Most migrants who are disappeared during their journey north come from Central America. They flee impoverished cities and rural communities plagued by climate change and neoliberal policies that force farmers to sell their crops at abysmal rates.
These are people with few resources. And when they disappear, their families lack the necessary support to effectively report or search for them in Mexico and the United States.
In 2005, the Movimiento Migrante Mesoamericano, or MMM, was formed by a group of mothers who have led a caravan through Mexico each year since to demand justice for their disappeared adult children. I followed this year’s caravan of mothers—the first since 2019 due to COVID-19—documenting their journey as they traced the main migrant route.
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MMM is an exercise in collective organizing and alliance-building, and also works to call attention to the dangers that women, in particular, face while migrating.
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The MMM caravan brings together about forty-five mothers from Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua as they search for their children in prisons, brothels, and shelters. In Mexico, the reported number of disappeared migrants quadrupled between 2020 and 2021.
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Rubén Figueroa, an activist and coordinator with MMM, has found more than 300 people alive in the eleven years that he has been part of the organization. He is now searching for his own brother, Freddy Figueroa, who disappeared at the hands of an organized crime group in Cancún, Mexico, during the pandemic.
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Marta Sánchez Soler, the co-founder of MMM, retired from her role in the caravans this year. A tribute to her work was displayed in Mexico’s Senate building in Mexico City.
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In June, Puentes de Esperanza, an organization created by Rubén Figueroa to increase searches in the United States, traveled with the San Diego–based Aguilas del Desierto to provide survival tips to migrants, such as wearing the right shoes, having a charged cellphone, and memorizing the emergency number in case it is needed.
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The XVI Caravan of Mothers traveled to the city of Tuxtla Gutiérrez in Chiapas, Mexico, to lay a wreath on a bridge where, in December 2021, fifty-five migrants died in a horrific truck crash. Their deaths are a part of a pattern highlighted by the recent tragedy in San Antonio, Texas, in which fifty-three migrants died in the back of a tractor-trailer that had no working air-conditioning system.