In Mexico, the torment of searching for missing persons also affects the families of police officers

Ana searches for her sister with a strange feeling inside. “It’s a bit like not really searching; for some time now, I’ve known I’m not going to find her,” she says before entering, alongside her colleagues from the Guerreros Buscadores de Jalisco (Jalisco Warrior Searchers) collective, a tiny abandoned house in the Valle de Los Olivos neighborhood, south of the Mexican city of Guadalajara. Ana speaks just minutes before the group begins breaking through the cement floor with a jackhammer, digging and digging and digging.

It’s difficult to explain how someone can search without hope, which would seem to be the very foundation of a search. But considering the context, Ana does not appear pessimistic; rather, she seems hardened by the blows of reality. Jalisco is the state with the most missing persons in Mexico, with at least 15,943 people who have not been located.

Three of the five children of Virginia Muñoz González, who worked as a police officer in Guadalajara, were outside their home in the Heliodoro Hernández neighborhood, northeast of the city, when several trucks with armed men stopped in front. It was April 3, 2021. The children ran inside, but the last one, then a 12-year-old boy, couldn’t close the door in time because the men were already behind him. Virginia, then 40 years old, stepped out of her bedroom. “Vicky?” one of the men asked.

“I think that if she hadn’t answered yes, they wouldn’t have taken her, because other men entered right away; they weren’t sure which house it was. But it’s instinct — if your children are there, you don’t want anything to happen to them, which is why she didn’t resist,” says Ana, Virginia’s sister. “She’ll be back soon,” one of the men told the children, who begged them not to take her away.

Thus began the journey of despair for the family of the newly promoted police officer, who had become a second commander after 20 years of service in the Guadalajara police, where she had even joined the Elite Wolves Unit. Her seniority, rank, and experience didn’t matter. Neither did the fact that they were her longtime colleagues, nor that she had been a patrol partner. One by one, they denied knowing Virginia and erased her from the department’s history.

Although Virginia Muñoz did exist, of course. Her payroll records remain on the National Transparency Platform, as do the statements from the Jalisco Attorney General’s Office, which confirms that she is still being searched for. The Federal Attorney General’s Office has even opened an investigation into the disappearance of an active-duty police officer. Jalisco is also the state where the most security personnel go missing.

“I think the Guadalajara police are involved, that’s why they treat us like this, that’s why they aren’t looking for her, that’s why I don’t think I can find her,” Ana says.

The crisis

From 2019 to the present, 84 security personnel have disappeared in Jalisco, including municipal and state police officers. Forty-two have been found, according to data from the state Attorney General’s Office obtained via transparency requests. The information does not specify how many of those found were discovered dead. However, according to journalistic records and the count by the organization Causa Común (Common Cause), which records 147 police homicides in Jalisco between 2018 and 2024, it is inferred that most of those found were killed.

The most recent case occurred in Teocaltiche, in the north of Jalisco, on February 18 of this year, when eight municipal officers and a civilian transporting them to Guadalajara for mandatory integrity and fitness tests disappeared. A day later, 14 bags containing the dismembered bodies of four officers were found. The other four officers and the driver remain missing. The Teocaltiche municipal police was taken over by state authorities and disarmed while the officers were interrogated. Security in the municipality was placed under the state police for several weeks, according to Jalisco Governor Pablo Lemus.

Recently, the governor reported that the same process was applied to the La Huerta municipal police, after evidence suggested that members of the force were involved in a forced disappearance.

Of the 42 missing police officers, 32 are municipal officers from various Jalisco municipalities, while 10 are state officers, according to the Attorney General’s Office.

Aftermath of the disappearance

Just over two years after Virginia’s disappearance, on September 23, 2023, Gregorio Bernardo Muñoz was kidnapped in Tlaquepaque while fixing a bicycle. Ana and Virginia’s nephew was 21 years old at the time. His father, Humberto Muñoz, despite being blind, immediately began searching for his son. On November 1, an armed group also took him from his home in the Miravalle neighborhood.

To date, nothing is known about Virginia, her brother Humberto, or Humberto’s son, Gregorio.

“I search so that others can find them, for all the disappeared, so that my mother doesn’t have to go because she’s already old, and even though she wants to participate in the searches, her legs can’t take it anymore,” says Ana, who goes with the Warrior Searchers from one house to another where they suspect there may be graves. One of these sites is in Valle de Los Olivos, where they dug down about a meter, removed a large stone, and saw the teeth of a skeleton.

“Then we have to stop digging and call the police to secure the scene until the Medical Examiner’s Office arrives,” says Ana, the woman who searches without hope, but makes discoveries all the same.

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