The Slow Decay of Mexican Fathers Searching for Their Missing Children

Fathers of the missing do everything possible to give their families hope, normalcy, and closure

People take part in a march on January 26, 2015, at the Zócalo square in Mexico City commemorating four months of the disappearance of 43 students from Ayotzinapa. Photo: Alfredo Estrella/Getty Images

Adolfo López Ramírez always wears a tucked-in button-down shirt; he looks steady even though he must do the unimaginable.

He’s one of just a few men in Las Rastreadoras, a collective of mostly mothers. When they go searching for “disappeared” people in northern Mexico — victims of political, drug, or gender violence — he delivers equipment like shovels to dig or tools to trace odors from decaying human bodies hidden underground. Ramirez is the calming force of Las Rastreadoras: Whether it’s time to search or it’s time to wait, either at a meeting or outside government offices, he makes sure that everyone around him is okay.

Ramirez’s son, Adolfo de Jesús, was 5 feet 8 inches tall with light brown skin, dark hair and eyes, and bushy eyebrows. On February 28, 2015, he wore an orange T-shirt, dark denim pants, and a metallic crucifix; that was the day two men took him and his roommate from their house in the city of Los Mochis in northern Sinaloa. He had an appendix surgery scar on the right side of his abdomen. He loved cooking, especially flans and desserts. He was 21 years old when he was last seen that Saturday…