The heat hangs heavy and leaden near the ocean’s edge. Hours pass; patrols seek out patches of shade, officials fan themselves, journalists lean back to rest—but they press on: walking, asking questions, pressing for answers, taking notes—jotting down a name, a date, a place they’ve never heard of. They work with the life jackets from their recent boat journey still strapped to their bodies; they don’t take them off, just in case there isn’t enough time. They have spent 16 months searching, and this is the first time they have been able to do so while standing on the very ground their missing loved ones—their children, a grandson, a brother—once trod; gazing at the mangroves, the palm-thatched roofs, the lagoon that kisses the Pacific—everything they are certain—absolutely certain—their loved ones saw as well.
On December 21, 2024, all trace of 40 migrants was lost in San José El Hueyate, Chiapas, Mexico. They had boarded a boat bound for Juchitán de Zaragoza, Oaxaca—also in Mexico. They were never heard from again. The families didn’t know—couldn’t have known—that another group, comprising at least 20 people, had vanished from that very same spot, along that very same route, just two months earlier: on October 21, 2024.
And yet another group—23 migrants strong—had also vanished from a nearby port, heading toward that same destination, on September 5, 2024. They—the detectives—number seven; they—the missing—number 83. There could be more; they don’t know—they have no way of knowing.
Alicia Santos, Isis Pérez, Elizabeth Guevara, Margarita Bravo, and Lázara Fernández have arrived from Cuba. Óscar Hernández comes from Honduras, and José Quindil from Ecuador. After 16 months, the government has finally granted them entry visas, allowing them to come into the country to “search.” To search: to put up posters bearing familiar faces; to ask questions—endless questions; to learn names they had never heard before. The permit—and this is important—is not for conducting investigations.
That, they are told, is a task for the Chiapas Attorney General’s Office—the very office holding the case file on their loved ones, yet which, in over a year, has failed to even trace the phones of the missing persons, their *coyotes*, or the last people to see them; an office that has summoned no one for questioning, established no investigative leads, and, least of all, made any arrests.
“We wish the Attorney General’s Office had done more before we arrived,” says Margarita Bravo. “We gave them enough information to conduct a search, and they didn’t do it,” adds Isis Pérez. “The fact that we have to be here searching for our children ourselves means the authorities haven’t done their job,” remarks Alicia Santos. These individuals—taxi drivers, accountants, biologists, retirees, homemakers, and government employees—have boarded a plane for the very first time; they have crossed their national borders for the very first time; and they have landed in a country of which the only thing they knew was that it had swallowed up their families.
The lack of answers from the Mexican Attorney General’s Office—which took nearly a year just to provide them with their case number—has left the migrants reeling, yet it comes as no surprise within a country that records over 130,000 missing persons, whom their families are left to search for entirely on their own.
Just this week, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) highlighted a reality that the UN had already warned of on several occasions: in Mexico, disappearances are “widespread” and “indiscriminate”—a humanitarian crisis that can strike anyone, and one that is either enabled by or actively involves state agents. Claudia Sheinbaum’s administration maintains that addressing this crisis is now a “national priority”; yet the last time—this past Monday—that officials dared to utter those words aloud, they were drowned out by the cry of a mother who has spent 21 years searching for her daughter: “What hope can any victim in this country possibly have?” Silence.
