The mothers who search for Mexico’s missing children

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Mexico City, Mexico – The mariachi band had just struck up its first ranchera when Axel grabbed his mother’s hand.

“Come on, mama!” the lanky 16-year-old shouted, spinning Daniela beneath a canopy of paper lanterns glowing in the warm night air.

The courtyard pulsed with music and laughter as cousins joined in, skirts twirling and shoes scuffing the ground. When Daniela tried to slip away to rest, her son pulled her back, draping his favourite grey hoodie over her shoulders and tugging her by the sleeves.

That was in April 2022.

Six months later, Daniela Gonzalez was knee-deep in a ravine filled with refuse searching for her son.

Two months after the family wedding where they’d danced until the early hours, Axel disappeared.

Daniela González, 40, as she begins a 20-meter descent into the ravine to search for the remains of her son, Axel Daniel González Ramos. The drop is nearly vertical in places, and the garbage-layered-1761918561

Searching for graves

It is a sunny, cloudless morning in May 2025, and Daniela is preparing to lower herself some 20 metres (66 feet) into a ravine in Palmas Axotitla, a hillside neighbourhood in the borough of Alvaro Obregon.

The area is a maze of flat-roofed, two- and three-storey homes tightly packed along steep streets, with narrow alleyways snaking between them. The ravine cuts through the neighbourhood, edged by houses with protruding concrete foundations and a small playground.

The ravine’s steep slopes are littered with rubbish, broken furniture and plastic bottles tangled in the dense undergrowth. Sewage collects into foul, foaming streams amid the vegetation and rubbish at the bottom of the ravine.

It is a place residents avoid.

The neighbourhood, like several others in Alvaro Obregon, is under cartel control. Rival gangs use the dead-end streets as hiding grounds from which to sell drugs and recruit young men, and the ravine as a dumping ground for their murder victims. In 2021, authorities recovered human remains from the Palmas Axotitla ravine. More bodies are believed to be buried there.

Daniela arrives at the ravine at around 8 am. She is not alone. More than 100 people gather at the ravine’s edge, entering the site through an opening in the rusted playground fence.

Most are family members of the missing. It took them a year to obtain permission from the local authorities to conduct a five-day search operation at the site. They have come in the hope that among the piles of rubbish, they might find the remains of their sons and daughters, siblings, husbands and wives.

Alongside the families are more than 20 members of Mexico City’s fire brigade, who will help with the search, armed police and National Guard troops, who will scan the hillsides for cartel “lookouts” who may attack those searching if they get too close to their clandestine burial sites, and forensic specialists who set up stainless steel tables ready to examine any remains that are found.

Daniela and the other mothers say such large operations only happen after they exert pressure on the Mexico City authorities to accompany them, and that, in many cases, searches may not have been necessary had the authorities taken their loved ones’ disappearances seriously when they were first reported. When security forces are present, it can feel like a display for local news outlets, they add. And most of the time, families search on their own.

“We’re the ones who find,” Daniela explains.

“This work we do,” she says, “is resistance. It’s re-existence. It’s love.”

Into the ravine

Around Daniela, mothers in sunhats tighten the laces of their waterproof boots. In the playground, volunteers stretch a tarp for shade and set out water bottles.

After pulling on a surgical mask to shield against the stench, Daniela clips into a safety rope and climbs down into the ravine. The air is damp and heavy with the smell of rotting food and animal carcasses. She starts to turn over torn mattresses and twisted wire with a pitchfork.

“I still search with the hope that he’s alive,” the 40-year-old mother of three explains.

Voices echo around her, a mix of shouted instructions and quiet prayers. Metal tools occasionally strike stone. Possible “lookouts” are spotted by family members, but disappear into the alleyways before officers can reach them.

At around noon, the harsh sun bearing down on her, Daniela plunges her pitchfork into the sludge and pulls out a crumpled hoodie. It is dark with mud. Her hands tremble as she turns it over. But the logo is wrong. The size is different. It’s not Axel’s.

Later that afternoon, when the day’s search ends, she stands near a stream of black wastewater falling from a cluster of orange brick houses peering over the cliff face. “I thought I had found him,” she says, her words catching in her throat.

“I felt this shock, like my chest caved in. And then nothing — it wasn’t his. I just have to keep going.”

A team of over 20 members from the Mexico City Commission for Natural Resources and Rural Development (CORENADR) digs into the hillside in search of remains.-1761918463 [Mark Viales/Al Jazeera]

Disappearance crisis

Since 2006, nearly 120,000 people have gone missing in Mexico. That year, then-President Felipe Calderon launched a militarised “war on drugs” against powerful cartels. Rather than dismantling them, the crackdown fractured Mexico’s criminal underworld.

Alejandra Ortiz Diaz, a human rights lawyer based in Monterrey, a city in Mexico’s northeast, says that by targeting cartel leaders without addressing corruption or local economies, the government created power vacuums that splintered large organisations into smaller, more violent groups.

“These factions turned on one another — and on civilians — in their fight to control territory, [human] trafficking routes, and local populations,” she says.

The crisis continues to deepen. In the first four months of President Claudia Sheinbaum’s administration, which began in October 2024, approximately 4,000 people went missing — roughly 40 per day.

Most of those who go missing in Mexico are teenage boys and young men. They disappear after encounters with cartel members seeking to exploit or recruit them, or because they inadvertently witness criminal activity or become involved with these groups. Smaller numbers of teenage girls and young women also go missing. According to Ortiz, they tend to be victims of rape and sex trafficking.

When people go missing, “families often report that authorities do nothing at first,” says Ortiz.

“Courts are slow, and interagency coordination is poor, which means that even when remains are found, investigations stall. Weak institutions, underfunded forensic teams, and systemic bottlenecks combine to leave most disappearances uninvestigated.”

As a result, families have been forced to take matters into their own hands, forming search collectives to look for their loved ones.

“There’s a part of you that wants to find something, and a part that doesn’t,” Daniela says. “Because if I found something of his, I might have to face the truth — that something happened to him.”

‘He was mine’

Daniela perches on a jagged rock. As the afternoon light plays on her dark brown hair, she peels off her gloves and scans the brush.

A faint smile crosses her face as she thinks of her son. He was affectionate and respectful, but “also had that little rebellious streak,” she says.

“As a little kid, he couldn’t sit still. He’d run all over the house.”

Daniela raised Axel, his older sister and his younger brother largely on her own in the house they shared with her parents. He cared for his siblings and loved helping his grandfather weld doors and windows. “Always curious, always trying things out,” she says.

“But with Axel, I had to warn him: not everyone out there is a true friend. He was too trusting of strangers. That scared me.”

Saturdays were for parties or meeting friends in the neighbourhood.

“He’d always ask for permission to go out … but he was clever. He’d start asking on Monday for Saturday.”

Axel loved reggaeton, would spend hours perfecting his hair and was meticulous about his clothes, never leaving the house without the light-grey hoodie Daniela bought for him.

“He had a style,” she says. “Even if we didn’t have much money, he always found a way to look sharp.”

At school, he struggled — not because he lacked intelligence, but because he felt restless.

“He wasn’t meant for a desk,” Daniela says. “But he had dreams. He talked about becoming a mechanic or learning a trade. Something with his hands.”

At home, he hugged his mother every day, sometimes just to say “I love you” and other times to get out of trouble.

“I always knew when he was up to something — he’d butter me up first,” she laughs warmly. “But even when I scolded him, he never raised his voice. He respected me. He loved me.”

Her son’s room remains mostly untouched. “His clothes, his shoes, his cologne — they’re all still here,” Daniela says quietly. “Sometimes I go in just to feel like he’s near.”

She pauses, eyes welling. “He wasn’t perfect. He was a teenager. But he was mine.”

‘I kept seeing Axel’

It was the night of June 23, 2022, when Axel stepped out of the pistachio-green, two-storey family home in San Miguel Ajusco, a mountainous neighbourhood on the southern edge of Mexico City. He told his mother he was heading to his girlfriend’s house nearby.

“There were rules,” Daniela says. “If you left, you had to say when you were coming back.”

Axel left at 10:30 pm and said he would return within the hour. He wore one of his favourite outfits: faded blue jeans, an orange sleeveless vest, a cap, black-and-white sneakers he had recently ordered on Daniela’s credit card, and his grey hoodie.

Smiling, Daniela recalls how he hadn’t asked her before buying the sneakers. “The delivery lady arrived and said, ‘Your son asked for these.’ And I just said, ‘Axel!’ And he said, ‘Come on, mama!’”

Hours later, Axel still hadn’t returned home and wasn’t answering his phone. Daniela didn’t know where his girlfriend lived or how to reach her family.

“It was a very new relationship,” Daniela says. “I didn’t even know her name.”

By morning, she was overwhelmed with worry. She tried to file a missing persons report, but the police told her to wait. “The police said my son had gone to a party and would probably be back in a day or two,” she explains.

As a minor, Axel’s case should have triggered an immediate search under national protocol.

But it took four months for the police to issue an Amber Alert, signalling to the public and the authorities that a child was missing and that urgent action was required.

In the meantime, as she waited for the police to act, Daniela searched the neighbourhood for any clues about Axel’s disappearance. Early each morning, she would retrace the paths he might have taken, hoping for a glimpse of him or a lead. Some nights, she ventured out again, following the routes he took when he went out with his friends.

“I couldn’t sleep at night,” Daniela says, her voice tight. “I kept seeing Axel, imagining him lost somewhere in the city. Everyone else went on with their lives — my family tried to keep busy, distracted themselves — but I couldn’t. I was alone with the fear, the worry, the not knowing … everything around me was falling apart while I was stuck in that nightmare.”

She suffered from insomnia, severe headaches and high blood pressure.

A few months after Axel’s disappearance, members of her extended family began to distance themselves – they stopped answering her calls or told her she needed to accept her son was gone. Some feared being targeted by cartels; others avoided her out of exhaustion.

“They told me I was obsessed,” she says.

Daniela had to choose between her job as a cleaner in a private home and looking for her son. She chose to keep searching for Axel.

‘Just a mother, with a shovel’

Six months after her son’s disappearance, and with no help from the authorities, Daniela turned to a grassroots collective she found on social media. Una Luz en el Camino (A Light on the Path) was formed in May 2022 by 60 families of disappeared people.

For the first time, she met others like her. There were fathers, siblings and other family members, but mostly mothers. And she realised for the first time that her experience was far from unusual.

“The state’s neglect is systemic,” says Daniela.

The collective connected her with their human rights lawyer to put pressure on the authorities, while other mothers accompanied her to meetings with the police and the prosecutor’s office. Still, there was no follow-up — only a suggestion by the police to “check the morgue”.

“They told me my son might already be dead. That I could find him there,” she explains.

Visiting the morgue — which she still does roughly once a week — fills her with “sorrow and rage,” she says, “because the authorities failed to do their job properly from the start.”

The police initially restricted Daniela’s access to her son’s case file until the collective and its lawyer insisted that, as his mother, she had the right to see it. When she reviewed the file in December 2022, it was almost empty. The 10 pages held no record of Axel’s last location or phone activity. “They hadn’t done anything,” she explains.

“I continue to blame the prosecutor’s office [which decides when to issue Amber Alerts] for denying my son the right to be searched for,” she adds with frustration. Experts say the first 48 hours are the most critical for searching. “That negligence is why he still hasn’t been found,” she says.

In January 2023, Daniela searched for Axel with the collective for the first time in the wooded hills of her neighbourhood. More than 20 mothers and volunteers came. Daniela brought a garden shovel and spade, and borrowed gloves and a sun hat. She had no protective gear — no mask, boots, or safety helmet to shield her from the risk of disease while digging through rubbish or from falling rocks.

“I was terrified,” she recalls. “But I kept thinking — if I don’t go, who will? I didn’t know what I was looking for. Just a mother, with a shovel and hope.”

Since then, Daniela has searched fields, ravines, and landfills with the collective, but she also goes alone to hospitals, morgues, and even prisons, following every lead she finds. Her day often starts before sunrise, and the terrain she searches in is usually polluted and rough. “The smell gets into everything,” she says. “Your hair, your clothes, your skin.”

She points to the photo of Axel printed on her T-shirt. “I go door to door with my son’s photo, asking if anyone saw something that night.”

She has heard rumours that a cartel abducted Axel, but she hasn’t found any concrete answers.

“I keep searching,” she says. “When we go out as a brigade, I also help other mothers look for their children. We all carry the same pain.”

Sleep offers little rest. “I wake up thinking I see him, then realise he’s not there,” she says. “I dream of him calling me, asking for help. I always think he is lost, suffering somewhere.

“I’ve seen conditions no one should endure — like human bones buried in the trash. No one should ever have to look for a loved one like this.”

‘Dismiss reports, delay investigations’

Ortiz, the human rights lawyer, agrees.

She has spent years representing the families of victims. “Families shouldn’t be leading these searches,” she says. “But because the institutions are fragmented, underfunded or just indifferent, families are forced to fill the void.

“Authorities frequently dismiss reports, delay investigations, or fail to follow up on leads, leaving families with little recourse.”

Ortiz explains that disappearances generally fall into two categories: those in which authorities are involved — handing over individuals to cartels, covering up crimes, or intentionally ignoring cases — and those carried out solely by organised crime, such as killings or kidnappings linked to human trafficking, recruitment, organ harvesting, or to exert territorial control. The cartels involved range from local gangs to transnational criminal groups.

In countless cases, she says, the state crosses the line into complicity. She has handled cases in which local police have allegedly detained individuals for trivial matters and then handed them over to cartels. These are often community members viewed as obstacles because they challenge local power structures or refuse to cooperate with cartels.

“We have cases with phone calls saying, ‘I just got stopped by the police,’ and then the person vanishes. Or a witness says the abductors wore official gear,” she explains.

Even when crucial evidence surfaces, Ortiz says families generally aren’t informed. When remains are found, the cases are often bogged down in bureaucracy, and bodies languish unexamined in morgues. “The forensic system is overwhelmed,” she explains.

As of 2023, more than 72,000 human remains were labelled as unidentified by state morgues, according to Mexican investigative nonprofit Quinto Elemento Lab. The closure this year of the National Human Identification Center due to federal budget cuts and internal shake-ups further crippled forensic work. The centre had been processing roughly 300 cases per month, aiming to reduce the backlog of unidentified bodies.

Ortiz says authorities devote little attention to actually locating the disappeared, instead focusing on identifying someone innocent to blame — a safer option than confronting powerful cartels or exposing the institution’s own negligence.

Political pressure from above — particularly from local prosecutors and police officials wary of exposing links between security forces and cartels — also disincentivises pursuing such cases. Many never reach the courts, she says.

“Cases are not properly investigated from the start,” she says. “Families are left waiting and searching on their own. Families are kept waiting for months or years with no answers.”

Returning a son’s remains

In the face of such challenges, those in the collective remind one another they are not alone. Daniela has found a new family among the collective’s members.

At the children’s playground in Palmas Axotitla, women in their 60s rock gently on swings. In the ravine below, mothers in their late 30s and early 40s offer each other water and words of encouragement before plunging back into the heat and chaos of the search.

Alongside other mothers, Daniela has participated in forensic and legal workshops supported by universities. She can now differentiate between human and animal bones, document sites, and properly handle evidence. During the Palmas Axotitla search, Daniela identifies a rubbish-filled spot beneath houses overlooking the hillside as a possible place where bodies might lie. She insists the fire brigade — who have experience working in difficult terrain and manage heavy equipment — dig, explaining why the site makes sense as it is below where they spotted suspected cartel lookouts.

In the ravine, a woman lifts out a small backpack, and others gather close, offering silent support. The backpack is handed over to the forensic specialists at their makeshift tables, but it yields no clues.

Since 2021, search collectives — often with the support of the city’s authorities — have combed the wooded slopes of Ajusco national park, in the city’s south and extending into Alvaro Obregon, almost daily. These operations are part of the broader network of citizen-led searches across Mexico City, targeting areas identified through anonymous tips or prior discoveries. In Ajusco, several sets of human remains have been recovered. Authorities and activists believe that more than 100 bodies could be buried in these secluded woods.

“All that were located are now home, identified and given a dignified rest,” Daniela says. “Maybe now their families can rest, too.”

She crouches and rests her hands on her knees for a moment. Around her, family members dig carefully, sweat streaking their faces.

“I remember the day we returned the remains of one boy to his family,” she says, speaking over the sound of shovels. “His mother collapsed right there when she saw the rotting remains of her son’s red shirt, in the middle of the work, sobbing. We all rushed to her, held her and cried together.”

The remains were later confirmed as the woman’s son’s.

These are difficult moments, Daniela explains, “because you think, ‘That could be my child.” But she also remembers that day as “beautiful”.

“That small closure for a family — even when you haven’t found your own child, you feel you’ve done something meaningful right here, in this place,” she says.

“Sometimes, we return someone else’s loved one home. And even if it’s not Axel, it means the world to that family. And that keeps us going.”

Surveillance network

On the fifth day of the search in Palmas Axotitla, Julieta Guerrero leans on a cane as she makes her way towards a park bench overlooking the edge of the ravine.

The 62-year-old wears a wide-brimmed hat over her shoulder-length white hair. As one of the older family members at the site, she cannot descend into the ravine but has been searching through rubbish piled at the top.

Julieta’s son, Sergio Gerardo Jimenez Guerrero, was 33 years old when he disappeared on his way to work on October 20, 2023.

Julieta’s daughter tracked down video footage from nearby businesses a couple of days after Sergio’s disappearance. Footage showed him leaving home and getting into a blue or green car the night he disappeared. The family traced his route up toward a small overpass in the semi-rural hills of Las Aguilas, the southern neighbourhood where he lived.

When they approached the authorities, urging them to consult Mexico City’s centralised surveillance system (C5) for more footage, police officers claimed there were no cameras. “It’s a federal, wooded area,” they said — meaning the city’s C5 surveillance network didn’t extend into the terrain, which lies under federal control. But Julieta’s daughter went to the street herself and found at least three cameras. Armed with exact addresses and camera IDs, they went to the prosecutor’s office — only for the authorities to refuse to investigate once again.

“Everything’s a pretext,” Julieta says. “They just didn’t want to show us.”

The C5 operates tens of thousands of cameras, ostensibly to keep citizens safe. But families like Julieta’s often find the authorities unresponsive. Footage is routinely missing, cameras are “offline”, or the authorities claim not to have jurisdiction.

What should be a tool for truth has become a symbol of stonewalling, according to Ortiz.

“All too often, police avoid requesting or reviewing C5 surveillance footage, especially if it could show the involvement of other officers in a disappearance,” she says. “By doing that, they protect their colleagues — out of loyalty, fear of retaliation, or corruption. In some cases, officers are directly involved with the cartels, which makes pursuing internal investigations even more dangerous.”

‘It’s not a dog — it’s my son’

For Julieta, the lack of willingness to investigate quickly became apparent.

“The prosecutor’s office tells you they have 8,000 cases,” she says. “You’re number 8,001.

“They didn’t take my son’s case seriously. They didn’t believe me.”

Despite presenting authorities with evidence they had gathered themselves — video footage, witness testimony, and detailed knowledge of the area where Sergio disappeared — Julieta’s family was ignored.

Meanwhile, Julieta has been threatened while putting up missing-person posters of her son. She recalls one time when a man, believed to be connected to a local cartel, asked her, “Why are you putting up posters for your dogs?”

“I told him, ‘It’s not a dog or cat — it’s my son.’ Then he said, ‘What if you disappear, too?’ And I answered: ‘Go ahead — what more can you take?’” Julieta recounts.

“They already took the thing I loved most,” she says. “I’m not afraid of them any more.”

The threats have not stopped her from searching, but the day by the ravine is a difficult one for Julieta. By mid-afternoon, as the day’s search starts to wind down in the blistering heat, collective founder Jaqueline Palmeros calls over to her, hoping to offer some comfort. Jaqueline, who is in her early 40s, wears a T-shirt with the face of her daughter, Jael Monserrat Uribe Palmeros, who was 21 when she disappeared in July 2020.

The women make their way to the playground fence opening, where Jaqueline takes a candle and a wooden cross from her pocket. They place the objects on the ground under the tarp and light the candle, a quiet gesture of remembrance for the disappeared. The flame casts flickering shadows across the dirt.

‘Keep them from getting killed’

Among the police and National Guard officers who spent the day scanning for lookouts is Omar Gomez Santillon.

Gomez is a sergeant in Mexico City’s Environmental Protection Unit. He typically patrols protected natural areas to prevent illegal logging and dumping. But in recent years, his duties have expanded to assisting families and forensic teams in searches for the disappeared across the city’s forested ravines.

“Some places are so remote and hostile that if cartels controlling the area decide they don’t want police poking around, they might turn aggressive or even make us disappear,” says the 37-year-old. “We could end up thrown down the same cliffs as the victims.”

“We’re there to prevent retaliation. Sometimes the people — cartel members or neighbours working as their eyes and ears in these controlled areas — watching us from a distance, are the same ones who buried the bodies,” Gomez explains.

On multiple patrols, armed men have confronted his unit, and at times, he feared he could be killed. But his sharpest criticism is of the justice system. “Much of the work done by investigators at the prosecutor’s office [gets held up],” he says. “Cases stall, impunity remains, and families are left waiting for answers.”

There are visible patterns of torture on the bodies they recover from clandestine graves, he says. “We recognise the modus operandi,” he explains. “Certain groups leave distinct marks on the bodies they dispose of — signs of torture, the way they are bound, or how and where they are abandoned.

“By examining these [torture] patterns, we can link cases to specific criminal organisations. But even when we recover a body, follow-up is minimal. Investigations rarely proceed to prosecution, leaving families with no accountability and little chance of justice.”

Gomez blames fear, burnout and institutional neglect. Psychological support for officers is lacking. “They say there’s help, but you have to ask for it privately. Most don’t — out of fear or shame,” he says.

“I studied criminology. I believe in justice. But we can’t keep pretending the system works. Families are doing the state’s job. Most of the time, we’re just there to keep them from getting killed for it.”

Mexico City authorities — the city’s Search Commission, the Attorney General’s Office and the C5 surveillance centre — did not respond to Al Jazeera’s multiple requests for comment for this story.

‘Your child is waiting’

Julieta helps organise search brigades. She has learned how to file case reports and obtain police protection — at least when conducting searches in dangerous areas.

“We’re not investigators, but we’ve had to become them,” she reflects. “Every mother out there looking for the remains of their loved ones is doing the work the state refuses to do.”

Daniela sometimes finds fragments of human remains – teeth, hair or bones. These discoveries have prompted police investigations and helped map areas where cartels have dumped bodies, offering families faint but crucial leads in their search.

Once, she found a pair of sneakers like her son’s.

When she meets mothers who are new to the collective, she urges them not to lose hope. “Somewhere, your child is waiting for you,” she tells them.

Each night, she lights a candle and gazes at a photo of her three children. She clings to the possibility of a reunion.

“I didn’t have two children,” Daniela says. “I had three. And one is still out there.”