Mexican mothers reclaim the search for their disappeared children

Americas Now

More than 130,00 murders have taken place in Mexico since 2007, according to the country’s National System of Public Security. And while it’s suspected that many of those murders are a result of the country’s drug war, a large part of them are never investigated. 

Just as disturbing, Mexico’s National Registry for Missing Persons says another 30,000 Mexicans have disappeared in the past decade.

The government’s failure to find them has led to an extraordinary movement of citizen search groups. Most are led by grieving mothers, who are fanning out across the country to find grave sites and dig up their children, even as they face threats by killers who want the disappeared to remain disappeared.

Correspondent Mike Kirsch recently joined citizen groups in one of Mexico’s most murderous regions, the central state of Veracruz.