Cecilia Flores

Cecilia Patricia Flores Armenta known as Ceci Flores is a Mexican human rights activist. She is the founder and leader of Madres Buscadoras de Sonora y de México (searching mothers of Sonora) – a group of women searching for missing or disappeared people in Mexico. Two of Flores’ six children were kidnapped in 2019.

Ceci Flores is from Northern Mexico. Her son, Alejandro along with his boss disappeared in Los Mochis, Sinaloa in 2015. In 2019, two of her children Marco Antonio and Jesús Adrián aged 15 were kidnapped by a cartel. Flores identified one of the men who kidnapped her two sons and threatened him to return her sons. Days later Adrián was released but his brother Antonio remains missing to date.

The search for her son led Flores and other women searching for missing family members to found Searching Mothers of Sonora. The group organize search parties with anti-kidnapping unit of the police but police was inefficient due to lack of fuel and frequent break down of patrol vehicles. In 2021, Flores and her group abandoned the police and decided to reach out directly to the cartels in Sinaloa and Sonora by posting messages on social media making different requests to the cartel.  In one of the messages, Flores made a plea to the cartels: “I’m reaching out to the leaders of the cartels. We’re not looking for justice, all we want is to find our missing loved ones and give them a proper burial,”. The group then posted a specific message on social media requesting the cartels to allow them search La Bartolina, a mass gravesite close to the U.S. border on the Gulf Coast. They asked the cartels to drop a banner by the border fence if they approve their request to search the forest for missing people. Days later, a banner was found and the Searching Mothers went into the forest where they discovered and excavated a mass grave containing human skeletons.

Later, this method was adopted by other groups searching for missing people but the government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador was piqued and accused the searching mothers of colluding with cartels and opposition groups against his government. Flores responded in a video message posted to social media stating that “If I have to go to hell itself, I’ll do it. And if I have to ask narcos for help, I’ll do that too.” On 17 April 2023, Flores was disappeared. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador ordered troops to start an operation to locate her. She was found 15 hours after her disappearance.