Mexican authorities again criticize volunteer researcher after she finds more bodies

MEXICO CITY (AP) — A Mexican volunteer researcher criticized in the past by the government has found more remains in Mexico City and authorities have attacked her for it — again.

The existence of clandestine dumping sites for bodies is sensitive to the Morena party, in power in Mexico. Morena, who is running for president against the former mayor of Mexico City in Sunday’s elections, says the type of violence that is plaguing other parts of the country has been successfully combated in the capital.

But volunteer researcher Ceci Flores, who spent years searching for her two missing children, says that’s because authorities didn’t bother to look for the bodies. It is a common complaint from relatives of missing people in many parts of Mexico, where drug cartels and kidnapping gangs use shallow pits to dispose of the bodies of their victims.

On Thursday, Flores posted a video showing what appeared to be human femurs and skulls in tall, dry grass on a hillside on the city’s east side. She suggested there were at least three bodies and noted there could be more on the hillside.

“We don’t want to bother them,” Flores said in the video, pointing to a pile of bones with his shovel several feet away.

Flores has sparred with the government before, accusing authorities of ignoring the situation of the more than 100 thousand missing people in Mexico.

At the end of April, Flores drew the ire of city prosecutors when she claimed to have found charred bones and at least two people’s identity cards in another semi-rural area on the city’s east side. Prosecutors quickly concluded that the bones were those of dogs and that the identification cards had been discarded or stolen and that their owners were alive.

Shortly afterwards, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador played a government-produced video at his daily press conference, accusing people like Flores of morbidity and claiming that they suffered from “a delusion of necrophilia.”

But on Friday, Mexico City’s acting prosecutor, Ulises Lara, was forced to acknowledge that Flores had in fact found bones and that they were apparently human. Lara said police, forensic experts, National Guard officers and soldiers were sent to the scene.

This raised the obvious question of why the vast official human resources team was never able to find the bodies, while a lone mother, armed only with a shovel, did.

Lara attacked Flores without mentioning her by name, claiming that “the chain of custody” of the evidence had been broken and the bones had been “handled.”

“This violated the dignity and respect that people who look for family members deserve, and some of them expressed their dissatisfaction with this situation,” said Lara, implying that it would have been better not to have found them.

In a video posted on social media on Saturday, Flores reacted with disbelief.

“Seriously? These remains were unknown. We did the work they were supposed to do,” Flores said. “You (Lara) didn’t even know about them, had no knowledge of them, didn’t locate them.”

Regarding the accusation that other relatives they were searching for were angered by their actions – mass searches of the kind Flores conducts in his hometown of Sonora are not common in Mexico City – Flores responded: “they should be angry with you for not doing your job.”

López Obrador Administration spent much more time and resources searching for people falsely listed as missing — people who may have returned home without notifying authorities — than searching for graves that family members say they desperately need to close.

Flores is a very talented searcher and, like many mothers of missing people, has a deep sense of mission. One of her sons, Alejandro Guadalupe, disappeared in 2015. Her second son, Marco Antonio, was kidnapped in 2019. Authorities told her nothing about the fate of either of them.

In his home state of Sonora, authorities confirmed in April that they had identified 45 missing people among 57 sets of remains in a body dump known as “El Choyudo,” which was originally discovered by the Flores group The Searching Mothers of Sonora.

“Search mothers” generally do not try to convict anyone of the disappearance of their relatives. They say they just want to find his remains. Many families say that not having definitive knowledge of a relative’s fate is worse than knowing that a loved one has died.

At least seven volunteer researchers have been killed in Mexico since 2021.