With more than 135,000 people reported missing in Mexico, groups of so-called madres buscadoras (Spanish for “searching mothers”) have emerged across the Latin American nation and have become a powerful social movement.

A major march is scheduled to take place on August 30 in Hermosillo, the capital and largest city in Mexico’s northwestern Sonora state, to highlight the crisis.

Ceci Patricia Flores, a 53-year-old mother of six who founded a madres buscadoras group in Sonora state, told Crux Now the march is to “make visible our reality of pain and the failure of the authorities to search, investigate and find our missing relatives.” Flores has been inviting citizens and organizations to participate in the effort.

“We have to raise our voices in the face of so much negligence,” she said.

Flores has been searching for her missing children, as well as those of other mothers, since 2019.

“In 2015, one of my sons went missing. In 2019, two others disappeared. The reality is that the authorities have done little to find them,” she said.

Back then, she did not know that so many families were in the same situation. Today, the organization has 3,000 members, most of them mothers.

Flores’s youngest son was eventually released alive by criminals a few years ago, while the remains of another were located only this year, seven years after he disappeared. The third is still missing.

“Over the years, we have helped resolve 5,000 cases. About half of the missing people were found dead,” Flores said.

Father Martín Gerardo Hernández, who is in charge of the Cathedral of the Assumption of Mary in Hermosillo, said his work with the searching mothers began about five years ago.

“A parishioner had her son go missing, and I accompanied her through all her suffering. She then invited me to take part in the group’s gatherings and demonstrations,” Hernández told Crux Now.

Hernández will not only join the demonstrators, but is also inviting parishioners – and Catholics in general – to do so.

The plight of the scores of thousands of missing persons – and the people who search for them – has garnered attention not only from local Church leaders but also at the national level and from the Vatican.

For years, the bishops’ conference and the Jesuits have been fostering the National Dialogue for Peace, a broad coalition to address violence and implement peacebuilding actions in Mexico, which lately has been prioritizing direct assistance to victims of violence.

Increased focus on supporting the madres buscadoras has been part of those recent efforts.

“We had a meeting with the bishops’ conference a couple of months ago, and the prelates praised those actions that involved direct engagement with the people most affected by violence,” Jesuit Father Jorge Atilano, who heads the Dialogue initiative, told Crux Now.

The work of the madres buscadoras was a focus of discussions between the Mexican Church and Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Holy See’s Secretary of State, who visited Mexico from August 4 to 6 after a trip to Guatemala and celebrated a special Mass in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

In his homily, Parolin praised the example of the mothers who “continue to search for their missing children with steadfastness and faith,” and called on Catholics to show prayerful and concrete solidarity with them, “[so] “their perseverance and their faith may be rewarded.”

Meanwhile, more and more dioceses and parishes have been supporting groups of mothers of the disappeared.

In Chiapas, for instance, churches have been implementing the so-called Peace Mailboxes, through which anyone with information about a missing person can leave a note with details that could help locate him or her. The program is being expanded to other dioceses.

The number of people who have gone missing has grown steadily over the past few decades. Most of them are men – around 75 percent – and under 30. While drug cartels are behind many cases, ordinary violence – including violence against women – also accounts for a share of the problem.

Maria Dolores Patrón, a 45-year-old resident of the state of Quintana Roo, is another searching mother, whose story painfully illustrates the struggle.

Patrón’s daughter disappeared in 2020, aged 17. Patrón soon realized that the authorities would not help her. When she reported her daughter’s disappearance, she was told the girl had probably run away with a boyfriend.

“The state didn’t have any special agency at that point to deal with that kind of problem. In 2021, we founded the group,” she told Crux Now.

Over the years, the Quintana Roo group of mothers has managed to locate the graves of 40 missing people and find six disappeared people alive.

“We had to exert a lot of pressure on the state authorities. Now there’s a branch of the District Attorney’s Office in charge of such investigations, with a staff of forensic anthropologists and archaeologists,” Patrón explained.

Patrón also faced a lack of sensitivity from the Church toward her suffering.

“I’m Catholic. When my daughter disappeared, I went to the local priest to find solace. He told me the same thing the authorities had said: ‘She was not kidnapped or killed. She’s young. She probably eloped with a young man.’ I couldn’t believe it,” she recalled.

Patrón said she knew her daughter very well and that she would never have done something like that. Her disappointment with the Church was so intense that she never attended Mass again.

The remains of her daughter were finally located in 2024, buried in the yard of her boyfriend’s parents, just three minutes from Patrón’s house. Her boyfriend was convicted of murdering her and sentenced to 50 years in prison.

“That discovery proved that my feeling about my daughter was right, and that both the DA’s Office and the priest were wrong. If the authorities and the priest tell me the same thing, where can I go for help?” Patrón said.

She said few Christian churches in Quintana Roo are engaged with the issue of missing people.

According to Atilano, more and more people in the Church are becoming aware of the issue, and Catholic engagement with groups of searching mothers is increasing.

That is one of the goals of the National Dialogue for Peace.

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