand that the claw dumps to the side gets higher, and eventually, two women pick up a giant sieve and start throwing sand from the pile into it, sifting it as though they’re looking for gold. And they are looking for a treasure, of sorts. Teeth, bones, buttons, hair clips, clothes, earrings, or anything else that remains of their missing loved ones. What might be left of their missing sons. Daughters. Husbands. Sisters. Brothers.
A small, sand-covered lump tumbles into view as the claw pulls away from the hole. The silence deepens. One of the women uses a shovel to pull the lump out of the hole. It is a small part of vertebrae. “Donde estan? Donde estan?....” (Where are they? Where are they?) A chant rises up, as though in a religious ceremony. The bone fragment is placed to the side of the hole. Photos are taken. Phone calls are made.
A man who used to work for the drug cartel rang María Isabel Cruz Bernal a few days ago. He was repentant about some of the dirty work that he had done for his bosses. Killing, dismembering and burying. He thought that Cruz and her fellow women might be able to find something - someone - buried in the sands of El Pozo.
Cruz founded the collective known as las Sabuesas, which translates loosely as “bloodhounds” or “sleuths” in English, some six years ago when her son Yosimar, who was a police officer, was abducted from their family home by a group of armed men. He hasn’t been seen since. “Yosimar won’t appear, el cabrón….” said Cruz to me. She hasn’t found a single sign of him since her search began more than five years ago.
As we spoke, the other women loaded shovels and iron poles into the back of a truck. They use the poles to stick deep into the ground where they think that bodies might be buried, then pull out the end to smell it for the putrid stench of decay. The truck that would bring the women and their shovels and sticks belonged to a state government search commission: the El Pozo area was a known dumping ground and zone of conflict for local criminal groups. The State Commission for Missing People was providing the excavator machine.
Dozens of groups like this set off on similar searches across Mexico every week, searching for more than 100,000 people who have gone missing in the last two decades, many of them since the country’s “drug war” began in 2007. More than 21,000 have gone missing since President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) took power in 2018. They are, without doubt, doing the government’s dirty work, despite promises during AMLO’s presidential campaign that he would resolve Mexico’s missing persons crisis. That has not transpired.
“What was your son’s name,” I asked Mirtha Mendoza the day following the search in El Pozo, whilst sitting in the front room of her small house in a middle-class suburb of Culiacan.
“His name IS José Manuel Macías Alfonso” she corrected me softly. “Because for me, he is not dead. So that’s why I say he is called, not was called.” On the afternoon of November 12, 2017, José Manuel, aged 29, who everyone called “Junior,” was on his way with his girlfriend to eat lunch with his mother when their Uber was stopped by a white Suburban truck, Mendoza told me. A number of armed men got out, ordered him out of his car, bundled him into theirs and took him away. Shocked and terrified, his girlfriend rushed to Mendoza’s house and told her what had happened.
“I was completely consumed by fear,” Mendoza remembered.
Four or five days went by, then Mendoza went to see a young man in the neighborhood, she told me, who she asked for help looking for Junior. She didn’t specify to me who this young man was or what he did. He made a phone call. Yes, they have your son, he told Mendoza. He’s very beaten up, he said. Mendoza begged him to beg them to let him go. They did not.
I have spent hours with these sorts of groups during my 15 years in Mexico, and in other states other than Sinaloa. Officially, there are some 5,000 people reported missing in Sinaloa. Cruz thinks that the real number is twice that, and that her group alone has found more than 16,000 pieces of “treasure,” i.e. human remains, since they started looking. Since the drug war began, Mexico’s forensics services have been inundated by corpses.
During the interview with Mendoza in her house, her husband arrives. He grunts a hello, and then disappears into one of the back bedrooms. He doesn’t want to talk to me, and he doesn’t want to talk about Junior. It is a pattern I’ve seen often - that it is more often than not the women who are the driving force behind trying to find missing people. Mirtha says that her search for Junior is an extension of her domestic duties, and her husband goes out to work to bring in money.
But Cruz says it goes deeper than that. “ I think [the women do it because] our insides are clamouring for the part of us that was stolen. I think us mothers are missing a part of our insides.”
I’m not sure I am up to the challenge of finding the right words to capture and to honor what it feels like to dig in the dirt for the remains of the baby you gave birth to. The prospect leaves me mute. I prefer numbness to feeling even a fraction of a fraction of that. I find myself turning away from the effort to empathize because of fear, terror, an incapacity to conceive of that ever being a reality. For me, these women ARE resilience. Their day to day is to live in some of the most severe daily discomfort, pain and uncertainty that life can bring. These women, and thousands of others, get out of bed to do this every single day all over the country. Even if those babies grew to be adults before they went missing, and whatever some of them might have been tied up in before they disappeared, for Cruz and Mendoza and their companeras, there is no other option but to search until they find.
And yet, even at such depths of darkness, something gorgeous takes shape that day in El Pozo. After a few hours of following the government workers around in their excavator, the women take a break. Lupita Valdez, whose son was also taken by armed men in July 2018, never to be seen again, lays down a blanket. The women around her pull out an array of plastic boxes from their backpacks containing tinga (shredded chicken in tomato sauce), frijoles (beans), white cheese and other fillings. Supermarket tortillas wrapped in crackling paper appear, as well as a few bottles of Coca-Cola. I watch them from a few meters away as I shelter under the relentless afternoon sun and bat away the tiny flies that are everywhere. They gesture to me to go eat, but I feel like an intruder all of a sudden. I don’t want to interrupt their brief relief, their reverie. They remove their face masks. Lupita makes a joke and the rest of the women burst out laughing.
“I can’t imagine my life without the Sabuesas collective,” Mirtha tells me from her sofa at home, where she says she said she slept for the two years after Junior was taken, hoping to hear his footsteps on the front porch. “ I have so much to thank Isabel (Cruz, the Sabuesas founder) for. If it wasn’t for them, I do not know who I would be today.”
Being around grieving mothers is hard, a contact of mine said to me when we were talking about the Sabuesas. Unless you are one. Collectives such as these give Cruz, Mendoza, Valdez and thousands of others not only hope and activity, but companionship in a journey that may well last the rest of their lifetimes.