Mexico City marchers on Mother’s Day demand authorities find missing children

Hundreds of demonstrators marched in Mexico City on Monday to mark Mother’s Day, demanding that authorities find their missing children.

The march is an annual event that takes place every Mother’s Day in Mexico City, The Associated Press reports. According to the Mexican government, more than 80,000 people have gone missing since the drug war in Mexico began in 2006.

Demonstrators chanted, “Where are our children, where are they?” and “Child, listen, your mother is searching for you.”

Interior Secretary Olga Sanchez met with some mothers early on Monday and “repeated the government’s desire to find out the location of their relatives,” according to her office.

Madres de personas desaparecidas en México se movilizan en la CDMX para demandar al gobierno que busque a sus hijos. Son 80 mil los casos registrados en los últimos 15 años, la mayor parte entre 2006 y 2012 #DiaDeLasMadres pic.twitter.com/xxeJ58n2kr

— Eduardo Martinez (@EduardomteleSUR) May 10, 2021

“It has been a pilgrimage, searching, searching and searching for justice,” Martha Estela Arana, whose son Alfredo Quesada Arana went missing 11 years ago, told the AP. “Administrations come and go, and it’s always the same. And we will continue searching, searching for them, to the last breath in my body.”

Most of those who disappear are presumably abducted and killed by drug cartels or kidnapping gangs, the AP notes. However, authorities and police are suspected of being behind some disappearances as well.

Not only mothers were in attendance. Some children who had to grow up without their parents also called on the government find them.

Maricarmen Cardona, 23, began marching with her mother when she was 11, calling on authorities to find her father who went missing in Piedras Negras in 2009.