The leader of a Mexicali search collective confronted Baja California’s attorney general on May 1, accusing her of lying about the number of bodies found in Mexicali clandestine graves at Ejido Miguel Alemán in the Mexicali Valley. Irma Leyva, who heads the group Madres Unidas y Fuertes, publicly challenged Attorney General María Elena Andrade Ramírez during a May Day parade, saying the state’s top prosecutor has never visited the burial site and is suppressing the true body count.
“She says that in each grave there is only one body. That is a brazen lie, because she has never set foot there,” Leyva told officials from the parade stage. “Let her go and get her feet dirty.”
Over 30 Mexicali Clandestine Graves Found Since January 7
Search collectives first discovered a clandestine grave at Ejido Miguel Alemán on January 7. By late January, 18 bodies had been recovered from the site, a rural area southeast of Mexicali’s urban center. Since then, the collective says it has identified more than 30 separate burial pits in the surrounding zone.
The FGE, Baja California’s state attorney general’s office, disputes that number. Prosecutors claim that remains found in multiple pits belong to single skeletons, so the official grave count is lower. The collective calls this accounting fraudulent. Leyva and other mothers are demanding DNA testing on all recovered remains to determine how many individuals are buried at the site.
The disagreement cuts to a core problem in Mexico’s disappearances crisis: who counts the dead and how. Mexico’s national registry of missing persons lists more than 116,000 people as disappeared across the country. Baja California ranks among the states with the highest disappearance rates. Families often do not trust official numbers because forensic systems are overwhelmed, underfunded, and, in some cases, deliberately opaque.
In Baja California Sur, authorities have reported the second-highest disappearance rate per capita in Mexico. The pattern is consistent across the peninsula: families search, the government falls behind on identification, and the gap between what families find and what the state acknowledges grows wider.
Search Teams Working Without Military or Police Escort for Two Months
Leyva disclosed that for two months, mothers from the collective have conducted field searches without any escort from the Mexican Army, National Guard, or prosecutors. Under Mexican law, search operations in areas with clandestine graves are supposed to include security accompaniment and forensic oversight from the state.
The absence of escorts exposes search teams to serious danger. Ejido Miguel Alemán sits in an agricultural corridor that has become a disposal area for cartel violence. Mothers who search these sites walk into terrain where organized crime operates, carrying only shovels and GPS markers.
Leyva also said that Attorney General Andrade Ramírez has refused to meet with the collective for months. She told officials she had submitted a formal petition to the governor’s office, which was stamped and received but never answered. “They have received the Search Unit, but they have not received us,” she said.
The collective’s frustration extends beyond access. Mothers say the FGE takes control of burial sites after remains are found but then stops searching the surrounding area. So families return, dig again, and find more graves that prosecutors have not looked for. “We find them out there, and then they disappear in here,” Leyva said, referring to the gap between field discoveries and official records.
State Search Mechanism Scheduled for May 12 Installation
Baja California Secretary General Juan José Pon Méndez and state congressional president Michel Sánchez Allende stepped down from the parade reviewing stand to speak with the mothers. Pon Méndez told Leyva that the state would formally install its Mecanismo Estatal de Búsqueda, or State Search Mechanism, on May 12.
The mechanism is a coordinating body required under Mexico’s 2017 General Law on Forced Disappearances. It is designed to bring together state prosecutors, security forces, forensic teams, and family collectives under a single search protocol. Several Mexican states have been slow to establish the mechanism, and Baja California’s delayed installation has been a source of criticism from families and human rights organizations for years.
Whether the May 12 launch changes conditions on the ground depends on staffing, funding, and political will. The collective’s core demands remain: independent DNA testing, transparent body counts, security escorts during field searches, and direct communication with the attorney general.
Pon Méndez insisted the government had attended to the mothers’ concerns. “In the matter of searching for people, we will not be selective,” he said. The mothers responded that they are “fed up” with inaction from prosecutors who, as Leyva put it, “are somebody’s children, but they are not investigators.”
The State Search Mechanism is set for formal installation on May 12 in Mexicali. The collective says it will continue field searches at Ejido Miguel Alemán regardless of government participation. This story was first reported by Punto Norte.