Patricia Acosta Rangel and her daughter Katia Citlali Jáuregui Acosta spent two years searching for a missing son and brother. They found him in a clandestine grave in La Ordeña last year. On Mother's Day 2026, they were gunned down on a Salamanca street corner - the third member of their search collective murdered this year.
The pair were riding a motorcycle at the intersection of Calle Estado de México and Estado de Durango in the 18 de Marzo neighborhood when armed gunmen opened fire at close range. According to witness accounts, the assailants discharged multiple rounds before fleeing at high speed. Paramedics confirmed both women were deceased at the scene.
Mother and daughter were members of Salamanca Unidos Buscando Desaparecidos, one of hundreds of citizen search collectives across Mexico formed by families of the disappeared. These groups - predominantly led by mothers and wives - conduct their own field searches for clandestine graves when authorities fail to investigate disappearances. They are known as buscadoras: the searchers.
Their work is dangerous. And increasingly, it is fatal.
A Systematic Silencing
The Acosta family's tragedy began February 8, 2024, when Patricia's son Miguel Ángel Jauregui Acosta disappeared in Guanajuato. For more than a year, mother, daughter, and family members joined organized searches through rural Guanajuato, probing the earth for signs of clandestine burial sites.
In March 2025, they found him. His remains were recovered from a clandestine grave in La Ordeña community. Despite achieving what thousands of families have not - locating their loved one - both continued their search work with the collective, helping other families navigate the same nightmare.
That commitment appears to have cost them their lives.
The murders mark the third killing of a female search activist from Salamanca Unidos Buscando Desaparecidos in 2026 alone, according to the collective. The pattern suggests not random violence but systematic targeting of those who demand accountability for Mexico's disappeared.
Mexico's Disappeared Crisis
Guanajuato has become one of Mexico's most violent states, torn by battles between the Cártel de Santa Rosa de Lima and the Cártel Jalisco Nueva Generación. The state recorded the highest number of homicides nationally in recent years, and thousands of people have simply vanished.
Official figures count more than 100,000 disappeared people across Mexico since 2006, though activists say the true number is far higher. Most cases receive minimal investigation. Families are left to search on their own, armed with metal rods to probe suspicious ground and their own funds to pay for forensic testing.
The buscadoras have become both heroes and threats - heroes to families who see them as the only hope for truth, threats to criminal organizations whose clandestine graves represent evidence of mass murder.
Following the Mother's Day killings, Salamanca Unidos Buscando Desaparecidos announced a peaceful march on May 10, 2026, beginning at the Olympic Stadium to demand justice. Authorities have not commented on the killings or identified a motive.
Twenty countries, 650 million people. Somos nuestra propia historia - and Patricia and Katia died writing it, demanding truth in a country where disappearance has become systematic and searching for the dead has become a death sentence.
