IGUALA, Mexico (AP) – On an arid hillside high above this now infamous city, Margarita Isidoro tirelessly wields a machete in search of her son.
The petite 57-year-old wearing black and pink sneakers, and a purse slung across her shoulders, moves with single-minded focus. She hacks at tangles of a thorny shrub and crawls into crevasses in the uneven terrain, driving her blade again and again into the soil. She kneels, claws at the dirt and tosses rocks aside.
Isidoro isn’t alone. Emboldened by international attention on 43 disappeared college students, dozens of parents have come out to hunt for their own children who have been missing for months or even years, digging alongside Isidoro as they’d never dared before, and as authorities never bothered to do.
“Whether he is dead or alive, I want to find my son,” says Isidoro, whose youngest went missing in April 2010.
Isidoro was afraid to search before now because someone had warned her that the same people who took her son in the badlands of the southern state of Guerrero might come after her or the rest of her family. Her son Orlando Catalan was 22 years old when he left home one afternoon to buy water and never returned. His car was found in another neighborhood eight days later. “Now I’m ready, if they take me, they take me. I’m going to find my son.”