They all appear, forming two lines, facing each other. The coyote points his cell phone at them and announces: “These clients are now ready to leave for the city of Juchitán and continue their journey to Mexico City.” The video ends with the same question all human traffickers end with: “Is everything okay?” Some answer, others give a thumbs-up. It’s the last recording. After those 17 seconds, all trace of the 23 people in the image is lost: five are children. It is September 5th, 2024, on the coast of Chiapas, southern Mexico. The group, from Ecuador, the Dominican Republic, Jordan, and Venezuela, has been waiting for a couple of days in a safe house in Puerto Madero, about 40 kilometers from the Guatemalan border. They are supposed to board a boat bound for Oaxaca; the journey, they tell their families, is supposed to take about nine hours. Instead, more than a year has passed. There is still no trace of them. All that is known is that three months later, on that same stretch of coast, another 40 migrants would go missing after also boarding boats bound for the same destination. While Mexico remains on the sidelines, a series of mass disappearances are marking its land.
“My husband is the shortest in the video, the third from the left,” Alma Pérez says in a video call about Luis Ángel Suárez, originally from Maracaibo (Venezuela). Below Luis is Myriam Godos with her son Julio Cobos, then 13, both from Machala (Ecuador). Six-year-old Charlotte González, with braids and a pink backpack, is resting her hand on Julio, and behind her is her mother, Camila Villa. The two children from the Dominican Republic, like Rafaela Fermín and Juan Sebastián Martínez: “My son is the one in the black t-shirt, sitting on the ground, in front,” says María Sofía Acevedo on the other side of the screen. From Jordan, Lubna identifies her brother Mohammad Ali with a green circle and her other traveling companion, Mohammad Sobh, with a purple one. Mayra’s relatives close the group: on the left, Silvia Obando with her 14-year-old son, Jared Calvache; and on the right, her other son, Alejandro Calvache, 15, and her husband, “a chubby man in a blue T-shirt,” Jorge Calvache. The four arrived from Guayaquil, Ecuador, to this place in the Pacific. In every interview, these mothers and sisters insist: “They just wanted a better life.”
They all shared a destination. Before Donald Trump’s return to the White House, the United States seemed like a talisman against the extortion, violence, and poverty of their countries. Their route broke down in Mexico. Not one family has managed to get the country’s authorities to start searching for them. Most have not even been able to file a complaint with the prosecutor’s office, overwhelmed by a crisis of 133,000 missing people. At the time of writing this report, many of these women are still battling with the National Search Commission to obtain at least a search card, a record proving that these 23 people existed, that they passed through Mexico, and that they disappeared here.
Julio’s Stamp
At a small farewell party, Julio Cobos dances with his mother to the rhythm of a cumbia. On August 30th, the two will begin a journey that will take them out of Ecuador and through Peru, El Salvador, and Guatemala before reaching Mexico. Three days later, the expression of this studious boy and fan of Orense, his hometown’s soccer club, has changed. Julio, who was dancing in his front yard with his arms raised, now seriously displays the black stamp that the coyotes have given him to enter Tapachula. This border city was an open-air prison during the worst moments of the migratory stampede and has now become a sort of distribution center for organized crime groups. From here, they send migrants, weapons, and drugs north along various routes; mostly by land, but others by sea.For some years now, the Sinaloa Cartel—now divided into two factions—and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) have been killing, kidnapping, and extorting money for control of this lucrative piece of land. Here, migrants are both prey and trophy. Hence the stamps and marks, which differentiate who has paid for their passage and who could still be locked up. They also stamped the Calvache Obando family. Silvia, Jorge, Alejandro, and Jared had to leave Guayaquil because of the “vaccines.” “My aunt had set up a small grocery store, a shop in her house, and they began asking her for money daily to protect her,” Mayra explains. “This extortion is now a typical situation in Ecuador.” Furthermore, the eldest son was facing sexual harassment, for which he had already been threatened. Faced with the siege of violence, the four thought it best to go to the United States, where part of the family lived. But first, they had to cross Mexico.
On September 3rd, 2024, a coyote, identified as JR, took them to a “beach house” in Puerto Madero. “It was a very large house, with only hammocks, and they took turns sleeping. Many people from different countries arrived there; that place was the gathering point,” Mayra summarizes. “They couldn’t leave on the road until a certain number of people gathered, because they arrived with several guides and had to wait until the armed group arrived.”
Camila Villa, 27, and her daughter Charlotte also arrived at that farm. They had come from Tenares, Dominican Republic, where the woman worked as a secretary at the city hall. “My sister had a good job, but her husband was in the United States,” explains Rosa Villa, who adds that the young woman was in a hurry to go help her family: “She’s the one who cares the most about us. She’s very kind, loving, and attentive. Everyone loved her.” While waiting in Puerto Madero, they met Juan Sebastián Martínez, 25, also Dominican, who was also on his way to join his wife in the US. “He told me he was with other people. He told me about a girl and a young woman from Tenares, that they were talking a lot, that they had become friends, but that he was, however, scared,” says his mother, María Sofía Acevedo.
The last to arrive in the group were the Jordanians. Mohammad Ali and Mohammad Sobh left on August 23rd from Zarqa, a city very close to the border with Israel. After a journey of more than 12,000 kilometers, which included five European and Latin American countries, they arrived in Tapachula on September 1st. “My brother told me that the city wasn’t safe, that everything was very complicated, that the food they were given wasn’t good,” Lubna Ali said via WhatsApp. “He didn’t think Mexico was like that. He had heard many things about the country, but he didn’t expect that.”
The group tried to head north on September 4th, Luis Suárez told his wife, but “supposedly the security forces surrounded them and they had to turn back.” “They finally left on the 5th,” says Alma Pérez, who recalls that a short while before, Luis, who was working at a market unloading bananas in Colombia, sent her a photo of some new things he had bought (a backpack, a couple of shirts, a pair of jeans) for the next leg of the journey. “Around 11:00 a.m., he texted me: ‘Honey, we’re leaving now.’ ‘All set, my love, may God protect you.’ From then on, he stopped calling me; communication was lost, and we never heard from anyone,” she summarizes.
“Mommy, I’ll drop you off. I’ll call you when we get to Juchitán, which is nine hours away. The buses are already packed, they’re calling me. We’ll talk when I get there,” María Sofía Acevedo recalls Juan saying on their last call. “They’re going to take away our phones. They’ve already arranged a bus, now we just need the one to pick us up,” Rosa Villa recalls Camila telling her: “And that was the only thing.” Myriam Godos spoke to her eldest son, who had stayed behind in Ecuador: “Son, I’ll let you know if I leave today. Don’t worry, and please eat.” She said goodbye to her sister Verónica at 2:20 p.m. Ecuador time.
Most families didn’t know the trip was going to be by boat. Many believe that even the migrants themselves weren’t aware. “They were going to go by road, but I don’t know what happened. The route changed at the last minute, and to everyone’s surprise, they told us they had gone by sea,” Mayra notes. Rosa Villa found out about the boat after her sister and niece had already disappeared. “From the first night, we couldn’t sleep because she didn’t give us a single message or a single call. She kept talking at every turn. Until the morning of the 6th, after insisting, the coyote told us: ‘Don’t worry, it’s just that the boat broke down, they had a problem.’ And I said: ‘What do you mean by boat?’
All the families desperately went to the last coyotes who had seen their missing loved ones. Of all the versions they received about them—that they drowned, that the Navy chased them, that they were taken by a tuna boat, that they were shot—the one they most strongly believe is the one that includes kidnapping. “The boat broke down. Then, supposedly, they left them in a mangrove swamp, and some motorcycles arrived and took the people away. “They took them to a warehouse called La Gallera, and from there they separated them,” says Alma Pérez, according to what a person they hired found out: “Afterwards, he told us he didn’t want to continue collaborating because he was already very annoyed and didn’t want to get into trouble. And that was the end of our investigation.”
In the fight between organized crime groups on the border, EL PAÍS documented the mass kidnapping of migrants, who were placed in cockfighting cells or in places they called “galleras.” It also recorded the constant inaction of Mexican security forces regarding the transfer and the abuse of migrants. Now the mistreatment has also extended to their families, who have received dozens of extortion and threats, cornered with the promise of information. “A young man called me, told me he was from a cartel and that they had my sister working. He asked me for money and promised a call with her. A few days later, I got tired of waiting and wrote to him. He told me they didn’t want the money anymore: ‘Don’t worry, we’re getting enough out of your sister,'” Rosa Villa recounts.
The families have filed complaints with the foreign ministries of Ecuador, the Dominican Republic, and Jordan, but so far, none of them have received a single update. The 12 members of the group from Ecuador face an added challenge: their country’s government, led by Daniel Noboa, has no diplomatic relations with Mexico since the armed forces stormed the Mexican embassy in Quito to seize former Vice Minister Jorge Glas. “Since there is no embassy in Mexico, we have no support. Our complaint only reached Guatemala. We are helpless; no one wants to help us,” Verónica Godos remarks.
This story, with other protagonists, has already been told. But it must be told again, because it repeats itself and becomes twisted. This June, EL PAÍS revealed a mass disappearance in San José El Hueyate and how, despite complaints to the State Attorney General’s Office and the Attorney General’s Office, no authority had taken even the slightest action to find them. Now there are 23 more people, who disappeared even earlier, and whose families continue to replay the last video, searching for clues in farewell glances.
Original article by Beatriz Guillén, El País, September 14, 2025.
Translated by Schools for Chiapas.