During the three days Karla Margarita Pérez was missing, her family never stopped pushing for action: they circulated her missing person notice, put up posters, and organized demonstrations. “Urgently seeking information,” her brother Carlos wrote on Facebook. “She left Irapuato, Guanajuato, leaving everything behind with a single dream: to better herself and study to become a doctor. Today, that dream has been cut short. She is missing.”
It was also Carlos who announced on Thursday that his sister’s lifeless body had been found and who, hours later, called for a demonstration to demand justice and answers. “We address the authorities and society as a whole: it is no longer enough for you to simply be in contact with us; we demand an immediate investigation and the arrest of those responsible,” the young man wrote.
Karla Margarita Pérez was 22 years old, a sixth-semester medical student who had moved to Jalisco to further her education. She was studying at the Universidad Cuauhtémoc in Guadalajara. Contact with her was lost after 9:00 p.m. last Monday. The missing person notice last placed her in the Prados Vallarta neighborhood of Zapopan, on the border with the state capital.
“Today, our family is in despair and heartbroken over her absence. We demand that the relevant authorities expedite the search and provide us with answers. Every minute counts,” wrote Carlos Pérez on social media. In every post—amidst a national crisis involving more than 134,000 missing persons—he insisted: “She is not just another number. She is a daughter, a student, a young woman with a whole life ahead of her who cannot achieve her goal because someone or something stopped her.”
On Wednesday afternoon, Karla Margarita was found dead in a field located on Camino a Nextipac, near the University of Guadalajara’s University Center for Biological and Agricultural Sciences (CUCBA) in the Las Agujas neighborhood. The discovery has been confirmed not only by the family but also by Blanca Trujillo, the Deputy Prosecutor for Missing Persons in Jalisco. The official reported that a burnt-out motorcycle was also found at the scene, though authorities do not yet know if it is linked to the student’s murder.
