Argentina’s families eventually found the political change that made justice possible. Mexico’s are still waiting. Why have these family members, rather than the state, become the principal investigators of their disappeared loved ones?
Every Thursday since 1977, mothers in white headscarves walk around the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires. The Casa Rosada stands behind them, the seat of government that refused to tell them where their children were.
Thousands of miles away, a group of women comb through the deserts of Sonora, Mexico, trying to find the remains of their missing children. They are not forensic scientists. They are mothers, sisters, and wives of people who vanished. They are searching because ,“the government is completely useless”.
Argentina’s families eventually found the political change that made justice possible. Mexico’s are still waiting. Why have these family members, rather than the state, become the principal investigators of their disappeared loved ones?
Argentina
In Argentina, the reason was simple. The state could not be trusted because it was the perpetrator. After the 1976 military coup, an estimated 30,000 people were, according to human rights groups, disappeared and held in a clandestine network of detention centres by the military dictatorship (1976-1983). Some children were sent to live with military families, under new names. Only relatives who knew of their birth had any chance of finding them.
Given the corrupt state of the government, society took matters into their own hands. Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo, and the subsequent ‘Abuelas’, formed a powerful collective. Forging alliances with scientific specialists, journalists, and lawyers, they managed to bring about the ´índice de abuelidad´; allowing children to be identified without DNA from their parents. They also helped to conceive Articles 7,8, and 11 in the International Convention on ‘The Rights of the Child’ which granted a new right, the right to identity. This has granted once-appropriated children the possibility to reunite with their real families. Thanks to this progress, ‘The Abuelas’ have restored the identity of 140 grandchildren.
But how much can independent searches achieve? In Argentina, it wasn´t until the return to democracy in 1983, when President Alfonsin, leader of the Radical Civic Union, that justice could even begin to be discussed. His government created CONADEP (National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons), whose report ´Nunca Más´ (Never Again) confirmed around 9,000 disappearances, and gave the first official acknowledgement that the military dictatorship was responsible. It’s evidence fed into the 1985 trial of the Junta leaders, resulting in the long overdue punishment of those leaders responsible for the disappearances.
Mexico
In the Mexican case, disappearances since the 2006 War on Drugs have been orchestrated in the form of a collusion between state forces and organised crime groups. The Ayotzinapa case of 2014 evidences this collaboration: Municipal police worked with a criminal group to carry out the disappearance of 43 students. Despite the National Search Commission’s claim that disappearances are a ´national priority´, Independent expert panel GIEI rejected the government's account of the situation. Officials have repeatedly maintained that the missing are involved with criminal activity though there is no substantial evidence to prove this. Mexico does have a national search system, but families say it is inadequate. The state, in this light, should be considered an unreliable ally.
Las Madres Buscadores in Mexico are part of a wider collective of several groups. Relying on their own resources, they have come to study the identification and analysis of remains, the excavation of graves, and have constructed a network of emotional support for mothers. All of this is pursued at great personal risk. Amnesty International has documented killings, threats, displacement and criminalisation of searchers - with at least thirty killed between 2011 and 2025.
Yet researchers argue that these organisations, despite their best efforts, simply don’t have the capacity, forensic equipment or political access to find, or advocate on behalf of the growing number of disappeared Mexicans. Civil society efforts are not to be underestimated: following Ayotzinapa, Mexican campaigners prompted the UN to call for ‘rigorous intervention’ and attracted the attention of international funders. But the ‘structural’ nature of the crisis, as Amnesty International describes it, makes Mexico a complex case. The lines between state and non-state perpetrators are blurred, leaving searchers with little but themselves to draw on.
Hopeful developments
Recent months have brought both pressure and promises. This month, Mexican officials presented their search strategy at the UN in New York, reporting that more than 16,000 people have been located this year and that an expert group is reviewing the national registry’s methodology. Moreover, in April, the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances found well-evidenced indications that enforced disappearances in Mexico have been, and continue to be, committed as crimes against humanity, and asked for the situation to be referred to the General Assembly. This is not just encouraging, but genuinely a development capable of meaningful change. Argentina’s story proved that legal interference produces positive progress.
However, more people are yet to be found. In Buenos Aires, the women still walk on Thursdays, decades on, in hope of relocating their loved ones. In the deserts of Sonora, others are still searching. The UN’s referral and new arrests suggest the world is watching - and this could be transformational. However, Argentina’s experience demonstrates that attention and accountability are not synonymous. Families can find answers independently. The mobilisation of justice, it seems, requires politics. For Mexico’s searchers, that moment has not yet arrived, their relentless search continues, as one Mother affirms; ‘A Mother’s love has no limits’.