Mexican moms who have found thousands of cartel victims turn efforts to finding Nancy Guthrie
A Mexican mother who has spent years searching for victims of cartel violence hopes that Nancy Guthrie will be found alive and reunited with her family—unlike the thousands of victims whose remains she has helped recover from mass graves.
Ceci Flores, founder of Madres Buscadoras de Sonora (Searching Mothers of Sonora), created the collective after two of her six sons were kidnapped by a criminal gang on May 4, 2019, in Bahia de Kino, Sonora.
The following day, one of her sons, Jesús Adrian Sauceda, who was 15 at the time, was released after Flores reportedly confronted the gang’s leader at his home and threatened retaliation if her children were not returned safely. Her other son, Marcos Antonio Sauceda, 31, was never released and has not been seen since. Another son, Alejandro Guadalupe Islas, had previously disappeared on Oct. 30, 2015, while traveling to Los Mochis, Sinaloa.
Now Flores has joined the effort to locate Nancy Guthrie, 84, who was last seen on Jan. 31.
“Someone made an anonymous call to our group, saying she had been smuggled across the border to Nogales through a place called Las Mariposas,” Flores told The Post, referring to a Mexican community just south of Tucson, Arizona, where Guthrie lived.
“Someone called to give us that information. We don’t know if it’s true or just something meant to play with our emotions. We don’t know the truth,” Flores said.
“We verify all the information we receive. We go to the location and check. Whether it turns out to be true or not, we go.”
Flores said the group searched Las Mariposas but did not find any evidence of Guthrie.
Over the past 10 days, Flores and roughly 30 members of her group have searched about 60 miles of terrain across the border from Tucson but have not discovered any signs of the missing woman, who is the mother of NBC Today co-anchor Savannah Guthrie.
Since forming the collective about a decade ago, Flores and her team say they have discovered the remains of more than 2,000 victims while also locating at least 130 missing people alive.
Flores said she hopes to obtain immigration documents that would allow her group to enter the United States to help search in Tucson and surrounding areas.
However, she believes authorities may hesitate to grant permission.
“Honestly, I don’t think they’ll give us permission because they know our search history and the results we’ve achieved,” Flores said. “If we went into Arizona to search for Mrs. Nancy and found her, it could embarrass U.S. authorities.”
“They know that if we go in to search, we can find her because we have many years of field experience—something they don’t have,” she added. “For that simple reason, knowing we could embarrass them in the media and in the eyes of society, they may not allow it.”
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