After years without state intervention, relatives of missing persons in Chiapas conduct searches and excavations alongside the local government on land once controlled by organized crime.
Luna the little dog sniffs the damp earth of the ranch Las Pitayas, in the municipality of Emiliano Zapata, Chiapas. She walks around a few times and then sits in the hole that the State Commission for the Search of Persons (CEBP) has just opened with a pickaxe. There, the remnant of a burned military report was found.
“If there were any corpses or skeletal remains, Luna would be digging. She is trained to recognize the smell of decomposition on the ground,” explains a member of the Civil Protection of Chiapas.
Last June 11 was the fourth search that the Attorney General’s Office of the State of Chiapas (FGE), the State Search Commission, the Civil Protection and relatives of missing persons carried out on this ranch. During the first search, on December 11, 2024, they found charred skeletal remains.
“In the ranch Las Pitayas and its surroundings, the telephone data of many disappeared persons in Chiapas converge,” says the Cereza Collective, which accompanies relatives of disappeared persons. “For two years we have been asking the FGE to carry out searches, but it only began to do so last December when there was a change of government.”
From mid-2021, when the conflict for control of territory between the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco Cartel New Generation escalated, the number of missing persons in the state increased exponentially: according to the National Registry of Missing and Unaccounted for Persons (RNPDNO), between 2019 and 2024 the figure quadrupled and currently there are 1,563 cases. In these years, the search profiles began to fill the social networks and a macabre suspicion was insinuated among the population: in Chiapas there must also be clandestine graves.
According to data that the FGE shared with Animal Político following a request for access to information, between December 2024 and February 2025, 12 clandestine graves were found in the state: one in Emiliano Zapata, Soyaló, Palenque and Suchiate, two in Tapachula and six in La Concordia. In some graves bodies were found, 25 in total, and in others skeletal remains or bones. In March the Chiapas authorities stopped the searches, which resumed this month.
One of these organized crime ranches is located very close to the Tuxtla Gutierrez international airport. In March, authorities and the Chiapas-based searchers’ collective Mothers in Resistance combed the Aurora Buenavista ranch, which is located just ten kilometers from the Chiapas capital’s airport, in the municipality of Chiapa de Corzo. In an underground shelter they found tactical vests, helmets, drugs, weapons, cartridges and cocaine. A few kilometers from there is the Las Pitayas ranch.
Next to this arid zone in the center of the state, which the abundant rains of the last month are greening, passes one of the three corridors that the Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas Human Rights Center (Frayba) locates as a transfer route in its report “Chiapas, in the Spiral of Armed and Criminal Violence.” The corridor begins in Ciudad Cuauhtémoc, a town on the border with Guatemala that was recently the scene of an armed confrontation led by the Pakal Immediate Reaction Force (FRIP), passing through Comitán, San Cristóbal de Las Casas and Tuxtla Gutiérrez, ending in Veracruz.
So far, the authorities have combed just over half of the 16 hectares of the Las Pitayas ranch. According to Isabel Torres, member and founder of Mothers in Resistance, during a review of the ranch in which she participated, it was evident that the experts of the Prosecutor’s Office are not well trained in the collection of evidence. “Besides, the Prosecutor’s Office only arrives and sees what is in plain sight. We dig absolutely every corner of the house, any piece of clothing that is found, we check the walls to see if someone was there and wrote something,” says Isabel Torres.
The activist also criticizes the FGE for not moving forward with the investigation of the cases that are accumulating on the shelves of its offices, and the State Executive Commission for Attention to Victims (CEEAV) for not providing adequate support to the Chiapas searchers. At the same time, she points to improvements in the State Commission for the Search for Persons (CEBP), which is assisting its collective with personnel and technological tools. She also points out an important achievement that Mothers in Resistance reached after years of struggle: in mid-May, the Chiapas Congress created a commission to advance in the conformation of the Citizen Council, a body that, according to the law, should have been created in 2019.
“The Citizen Council will allow the participation of families in the State System for the Search for Persons,” explains Isabel, whose daughter Cassandra Isabel Arias Torres, 18, was disappeared on December 17, 2022 in Berriozábal, near Tuxtla Gutiérrez. She was taken from a party hall during Isabel’s wedding by armed men with the initials of the FGE on their chests. Subsequently, Cassandra’s cell phone was geolocated at the Aurora Buenavista ranch, while Isabel’s cell phone, which the kidnappers also took, was geolocated at the Las Pitayas ranch.
The charred skeletal remains, which were found in December 2024 in a septic tank at Las Pitayas ranch, are in such bad condition that it could be difficult to extract their genetic profile and identify them. However, at first, the authorities said that they were three skeletons, of three different people, and the media claimed that they belonged to the members of the group of seven people who disappeared on November 23, 2024, while traveling in an Urvan that was found a few kilometers from the ranch. In reality, the Cereza Collective has doubts that the skeletal remains belong to them, since the geolocation of their cell phones does not lead to the ranch Las Pitayas, although they were in the 20 de noviembre neighborhood, which is near there.
“I had a very bad time because of the news spread by the tabloid media, it was at night and I was dialing and dialing the Prosecutor’s Office, but they did not answer me,” says Kenia García Chulín, a 19 year old young woman who has been looking for her parents and her 12 year old brother since that day.
Along with the relatives of other people traveling in that Urvan, on June 11, Kenia accompanied the search of the Las Pitayas ranch. She pressed the authorities to search thoroughly, pointing out pits, corners and a spot in the grass where there was ash: there, they found the burned military uniform.
“How deep can you find remains?” she asked a member of the State Search Commission, who was digging in the burned spot indicated by Kenya. “Sixty-seventy centimeters, they don’t bother to dig any deeper,” he replied.
A little further on, next to the septic tank where the skeletal remains were found and a pochota whose trunk is full of bullet impacts, the FGE found two metal drums that they suspect could have been used to burn bodies, and which will be analyzed in a laboratory.
“I don’t feel there is much transparency on the part of the FGE. There are loose threads in the reconstruction of the facts that it has not been able to sew together: one day it gives us one piece of information and the next day it gives us another, where details come out that were not mentioned in the previous meetings,” says Kenia.
“We, the families who have been in this search for seven months, were able to detect some gaps. I think that for us it is very important to walk hand in hand as relatives before the institutions, that more than the perpetrators, we are looking for our missing loved ones.”
Original text by Orsetta Bellani in Animal Político on June 16th, 2025.
Translated by Schools for Chiapas.