The mothers who search for Mexico’s missing children

The mariachi band had just struck up its first ranchera when Axel grabbed his mother’s hand.

“Come on, mama!” the lanky 16-year-old shouted, spinning Daniela beneath a canopy of paper lanterns glowing in the warm night air.
The courtyard pulsed with music and laughter as cousins joined in, skirts twirling and shoes scuffing the ground. When Daniela tried to slip away to rest, her son pulled her back, draping his favourite grey hoodie over her shoulders and tugging her by the sleeves.

That was in April 2022.

Six months later, Daniela Gonzalez was knee-deep in a ravine filled with refuse searching for her son.

Two months after the family wedding where they’d danced until the early hours, Axel disappeared.
Searching for graves
It is a sunny, cloudless morning in May 2025, and Daniela is preparing to lower herself some 20 metres (66 feet) into a ravine in Palmas Axotitla, a hillside neighbourhood in the borough of Alvaro Obregon.

The area is a maze of flat-roofed, two- and three-storey homes tightly packed along steep streets, with narrow alleyways snaking between them. The ravine cuts through the neighbourhood, edged by houses with protruding concrete foundations and a small playground.

The ravine’s steep slopes are littered with rubbish, broken furniture and plastic bottles tangled in the dense undergrowth. Sewage collects into foul, foaming streams amid the vegetation and rubbish at the bottom of the ravine.
It is a place residents avoid.

The neighbourhood, like several others in Alvaro Obregon, is under cartel control. Rival gangs use the dead-end streets as hiding grounds from which to sell drugs and recruit young men, and the ravine as a dumping ground for their murder victims. In 2021, authorities recovered human remains from the Palmas Axotitla ravine. More bodies are believed to be buried there.

Daniela arrives at the ravine at around 8 am. She is not alone. More than 100 people gather at the ravine’s edge, entering the site through an opening in the rusted playground fence.

Most are family members of the missing. It took them a year to obtain permission from the local authorities to conduct a five-day search operation at the site. They have come in the hope that among the piles of rubbish, they might find the remains of their sons and daughters, siblings, husbands and wives.

Alongside the families are more than 20 members of Mexico City’s fire brigade, who will help with the search, armed police and National Guard troops, who will scan the hillsides for cartel “lookouts” who may attack those searching if they get too close to their clandestine burial sites, and forensic specialists who set up stainless steel tables ready to examine any remains that are found.

Daniela and the other mothers say such large operations only happen after they exert pressure on the Mexico City authorities to accompany them, and that, in many cases, searches may not have been necessary had the authorities taken their loved ones’ disappearances seriously when they were first reported. When security forces are present, it can feel like a display for local news outlets, they add. And most of the time, families search on their own.

“We’re the ones who find,” Daniela explains.

“This work we do,” she says, “is resistance. It’s re-existence. It’s love.”

Into the ravine
Around Daniela, mothers in sunhats tighten the laces of their waterproof boots. In the playground, volunteers stretch a tarp for shade and set out water bottles.

After pulling on a surgical mask to shield against the stench, Daniela clips into a safety rope and climbs down into the ravine. The air is damp and heavy with the smell of rotting food and animal carcasses. She starts to turn over torn mattresses and twisted wire with a pitchfork.

“I still search with the hope that he’s alive,” the 40-year-old mother of three explains.

Voices echo around her, a mix of shouted instructions and quiet prayers. Metal tools occasionally strike stone. Possible “lookouts” are spotted by family members, but disappear into the alleyways before officers can reach them.At around noon, the harsh sun bearing down on her, Daniela plunges her pitchfork into the sludge and pulls out a crumpled hoodie. It is dark with mud. Her hands tremble as she turns it over. But the logo is wrong. The size is different. It’s not Axel’s.

Later that afternoon, when the day’s search ends, she stands near a stream of black wastewater falling from a cluster of orange brick houses peering over the cliff face. “I thought I had found him,” she says, her words catching in her throat.

“I felt this shock, like my chest caved in. And then nothing — it wasn’t his. I just have to keep going.”