When she arrived at the field in northern Mexico where she has been searching for her son’s remains, Cecilia Flores kissed a large banner emblazoned with his face. Big letters on it proclaimed, “Your mother is fighting because she loves you.”
Ms. Flores was leading a team of fellow mothers, archaeologists and criminologists all searching in the relentless sun one April morning for people who have gone missing. An excavator dug trenches 4 feet deep and as long as 180 feet.
Ms. Flores’s son Alejandro disappeared in 2015, when he was 21. She has been searching this area on and off for the past four years after receiving an anonymous tip that her son’s remains were in this field in Sinaloa State, where other bodies have been unearthed.
“If I find my son, I’m going to make an altar here,” Ms. Flores said.
This is the constant agony of searching mothers, or “madres buscadoras” as they are known in Mexico. Few are more prominent than Ms. Flores, 53, the founder of several groups including the Madres Buscadoras de Sonora, or the Searching Mothers of Sonora, a state in northwest Mexico.
Many mothers go years without finding their loved ones, and some never do. Ms. Flores, a mother of six, has two sons who both disappeared.
But in late March, prosecutors in Sonora called her to say that they might have located her other son, Marco Antonio, who went missing in 2019 when he was 32. Her hopes had been raised and then dashed five times before over the years. But she rushed over to the search site and helped with the dig.
In a heartbreaking video that received nearly a million views online, she held up a femur bone in the desert that DNA tests later confirmed to be from her son. The authorities said bone fragments, clothes and shell casings were found on the property of a deceased man who they presume had participated in Marco Antonio’s disappearance.
Marco Antonio’s remains were found just 300 feet away from where Ms. Flores said she and her daughters had searched three years before, based on a tip from a man who called her from prison. But they stopped looking when they mistook the sound of motorcycles from a nearby farm for cartel members riding up to threaten them, a grim reality that Ms. Flores has faced before.
Women searching for the disappeared have repeatedly been killed in Mexico, including last weekend.
“It wasn’t the right time to find him,” she said.
For nearly a decade, Ms. Flores has been one of the key faces of a crisis in Mexico, where more than 133,000 people have vanished. Nearly all disappeared in the past two decades, many at the hands of criminal groups or colluding officials.
The disappearances have hung like a cloud over the administration of President Claudia Sheinbaum, who has vowed justice for all of the missing and has overseen some encouraging changes but is under increasing pressure to do more.
While government statistics show homicides have dropped by roughly 40 percent under Ms. Sheinbaum, who took office in October 2024, the number of missing people has more than doubled since 2016, climbing steadily over the years.
Ms. Sheinbaum sparred with a United Nations body of experts last month over its scathing report concluding that disappearances in Mexico were widespread and systemic, and often involved the complicity of the authorities.
“They want to pretend that nothing happens, that everything is dropping, when it’s not true,” Ms. Flores said of the Mexican government while standing in front of a statue of St. Jude, the Catholic patron saint of impossible causes. “Every day, people go missing.”
Despite living under constant threat, Ms. Flores is unafraid to speak her mind.
Recently, she posted a video on social media asking Joaquín Guzmán Loera, known as El Chapo, the infamous leader of the Sinaloa Cartel who is now in a U.S. prison, for tips to help locate her son. She included her address. She said she believed that Mr. Guzmán “was a good person for helping the poor a lot” and should now help mothers.
Ms. Flores’s methods have not been welcomed by all.
Mirna Nereida Medina Quiñonez, who founded a searching mothers collective in northern Sinaloa in 2014 after her own son disappeared, took Ms. Flores under her wing when Alejandro went missing. While she said Ms. Flores was daring, she did not agree with her style of drawing a lot of attention because searching is dangerous.
“She doesn’t represent us,” she said. “I’ve been searching for 12 years and we have found people, but we do it with a low profile because we try to take care of ourselves. We’re under threat.”
Ms. Flores has also drawn criticism for advocating for a truce with criminal groups so that mothers can safely search for their loved ones.
“I became an investigator of everything because of this obsession I have with finding my son,” she said. “It’s not because I’m interested in seeing where there’s a safe house or a drug den or where they’re selling stolen fuel.”
The discovery of Marco Antonio’s remains brought Ms. Flores fleeting closure. She said she can’t rest until she finds her younger son, Alejandro. Ms. Flores said Marco Antonio had been selling drugs for corrupt local authorities when he disappeared. But Alejandro, she said, was in the wrong place at the wrong time near her hometown, Juan José Ríos, when a criminal group snatched him.
One reason Ms. Flores said she sleeps only four hours a night: thoughts of vengeance.
“I find myself thinking that the authorities must punish the guilty parties,” she said. “They have to pay for what they did to my son. Thinking about vengeance is a terrible thing because it’s something that doesn’t let you live, it doesn’t let you rest, it leaves you with no peace.”
Once Marco Antonio was buried, Ms. Flores moved from Sonora State back to Sinaloa into her mother’s modest two-bedroom house to dedicate herself to finding Alejandro. She tried to search for him before, but she said she paused when local cartel members showed up at her mother’s house twice asking for her.
“I live with a lot of fear that something happens to her,” Ms. Flores’s mother, Marcela Armenta, 70, said in tears.
Ms. Flores has had round-the-clock police protection over the past few years. But she said she still worries about corrupt authorities in Mexico.
“The problem isn’t that they take me,” Ms. Flores said. “The problem is that they do it right in front of my family. I don’t want my mother to become a searching mother herself.”
Still, Ms. Flores is very public about her mission. She lists her phone number on social media. She goes live from her Facebook accounts while out on digs, often in dangerous or remote areas. Recently she narrated as other mothers and her brother used a flour-and-water mixture to glue missing persons posters to poles in small towns. She made sure they stuck them facing a local outdoor bar frequented by the “bad guys.”
She uses her large social media following to earn a living and raise money to fund her search groups, selling jewelry, makeup and more.
While in the town of Corerepe, Ms. Flores’s group attracted attention in part because of her police escort. Men on motorcycles, probably working for the cartels as lookouts, rode by frequently.
In several places, Ms. Flores said she and other mothers have put up missing posters only to discover them gone later. She said it was like pushing a boulder up a hill.
“We’re fighting apathy, bureaucracy and re-victimization by women and men who don’t like what we’re doing because they think it’s a waste of time, and that we’re looking for criminals who don’t deserve to be alive,” she said.
To María Isabel Zavala Monrreal, 53, whose 22-year-old son disappeared in Juan José Ríos in 2013, Ms. Flores is a source of strength and inspiration in the search for her son’s remains. She said her husband has never helped her search in part because he wants to leave the past alone.
“It’s a fight every time I come search,” she said, crying. “I’ll never stop looking.”
Gathering for searches is a therapy session of sorts for the mothers.
As the excavator buzzed nearby in the Sinaloa field, Ms. Flores, Ms. Zavala Monrreal and other mothers sat commiserating in the shade.
In one of the trenches, Ms. Flores found a bit of tattered green cloth. She pulled out her phone to show a photo of Alejandro wearing a green polo shirt the day he disappeared.
“Maybe it’s him,” she said.
James Wagner covers news and culture in Latin America for The Times. He is based in Mexico City.
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