Beatriz Uscanga’s life changed forever on September 4, 2025. That day, at 8:45 a.m., she received the last call from her 18-year-old son, Sebastián Menéndez Hernández. He was at the New Bus Station in Tlaquepaque, Jalisco, waiting for a flatbed truck that, he said, had been sent to take him to a job interview. He hasn’t answered since.
His phone went dead, and his trail disappeared.
Sebastián is now part of the history of disappearances at the bus terminal, a location that has become a scene of forced recruitment through false job offers.
His mother, originally from Cosamaloapan, Veracruz, embarked on a two-day bus journey of more than 900 kilometers to reach Jalisco and search for him. She missed an emergency flight she tried to take, but nothing stopped her: “I’m not leaving here until I get my son back,” she says.
On August 30, she left home to return to Querétaro. Days later, she told her mother she had “a surprise.” She listened to him uneasily, feeling that something wasn’t right.
The suspicion was confirmed on September 4, when Sebastián called her from the Tlaquepaque bus station:
“Sebastian’s ticket was paid for, Sebastián didn’t buy it, someone else paid for my son’s ticket, and they also sent him the Uber. I yelled at him on the phone to get help, and he hung up on me, telling me he was just going to an interview, and on his way back from the interview, he’d call me back. From the moment he got into the Uber, I immediately called him back… three minutes later, his phone was completely off.” Since then, she hasn’t heard from him.
Upon learning of the disappearance, she wanted to file a report in Veracruz, but was warned that the process could take up to six months to reach Jalisco. So she decided to travel herself.
She arrived in Guadalajara on September 11 and filed a formal report. “I couldn’t even get a form. If you’re not from here, you can’t do anything; you have to go to the state police,” she recalls.
In Guadalajara, I didn’t know anyone. “Here I am in a place, in a support center that’s very good, very safe, for mothers like me. There are psychologists, there are lawyers, there’s a myriad of other things, but for me, the doors that have been opened for me everywhere are from them, thanks to them.”
