TAPACHULA, Mexico — In early May, a small group of mothers and siblings arrived in the coastal village of San José El Hueyate, in Mexico’s southern Chiapas state, clutching photographs and memories. They had come to search for 40 relatives from Cuba, Honduras and Ecuador who had vanished here on Christmas Eve 2024, last seen boarding a small boat bound for a maritime route toward the United States.
Among them was Isis Pérez, whose daughter, Elianis Caridad Morejón Pérez, a young Cuban woman, made a final phone call before stepping onto the vessel. “She told me she had put on a life jacket and was boarding a boat,” Pérez recounted. It was the last communication from any of the 40.
For months, the families heard nothing. Then this month, they traveled to the same pier — a known embarkation point for smugglers — and scoured the waterfront, spoke with local merchants, and even took boats along the Pacific coastline. “As family members, we live in constant torment and anguish, longing to find them,” said Óscar Hernández, a Honduran man searching for his brother among the missing.
The migrants had been moving northward on land, unaware until late in their journey that the path would turn to the sea. Meiling Álvarez Bravo, a 41-year-old Cuban, and her 15-year-old son, Samei Armando Reyes Álvarez, were among the disappeared. Julia Margarita Bravo Díaz, Meiling’s mother, recalled her daughter’s last call: “On Dec. 21, 2024, at 8 a.m., she told me they were going to have breakfast because they were about to cross toward Mexico City by boat.” The son’s grandmother said the family had flown from Cuba to Nicaragua, then traveled overland through Honduras and Guatemala, without knowing a sea crossing awaited.
“Searching for missing persons in Mexico is a grueling task on land, but it becomes exponentially more difficult at sea,” said Ana Enamorado, coordinator of the nonprofit Regional Network of Migrant Families.
The International Organization for Migration’s Missing Migrants Project has recorded the death or disappearance of 11,475 migrants on the route from South America to the United States since 2014. More than half of those were in Mexico. Smuggling ports along the Pacific coast have been identified since 2021: migrants typically board small, twin-engine boats in Puerto de Ocós, Guatemala, then refuel and resupply in Chiapas ports — including San José — before disembarking in Oaxaca to continue north by land.
The 40 vanished as the Biden administration, which had adopted more flexible immigration policies, was ending, and Donald Trump’s second term — with its promise of rollbacks — was about to begin. Family members said the migrants were racing to reach the U.S. border before January 2025, fearing the incoming administration would dismantle those policies.
Between July and November 2025, the Mexican Navy rescued 22 migrants — six from high-seas shipwrecks and 16 from land as they prepared to embark from Chiapas. In response to the risks, Mexican authorities said in March that they had increased high-seas surveillance alongside Guatemalan partners to disrupt drug trafficking and irregular migrant movements.
The families will soon return to their home countries, but the search, they insist, is not over. “We are leaving with heavy hearts but with the hope of finding them,” Pérez said. “We ask that you help us search, help us find them.”