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Shaylih Muehlmann, 2024, Call the Mothers: Searching for Mexico’s Disappeared in the War 
on Drugs, Oakland, California: University of California Press, 264 pp., ISBN  9780520314573  

 

“Call the Mothers: Searching for Mexico’s Disappeared in the War on Drugs” is a compelling 

multi-sited ethnography that begins with the author’s account of meeting Leticia in Mexico 

City, whose young daughter, Ivonne, had been missing for two years. After undertaking a two-

year-long search with minimal assistance from state authorities, Leticia finally found her 

daughter buried in a communal grave. By recounting this encounter, the author captures the 

heart-wrenching paradox of a mother's sense of relief after finding her child dead - a devastating 

end to the limbo of not knowing. In five chapters, this book traces how the process of searching 

for disappeared family members transformed the lives of Leticia and other Mexican mothers 

who conducted marches, built support networks, acquired investigative skills, searched through 

morgues and deserts, and exposed the corruption and complicity of state officials in human 

rights abuses in Mexico. The core contribution of this work is a critical examination of maternal 

activism that unpacks its interaction with dominant gender norms, state indifference, and 

organized crime.  

The first chapter, “They started off as a busload of victims,” establishes how the shared 

experience of personal loss connected women in the ‘Caravan for Peace’ rally, which started in 

central Mexico, and visited various locations in Mexico and in the United States raising 

awareness about the violence unleashed by drug policy. Through this experience, relatives of 

the disappeared were able to appreciate how drug policies in the US were adversely impacting 

both Mexicans and low-income groups in the United States and to transform the tenor of their 

campaigning. Prior to the caravan, emphasis was placed on the innocence of the disappeared, 

or their non-involvement with cartels. However, this particular framing had a limited effect, as 

it masked the structural causes of drug-related violence.  

Muehlmann argues that this foregrounding of the innocence of their children by the mothers 

partially emerged from the misgivings of being seen as a bad parent, and in part as a strategic 

use of the figure of the grieving mother, which has a unique position in Catholicism and 



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patriarchy. Mother-centric activism had a dual character: it enabled political action, but it also 

reproduced traditional gender roles. Nevertheless, its limitations were outweighed by the 

effects of the politicization of Mexican mothers upon their interaction with black mothers from 

the inner-city areas in the U.S, whose activism was centered on the systemic factors like racism 

and marginalization that pushed their children into crime and drugs and who framed problems 

in the community as issues rooted in lack of social justice.  

In the  second chapter, “Until we find them,” the author focuses on the wait mothers went 

through after the disappearance of their children. Muehlmann describes the bureaucratic limbos 

that the searching mothers faced and how the wait mobilized some of the mothers who founded 

their own search committees to investigate the disappearances thereby transcending individual 

activism.  

There was a poignant contrast between the anguish and sense of urgency experienced by the 

families and the sluggishness, dismissal, and disregard with which the state bureaucracy and 

police responded. State authorities often employed delay tactics and blamed the victims. A 

grinding cycle of waiting would begin for relatives from the moment they approached 

authorities to report a disappearance and would continue through waiting for a formal case 

opening, the proceeds of the investigation, and the process of coordination between different 

government agencies. Long delays impeded progress and eroded the families’ well-being. 

Muehlmann reports on relatives selling their assets to bribe police officers or pay for the 

operational expenses of the investigating officers.  

Intentional delays by the Mexican state included using the law to justify long-drawn waits and 

to exercise power over relatives. The book carefully documents the authorities’ lack of genuine 

political will to investigate. Weary of Kafkaesque encounters with authorities and troubled by 

the wait, some mothers went on to organize search collectives or launched their own 

investigations, at times trespassing the law. Muehlmann does not romanticize the self-initiated 

investigations but views them as a response to state neglect.  

The third chapter, “Call the Mothers, Not the Police,” discusses the investigations led by self-

organized search committees. As activist mothers became a source of support for other families 

looking for their disappeared children, networks and collectives sprouted across Mexico. 

Activist mothers offered their personal networks, insights, and skills to support other families. 

This included explaining how to put pressure on authorities to register cases officially, 

providing logistical and emotional support in searching local morgues, directly investigating 



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murders and kidnappings, and lending leverage and connections vis-a-vis the police and 

criminal organizations. Although the specific character of disappearances depended on the 

local context, women collectives sprouted throughout the country. And given state inaction, 

dismissal, and collusion, newly affected families often turned to these committees for support. 

Moreover, the collectives began to push back against the authorities' policy to underplay the 

number of the disappeared. Muehlmann notes that although women-led collectives filled in for 

incompetent state institutions, they lacked resources and professional competencies. This is 

framed as the effect of the neoliberal thrust to shift state responsibilities onto civil society while 

state-society relations remained conflictive. 

The fourth chapter, “A rage so fierce she didn't notice her feet,” investigates the impact of 

officials’ dismissal of victims and their complicity with organized criminals. Through a detailed 

account of a public confrontation that went viral on the internet between a mother and the 

Veracurz governor Duarte Javier, the author unveils the longstanding nexus between organized 

crime and public office. The alliance of high-level public officials and narco-traffickers in 

Mexico goes back in history and cemented the accumulation of many private fortunes but this 

informal arrangement was unsettled by neoliberal reforms and power transition in the 1980s. 

The author shows that beyond the war on drugs, militarization and violence were linked to 

trade integration (NAFTA) and US-Mexico security cooperation (Merida initiative). The author 

provides this context for drug violence and overcomes personalistic characterizations of 

corruption. 

The final chapter of the book, “Without a body there is no crime,” traces the discovery of mass 

graves and the implications for relatives, civil society groups, and the Mexican state. The 

unveiling of these clandestine burial sites - despite attempts of obfuscation and frequent denial 

of the disappeared by the state—demonstrated the gravity of the situation, although it did not 

lead to a more transparent investigation by the officials. Nonetheless, for the relatives, the 

discovery of remains of the missing provides irrefutable evidence of the crimes committed.  

In another development, new information about the location of mass graves has come from the 

cartels themselves. The author argues that criminal groups strategically conceal or alternatively 

draw attention to crime scenes such as mass graves, for instance, to signal their control over a 

certain territory. But mothers also received tip-offs from low-ranking cartel members, leading 

them to develop a more sympathetic view of these cartel members compared to state officials.  



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Muehlmann examines the pathways of affect in these paradoxical sympathies and rejects the 

oft-cited trope of glamourized narcos. Instead, the author offers a more convincing reading of 

this sympathy to the profound hurt caused by the denialism and obfuscation of state officials' 

denial: relatives felt they were more likely to get help from the narcos than from the state. The 

author concludes by noting the significant achievements of the civil society movement, led by 

mothers, that formulated demands for justice for the disappeared without needing to foreground 

their 'innocence.’ Written in an engaged and accessible manner, the book reveals the 

experiences of women searching for their missing relatives and the broader political economy 

that produces and sustains drug-related violence. Given the rise of women’s activism, the book 

offers novel insights into the literature on forced disappearance, social movements, and 

neoliberalism with implications far beyond the case of the war on drugs in Mexico.  

 

Hammal Aslam is a PhD researcher at The International Institute of Social Studies. In his 

doctoral work, he is focusing on rural transformations in Balochistan, Pakistan, with a specific 

focus on changes around livelihoods, labor, and natural resource use and access. Previously, he 

worked as a university lecturer in the Department of international relations at BUITEMS, a 

public university in Quetta. 

 

Acknowledgments 

I would like to thank Dr. Helena Perez Nino for her guidance in editing and revising this article. 

I am also grateful to Rassela Malinda for reading an earlier version and providing valuable 

feedback. 

 

 

 

© 2025 Hammal Aslam 

 


