I Do Not Like Making It Media: Sheinbaum Defense of Secret Meetings with Search Mothers

Claudia Sheinbaum stood at the podium in the National Palace, hands resting on the wood, facing a room full of cameras and journalists. The question had come from the back: search collectives say you won't meet with them. She adjusted the microphone and answered.

"I receive many search mothers, I just don't make propaganda of it," she said. "I receive them personally, here and also outside the city when I travel, but I don't like to make it media because I don't believe it's necessary."

The problem for the mothers digging through dirt and rock across Mexico is that they don't know who she's talking about. The collectives that represent thousands of families looking for disappeared loved ones say they have not had formal meetings with the president. What Sheinbaum describes as private, and what they describe as nonexistent, leaves a gap that keeps widening.

"We don't have records of meetings with her," said a representative from one collective in the northern state of Nuevo León, speaking on condition of anonymity because of safety concerns. "If she's meeting with individual mothers, that's fine. But the mothers who actually lead search brigades, who dig, who organize, they haven't been called in."

Mexico's official registry holds more than 100,000 disappeared people. The real number is almost certainly higher. Many families never report. Many reports never get processed. The mothers who search, known among themselves as buscadoras, often work in groups of five or six. They pick through abandoned lots and empty fields with gardening tools because the state does not have the resources or the will to do it for them.

The timing of the criticism is specific and hard to ignore. Days before Sheinbaum's press conference, she received "pato Merlín," the unofficial duck mascot of the 2026 World Cup, in a public photo session at the National Palace. Images circulated widely: the president smiling with a man in a duck costume, hands clasped, cameras flashing. Search collectives noticed.

"They have time for a duck," one mother posted on social media. "They don't have time for us."

Sheinbaum addressed the contrast indirectly. "It is not that I don't receive them," she said. "I give them my personal cell phone." The implication was clear: the meetings happen, the attention exists, just without the cameras. Private care for a private crisis.

But the crisis isn't private. Search mothers in states like Jalisco, Estado de México, and Guanajuato operate in plain sight. They dig through mass graves. They find bones. They bag what they can and carry them to forensic labs that take years to process. Their faces are known. Their names are public. Their grief is not a back-channel conversation.

Sheinbaum also clarified that she does not hold formal meetings with search collectives as organizations. Those meetings, she said, are handled by Interior Secretary Rosa Icela Rodríguez and Deputy Secretary Arturo Medina. The president's office added that, beyond the families of the 43 Ayotzinapa normalistas, a case that has haunted Mexican presidencies for a decade, she also holds private encounters with victims of sexual violence and domestic abuse.

The Ayotzinapa reference is heavy. Those 43 students disappeared in Iguala in 2014. Their parents have been searching for 11 years. They have met with presidents, secretaries, prosecutors, and foreign delegations. Their children have not been found. If private meetings were the answer, the Ayotzinapa case would have been solved long ago.

The question that lingers after Sheinbaum's press conference is not whether she has met with individual mothers. She says she has. The question is whether private, unrecorded meetings with a few people are a substitute for a national strategy on disappearances. Mexico's forensic system is overwhelmed. The country's DNA databases are incomplete. Many mass graves are never excavated because local authorities say they lack the budget.

For the mothers who follow Sheinbaum's schedule and show up at public events hoping for a conversation, the president's cell phone number is not the point. They want a meeting where they can hand over a list of names. They want a government that searches with the same urgency they do. They want to be seen, not just received.

"I don't like to take a photograph of that because it's a matter of direct attention to the person, to the victims," Sheinbaum said.

But in a country where more than 100,000 families have no answers, the question is whether a closed-door approach helps the people who are still waiting, or just helps the president avoid the question entirely.