Through an anonymous message from the criminals who made her son disappear, activist Cecilia Patricia Flores Armenta, leader of the Collective Mothers Searching for the Disappeared in Sonora, northwestern Mexico, allegedly found this Thursday the remains of one of her two disappeared children. .
The remains of the body found, possibly belong to his son Marco Antonio Sauceda Rocha, whose body was abandoned in the Sonora desert.
Flores is a single mother of six children and has experienced the disappearance of three of them. The first, Alejandro, 21, disappeared on October 30, 2015, kidnapped in the community of Juan José Ríos, on the way to the city of Los Mochis in the neighboring state of Sinaloa.
The other two, Marco Antonio, 32, and Jesús Adrián, 15, were kidnapped by a cartel in Bahía de Kino, Sonora, on May 4, 2019. The minor was released, but the eldest is missing.
Due to these episodes, Flores founded, at the end of 2015, the group of women that searches for more than 7,000 disappeared people in Mexico and that during the time they have been tracking in regions controlled by organized crime, they have found more than 2,000 bodies in clandestine graves or crematoriums.
“Where the fence begins, there is a gate, you remove it, they are going to enter and there it is and that is what we did,” said the woman, “remove the gate, enter and here it was, it is the only body there at the moment and well, based on the information What does that person (anonymous) give me? I think it could be my son, in fact, when we passed right here, my daughter told me that she dreamed of her brother,” Flores Armenta narrated.
Accompanied by personnel from the National Commission for the Search for Missing Persons and agents from the National Guard and the Sonora Prosecutor’s Office, in addition to a dozen women looking for their relatives, Flores Armenta arrived at the place where the anonymous messenger assured her that they had abandoned the body of his son.
“I dreamed that he (my brother) was coming from that side and I was walking from this side, since we met he told me: ‘so close they were chubby and they couldn’t find me,” said Cecilia Guadalupe Valenzuela Flores, the victim’s sister.
“I feel very bad, but at the same time happy because I think I already deserved to return home,” added his sister.
After the discovery, the Forensic Scientific Intelligence Laboratory of the National Search Commission must carry out the genetic comparison tests to determine if the skeletal remains found correspond to Marco Antonio.
The “searching mother,” as thousands of women who move around the country in the hope of finding their disappeared children are known in Mexico, said she will continue to search for her children because she still has to find Alejandro.
Just last April 17, the activist was declared missing after being held incommunicado for searching along the coast, accompanied by State Police agents who always guard her.
For her work, the activist has been threatened by the Sinaloa Cartel, the Jalisco Nueva Generación Cartel and Rafael Caro Quintero’s “La Plaza”, criminal groups that operate in northwestern Mexico.
Last Tuesday, Teresa Magueyal, a mother who was looking for her missing son in the state of Guanajuato, central Mexico, was murdered in the San Miguel Octopan community, located in the municipality of Celaya, where her son José Luis disappeared in April 2020. .
Magueyal became the first activist of her kind to lose her life this year.
In 2022, according to figures from the Mexican government, 5 activists searching for missing persons were murdered.
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