After 4 Sons Vanish, Their Mother Devotes

Her Life to Mexico’s Missing

Over 100,000 people are missing in Mexico, but even amid this national agony, one mother’s
story stands out both for the scope of her suffering and for her work trying to end the nation’s
nightmare.

After María Herrera Magdaleno’s four sons disappeared, she began advocating for all parents
in Mexico with missing children.

MEXICO CITY — Although a woman of modest means, she has traversed Mexico, filed a
lawsuit against its government, met with United Nations officials and even hugged the pope,
all in the service of one quest: reuniting with her four sons who have disappeared.

“A mother’s heart is in each of her children,” said María Herrera Magdaleno in a recent
interview. Losing them is “the worst thing that can happen in your life.”

As successive governments have failed to end Mexico’s drug wars and the widespread
violence and misery they have wreaked, more than 100,000 people are missing, and the
anguished cries of mothers like Ms. Herrera have become commonplace. They are heard at
protest marches in major cities, in the desert where relatives poke at the ground looking for
corpses and in homes all over the country, where mothers weep alone.

But even amid this national agony, Ms. Herrera’s story stands out, both for the dimension of
the horror she has suffered, and for her activism in trying to end her nightmare and that of so
many of her compatriots.

Doña Mary, as she’s affectionately known, has become a leader among the mothers searching
Mexico for their loved ones, connecting a disparate group of grief-stricken women into a
national movement that has demanded action from a government they say has long ignored
them.
“She is a powerful woman, and she’s a woman who has a capacity to connect, to educate, to
convey things that are not easy to convey,” said Montserrat Castillo an activist for the
disappeared who has known Ms. Herrera for a decade and now works for the organization she
founded, Searching Relatives.

Her first sons to disappear were Raúl and Jesús Salvador in August 2008. The two adult
brothers — Raul was 19 and Jesús Salvador 24 — were helping their mother with the
business she had founded after leaving a husband she believed unfaithful, making her a single
mother looking after her own eight children and two stepchildren.

Ms. Herrera, 73, began by making clothes, selling her handiwork to the families of her
children’s classmates in the village in the western state of Michoacan where she lived. As her
business grew, she began traveling to the nearby city of Guadalajara to buy clothes to sell in
bulk. Eventually, she branched out into selling jewelry, particularly gold pieces.

Ms. Herrera has gone countless times to the states where her sons are believed to have
disappeared, Guerrero and Veracruz, digging in the dirt for any sign of her children.

As the business started to take off, her children joined in, going on the road to buy and sell
gold.

But as their enterprise grew, so too did violence in Mexico: In 2006, then-president Felipe
Calderón launched an all-out war on Mexico’s drug cartels, igniting a bloody battle that still
rages.

Soon, this surging crime wave caught up with Ms. Herrera’s family.

Raúl and Jesús Salvador had gone to neighboring Guerrero state with five colleagues. They
usually came back from such trips by the weekend. When they hadn’t returned by Saturday,
Ms. Herrera said she felt an overwhelming sadness come over her and started crying for no
reason.

“‘I have this feeling that something bad, something awful is happening,’” she recalls telling
one of her daughters-in-law.
Dawn broke on Sunday with still no sign of them. She went to church, unable to stop crying,
despite the priest’s efforts to console her. By nightfall, her sons still hadn’t appeared. Another
one of her sons, Juan Carlos, tried calling but couldn’t reach them.

Neither Raúl nor Jesús Salvador, nor any of their five colleagues, have been seen again.

“It’s something I almost don’t want to remember,” she said through tears. “But it’s so marked
on you that you can’t forget.”

Ms. Herrera went to the local government office in her village to ask for help, but it offered
little support. So she set out with Juan Carlos to the town near where her sons had last been
seen, Atoyac de Álvarez, in Guerrero state.

Violence had overtaken the town, as rival criminal groups fought each other for control.
When Ms. Herrera went knocking door to door asking about her sons, she was met with fear
and hostility.

Ms. Herrera’s missing sons. Clockwise from top left; Jesús Salvador, Raúl, Luís Armando and
Gustavo

“Get out of here,” one resident told her, Ms. Herrera recalled. “Take your children away,
they’re going to kill them!”

They went to the local police station and to a nearby army barracks asking for help, but at best
they were ignored, and in one instance they were threatened, according to Ms. Herrera.
Fed up with the stonewalling, Ms. Herrera traveled to Mexico City and stationed herself
outside the Mexican Senate, begging for help. Eventually, she met a local congresswoman
from Guerrero, who agreed to help her find her sons, lending a government car and helping
file a complaint with the attorney general’s office.

Ms. Herrera began devoting all her time and resources to the search, selling her business to
support the cost. She also forbade her other sons from going out on the road for their gold-
selling business, fearful of what could happen as murders in Mexico soared.

But after two years with no sign of her sons, money started running out. To cut costs when
she traveled to the capital, Ms. Herrera began sleeping at the bus station.

Her children began pressing her to let them travel again.

“‘Mom, let us go out and work,’” she said her son Gustavo asked of her as he drove his
mother to the bus station for another trip to Mexico City. “We don’t have anything left, we’re
going into debt.”

That trip would be the last time she ever spoke to her son.

Just over two years after Raúl and Jesús Salvador had gone missing, Gustavo, 28 at the time,
and his brother Luís Armando, then 24, disappeared while on a work trip in eastern Veracruz
state, where violence was also on the rise.

On hearing the news, Ms. Herrera fell into a deep depression.

“I wanted to die,” she said. “My whole family is destroyed.”

Ms. Herrera said she had no intention of stopping her work on behalf of all the mothers in
Mexico whose children are lost.

At last, the voices of her grandchildren roused her. She began traveling again to Mexico City.
But the process proved fruitless.

“We went to all the national offices in all the places where my children had passed through,”
Ms. Herrera said. “No one gave us an answer.”
Such encounters with a justice system that is inefficient at best and incompetent at worst are
common in Mexico. As of last November, no more than 6 percent of disappearance cases had
resulted in prosecutions, according to the United Nations.

Authorities across the country are known to work in tandem with organized crime, and it is
likely that the local police were involved in or at least had knowledge of all four young men’s
disappearances, according to Sofia de Robina, a lawyer for Ms. Herrera.

In 2011, on one of her trips to follow up with the authorities on the fate of her sons, Ms.
Herrera came across a growing protest movement founded by the Mexican poet Javier Sicilia,
after his son and six other young men were killed by gang members. Called the Movement for
Peace With Justice and Dignity, Mr. Sicilia led caravans across Mexico calling for an end to
violence.

Ms. Herrera went and spoke to a rally in the city of Morelia, taking with her laminated photos
of her four missing sons.

“I heard a harrowing cry when they yelled: ‘You’re not alone, you’re not alone,’” Ms. Herrera
said. “In that cry I felt a kind of strength, and I joined the caravan.”

She traveled the country for two weeks, including to Guerrero and Veracruz. But though she
found no sign of her sons, she did find something else: dozens of other mothers, brothers,
sisters and sons with missing relatives.

“It was something very, very cruel for me to discover that it wasn’t just me,” Ms. Herrera
said. “And from there, we started to share that pain, to share that energy, all this anger, all this
suffering, to know each other and scream as one.”

But solidarity alone could get them only so far.

Ms. Herrera realized all those parents needed more resources and the knowledge of how to
look for their missing children. So she began convincing universities to give workshops on
how to search for missing people, the majority of whom are presumed to be killed and buried
in unidentified graves.

She also began organizing conferences, where women from all over Mexico would learn from
anthropologists and forensic experts how to look for signs of disturbed earth that might point
to a hidden grave, and how to identify human remains.

These women then took their knowledge home, forming their own collectives to perform the
work the government was failing to do: Looking for their children. When Ms. Herrera started
this work, there was just a handful of these groups in the national network she helped found.
Now, there are more than 160.

“We organized ourselves,” she said, “because we learned that from them,” she said, referring
to the criminal gangs.

Ms. Herrera has gone countless times to Guerrero and Veracruz, digging in the dirt for any
sign of her children. So common are clandestine graves in those states, she frequently finds
some kind of human remains. When she or other collectives identify bones or other remains,
they are handed over to the local prosecutor’s office for DNA testing.

As of yet, none of the remains have been identified as her sons.

“It’s something I almost don’t want to remember,” Ms. Herrera said. “But it’s so marked on
you that you can’t forget.”

Her work isn’t without risk: Her family has received threatening phone calls, and in the last
two years, five mothers looking for disappeared children have been killed.

Ms. Herrera has remarried, and although she says she takes comfort in her new relationship,
she can’t truly be happy knowing her sons are still missing.

“Any kind of joy is clouded by this pain,” she said.

And so she has continued her work. In May, she traveled to the Vatican and met Pope Francis,
asking for a blessing for her sons and all the other missing people in Mexico.

“I told him, bless all these mothers who are living through this horrific situation,” she recalls
telling the pontiff. “It’s a terror that we are living through.”

Last week, Ms. Herrera sued the Mexican government before the Inter-American Commission
on Human Rights in Washington, for its possible role in her sons’ disappearance, either
through direct involvement or omission, and for failing to tackle the crisis of disappearance in
Mexico.
Ms. Herrera said she had no intention of stopping her work, not just for her, but for all the
mothers in Mexico whose children are lost.

“As long as God lets me, and until I really can’t any longer, I’m going to keep at it,” she said.
“I understand that pain, you know, that tremendous love.”