Mexican activist who searched for disappeared brother now missing after attack

A Mexican woman who spent five years looking for her disappeared brother has herself been abducted in an attack in which her husband and son were shot dead.

Lorenza Cano, one of Mexico’s many volunteer searchers trying to find the country’s 114,000 desaparecidos, was seized late on Monday by a group of gunmen who burst into her home in the northern city of Salamanca.

Cano’s volunteer group, Salamanca United in the Search for the Disappeared, said the attackers shot and killed Cano’s husband and adult son in the attack and state prosecutors confirmed that Cano remained missing.

At least seven volunteer searchers have been killed in Mexico since 2021. The volunteer searchers often conduct their own investigations – often relying on tips from former criminals – because the government has been unable to help.

Such volunteers usually are not trying to convict anyone for their relatives’ abductions; they just want to find their remains.

Cano had spent the last five years searching for her brother, José Cano Flores, who disappeared in 2018. On Tuesday, Lorenza Cano’s photo appeared on a missing person’s flyer, similar to that of her brother’s.

Guanajuato state, where Salamanca is located, has for years had the highest murder rate in Mexico, thanks to bloody turf battles between local gangs and the Jalisco New Generation cartel.

The Mexican government has spent little on looking for the missing. Volunteers must stand in for nonexistent official search teams in the hunt for clandestine graves where cartels hide their victims. The government hasn’t adequately funded or implemented a genetic database to help identify the remains found.

Victims’ relatives rely on anonymous tips to find suspected body-dumping sites.

If they find something, the most authorities will do is send a police and forensics team to retrieve the remains, which in most cases are never identified.

It leaves the volunteer searchers trapped between two hostile forces: murderous drug gangs and a government more focused on denying the scale of the problem.

In July, a drug cartel used a fake report of a mass grave to lure police into a deadly roadside bomb attack that killed four police officers and two civilians in Jalisco state.

An anonymous caller had given a volunteer searcher a tip about a supposed clandestine burial site near a roadway in Tlajomulco, Jalisco. The cartel buried improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, on the road and then detonated them as a police convoy passed. The IEDS were so powerful they destroyed four vehicles, injured 14 people and left craters in the road.

It is not entirely clear who killed the six searchers slain since 2021. Cartels have tried to intimidate searchers in the past, especially if they went to grave sites that were still being used.

Searchers have long sought to avoid the cartels’ wrath by publicly pledging that they are not looking for evidence to bring the killers to justice and that they simply want their children’s bodies back.

Searchers also say that repentant or former members of the gangs are probably the most effective sources of information they have.