Searching mother Rubí Patricia Gómez-Tagle was killed in her home in Mazatlán, Sinaloa, on Saturday, 27 February. Rubí was a member of the collective “Corazones unidos por una misma causa”, and she searched for her son, Édgar Daniel López, who disappeared in Mazatlán on 29 May 2025. She also demanded justice for the disappearance of her sister defender, searcher Ángeles Valenzuela, member of the same collective, who disappeared in October 2025.
Rubí is the nineteenth searching woman defender killed in Mexico since 2020; another twenty have survived attempted killings. This is a painful reality that has been on the rise since the crisis of violence and human rights violations unleashed by the so-called “war on drugs” declared by President Felipe Calderón in 2006, which plunged much of the country into a wave of violence and realignment of the de facto distribution of power and capitalist exploitation and dispossession in the different territories. The level of lethality faced by this group of women defenders is deeply troubling: one in three women defenders killed in the country was a searcher. We have documented 1,804 attacks against 395 women defenders and 30 organizations working for the right to truth and justice since 2020, most of whom are searching for their disappeared family members. This accounts for 16% of all attacks against women defenders registered in Mexico in that same period.
Despite efforts made by federal authorities in recent years, we face a structural problem that has been exacerbated by decades of neoliberal policies and dispossession, which have intensified violence and inequality and caused Mexico to remain the country with the highest number of missing persons on the continent. According to the National Registry of Disappeared Persons, 131,991 persons were officially registered as disappeared and unaccounted for as of 7 August 2025.
In this context, given the ineffectiveness, omissions, and - at times - collusion of authorities - primarily at the local level - with organized crime, many mothers, daughters, sisters who have suffered the disappearance of their loved ones have organized themselves in searching collectives and transform their life projects in order to seek truth and justice in hostile territories. In this way they become “searchers” - buscadoras as they define themselves - who, in addition to denouncing and making demands of State authorities, carry out the work of accompanying, investigating and searching on the ground, with scarce resources and insufficient protection measures, in territories frequently controlled by organized crime. Thus, the collectives that search for disappeared persons face a serious reality of attacks due to their role and their increasingly organized strength demanding justice, searching for their family members, demanding their return alive, and demanding that the State comply with its duty to search for the disappeared.
The National Network of Women Human Rights Defenders in Mexico and IM-Defensoras condemn the killing of searching mother Rubí Patricia Gómez-Tagle, and we demand that authorities guarantee justice and reparation for this crime, as well as protection for her family and the other members of the collective “Corazones Unidos por una Misma Causa”.
We urge the authorities and the people of Mexico to respond to the gravity of this situation with a long-term approach that addresses its structural causes, giving priority to policies of justice and social equality over those of security, to the reconstruction of the social and community fabric and to collective action, from a holistic approach to justice that centers care and life, that focuses on reparation and non-repetition, and that does not contribute to further violence.
Finally, we call for international solidarity with the collectives of searching mothers and with what is happening in Mexico - a painful and brutal expression of the same policies of death that, to varying degrees, plague other territories in our region, in Latin America, and across the world.