Women whose children are missing are ignoring stay-at-home orders to search for them. For these women, searching for mass graves in a bid to find their loved ones is an essential activity.
Once a week, María Isabel Cruz Bernal puts on her gloves, face mask, goggles, ski mask, and other special garments to search for her son, Yosimar García Cruz, a municipal police officer who went missing in Sinaloa three years ago.
Even though the members of Sabuesas Guerreras (Warriors Hounds) are not staying at home, they also implement special measures to protect themselves against COVID-19; for example, they reduced their number of weekly trips and the number of people who participate in each search party for mass graves. They say they keep looking for their loved ones because if they don’t, not one else will.
Sabuesas Guerreras (Warrior Hounds), is a group formed by 370 mothers, who are looking for their missing children or loved ones.
According to María Isabel: “the truth is, although we protect ourselves, we sometimes forget that coronavirus exists, but we are already dead, what can a virus do to us, when the worst plague already inflicted us a lethal pain: the death of our children. ”
For years, these Mexican women have been looking for their children without the support of authorities. In recent weeks, every time they request the help of the Attorney General’s Office in Sinaloa, the office staff say they are too busy handling the COVID-19 situation.
María Isabel explains that on April 9, when the group of women found human remains in Palmillas, Culiacán, experts from the Attorney General’s Office told them to put the remains in a plastic bag and send them to them so they could analyze it.
Isabel says that authorities haven’t asked them to stop looking for human remains or mass graves amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
The activities carried out by these Mexican mothers prove that their pain tortuous and continuous, they can’t stop searching for their loved ones amid a pandemic or Mother’s Day.
Meanwhile, Isabel is waiting for authorities to notify her in case some of the remains she has found throughout the years belong to her son.
Source: El Universal