Ceci Flores, One of Mexico's Best-Known Mothers Searching for Their Missing Children, Sends Heartbreaking Letter to El Chapo After His Prison Rights Appeal

Ceci Flores, one of Mexico's best-known search activists, has taken an extraordinary and deeply painful step. In a public appeal, the founder of Madres Buscadoras de Sonora asked Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán to help families locate people allegedly disappeared by the Sinaloa Cartel, including her son Alejandro Guadalupe Islas Flores.

Her message came just days after Guzmán sent his own handwritten letter to a U.S. judge asking for fair treatment while serving a life sentence at the supermax prison in Florence, Colorado.

In a video published in X, Flores said she decided to write after seeing Guzmán demand "a more dignified life" from prison. In response, she asked him for empathy toward mothers who have spent years searching for missing children. In a video message, she urged him to send a letter telling families where "the boys who disappeared" were left so they can be brought home. The request is not abstract for her.

Flores says her son Alejandro disappeared in Los Mochis, Sinaloa, in October 2015 after being taken by men she links to the Sinaloa Cartel.

Letter from Ceci Flores to El Chapo Guzmán.

Chapo, I ask and beg you, in the name of my son Alejandro, that you write us a letter and tell us where we can find our missing loved ones, and that you help us mothers give them a dignified burial, which, as human beings, they have the right to.

This is asked and begged of you by a mother who has spent more than 10 years searching for her son, who has dug through the earth with her own hands. Please, have compassion for our pain.

I know you are a good person, that you helped many poor people, but now help the mothers.

My address is Bahía de Kino, Sonora, Calle Tampico #27, postal code 83340.

I await your response. I write to you with great fear, but with great love for my son.

Guzmán is incarcerated in the Florence Supermax, under the authority of the federal court in Brooklyn and the Bureau of Prisons in Colorado, while the human devastation tied to the cartel he once led continues to haunt families in Mexico. Flores is effectively connecting those two worlds, using the public visibility of Guzmán's U.S. imprisonment to demand answers about the disappeared left behind in cartel territory.

Her appeal comes at an especially raw moment.

Earlier this month, Flores said she would move to Sinaloa to continue looking for Alejandro after authorities confirmed through DNA testing that remains found in Sonora belonged to another of her sons, Marco Antonio, who had also disappeared. That loss turned Flores's already public fight into something even more devastating, a mother mourning one son while refusing to stop searching for another.

Flores has become one of the most visible faces of Mexico's movement of madres buscadoras, civilian collectives led largely by women who search for missing relatives when official investigations stall or fail. Their work has become one of the starkest symbols of Mexico's disappearance crisis.

Reuters reported Tuesday that Amnesty International put the number of disappearances in Mexico at 133,500 by the end of 2025. The Associated Press reported last week that more than 130,000 people have officially gone missing in Mexico since 2006 and that more than 70,000 unidentified bodies remain in morgues across the country. Mexico's National Search Commission also maintains a live public registry of disappeared and unlocated persons, underscoring the scale and institutional permanence of the crisis.