MEXICO CITY (AP) — A Mexican volunteer researcher criticized in the past by the government found more human remains in Mexico City and authorities attacked her for it — again.
The existence of illegal dumpsites is a sensitive subject for the Morena party in power in Mexico. Morena, who is running as Mexico City’s former mayor in Sunday’s presidential elections, says the type of violence plaguing other parts of the country has been successfully fought in the capital.
But volunteer searcher Ceci Flores, who spent years searching for her two missing sons, says that’s because authorities didn’t bother to search for the bodies. It’s a common complaint from relatives of missing people in many parts of Mexico, where drug cartels and kidnapping gangs use shallow graves to dispose of their victims’ bodies.
On Thursday, Flores posted a video showing what appeared to be human femurs and skulls in the tall, dry grass of a hillside east of the city. She suggested there were at least three bodies and noted there could be more on the hillside.
“We don’t want to disturb them,” Flores said in the video, pointing to a pile of bones with his shovel several feet away. “We don’t want to come in and disturb them.”
Flores has previously fought with the government, accusing officials of ignoring the fate of the more than 100,000 people missing in Mexico.
In late April, Flores drew the ire of city prosecutors when she claimed to have found charred bones and identification cards of at least two people in another semi-rural area of eastern California. the city. Prosecutors quickly concluded that the bones were from dogs, that the ID cards had been thrown away or stolen and that their owners were alive.
Shortly afterward, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador released a government-produced video during his daily press briefing, accusing researchers like Flores of morbidity and saying they suffered from a “delusion of necrophilia.”
But on Friday, Mexico City’s acting prosecutor, Ulises Lara, was forced to acknowledge that Flores had indeed found bones and that they were apparently human. Lara said police, forensic experts, National Guard officers and soldiers were dispatched to the scene.
This raises the obvious question of why the vast team of official personnel was never able to find the bodies, while a lone searching mother, armed only with a shovel, did.
Lara attacked Flores without mentioning her by name, saying the “chain of custody” of the evidence had been broken and the bones had been “manipulated.”
“This violated the dignity and respect that people who search for the relatives deserve, and some of them expressed their dissatisfaction with this situation,” Lara said, suggesting that it would have been better not to do so. find.
In a video posted on social media on Saturday, Flores reacted with disbelief.
“Seriously? These remains were unknown. We did the job they were supposed to do,” Flores said. “You (Lara) didn’t even know them, you didn’t know about them, you didn’t locate them .”
Regarding the accusation that other members of his searching family were angered by his actions – mass searches of the type Flores conducts in his native Sonora are not common in Mexico City – Flores retorted: “They should be angry at you for not doing your job.”
López Obrador’s administration has spent far more time and resources searching for people falsely listed as missing – people who may have returned home without informing authorities – than searching for graves that relatives say they have desperately need closure.
Flores is a very accomplished researcher and, like many mothers of missing people, she has a deep sense of mission. One of his sons, Alejandro Guadalupe, disappeared in 2015. His second son, Marco Antonio, was kidnapped in 2019. Authorities have said nothing about either man’s fate.
In his home state of Sonora, authorities confirmed in April that they had identified 45 missing people among 57 sets of remains in a dump known as “El Choyudo,” originally discovered by Flores’ group, The Searching Mothers of Sonora.
Madres buscadoras (mothers in search) generally do not try to blame anyone for the disappearance of their loved ones. They say they just want their remains back. Many families say that not having accurate knowledge of a loved one’s fate is worse than knowing that a loved one has died.
At least seven volunteer researchers have been killed in Mexico since 2021.
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