After 4 sons vanish, their mother devotes her life to Mexico’s missing

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 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, 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 activ for the disappeared who has known 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.
Herrera, 73, began 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 near city of Guadalajara to buy clothes to sell in bulk. Eventually, she branched out into selling jewelry, particularly gold pieces.
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 Herrera’s family.
Raúl and Jesús Salvador had gone to neighboring Guerrero state with five colleagues. They usually came back from such trips the weekend. When they hadn’t returned Saturday, 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 Sunday with still no sign of them. She went to church, unable to stop crying, despite the priest’s efforts to console her. 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.”
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 Herrera went knocking door to door asking about her sons, she was met with fear and hostility.
“Get out of here,” one resident told her, Herrera recalled. “Take your children away, they’re going to kill them!”

They went to the local police station and to a near army barracks asking for help, but at best they were ignored, and in one instance they were threatened, according to Herrera.
Fed up with the stonewalling, 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.
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, 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, Herrera fell into a deep depression.
“I wanted to die,” she said. “My whole family is destroyed.”
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,” 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% 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 Herrera.
In 2011, on one of her trips to follow up with authorities on the fate of her sons, Herrera came across a growing protest movement founded Mexican poet Javier Sicilia, after his son and six other young men were killed gang members. Called the Movement for Peace With Justice and Dignity, Sicilia led caravans across Mexico calling for an end to violence.
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,’” 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, sers and sons with missing relatives.
“It was something very, very cruel for me to discover that it wasn’t just me,” 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.
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 anthropologs and forensic experts how to look for signs of durbed 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 Herrera started this work, there was just a handful of 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.
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.
None of the remains have been identified as her sons.
Her work isn’t without risk: Her family has received threatening phone calls, and in the past two years, five mothers looking for disappeared children have been killed.
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 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, 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.
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.”