"Sol Prendido" for Borderland Beat
María del Carmen Volante was about to begin a search in a part of the Ajusco forest when she learned of another disappearance: that of a young woman, a few kilometers from where she was, in the same mountainous region south of the capital where her 23-year-old daughter, Pamela Gallardo Volante, was last seen on that life-changing November 5, 2017.
Over the years, the searching mother has gathered information on the local dynamics of this territory, which she describes as "ungovernable": the long-standing disputes over control of land and resources; the expansion of urban sprawl and land invasions; the proliferation of activities such as illegal logging and the depredation of flora and fauna.
And of course, there are also kidnappings, homicides, and trafficking networks, activities for which criminals take advantage of the confluence of the borders between the states of the State of Mexico, Morelos, and Mexico City.
The Cumbres del Ajusco National Park has been used as a clandestine dumping ground for corpses.
So, on the morning of July 14, 2025, María del Carmen heard news: an operation was underway to locate 19-year-old Ana Amelí García Gámez, who had disappeared while hiking on Pico del Águila Mountain, within Cumbres del Ajusco National Park.
Two days earlier, the young woman had sent a message to her family with a photo of herself at the top of the mountain, but she didn't contact them again and never returned home. Days later, under media pressure, authorities announced a search with more than 100 people deployed in various areas of the park. “[The news] left me very shocked because we were searching in part of the Ajusco forest, where you go up. And we said: [the search] will also be for Ana Amelí. Because, if we find her, who will it be for? For everyone,” he says.
So far, there are no traces of Ana Amelí or Pamela. Furthermore, in the following weeks, two more disappearances were reported in this region, which belongs to the Tlalpan municipality. On September 2, María Isabella Orozco Lozano, 16, was last seen in San Miguel Xicalco, a town at the foot of the Ajusco. On September 16, Luis Óscar Ayala García, 48, went jogging near Pico del Águila; his car was located, but not him.
After almost eight years, the Gallardo Volante family says they have participated in hundreds of searches in this forested mountain range. Pamela's trail disappeared after attending the Soul Tech music festival, at kilometer 13.5 of the Picacho-Ajusco highway. Today, María del Carmen recognizes that she's no longer just looking for her daughter. She's searching for any missing person she can find along the way.
The last photo of Ana Amelí García with a group of mountaineers.
Search groups are multiplying in El Ajusco
María del Carmen visited El Ajusco for the first time in November 2017. She had never been to the protected natural area before, where people frequent on weekends for ecotourism activities or a picnic.
“When we went looking for her, I said, ‘This is huge. How am I going to navigate these ditches?’” she says. This natural reserve, part of the Sierra del Ajusco mountain range, seemed overwhelming. So she began by visiting the surrounding neighborhoods, such as Héroes de 1910 and Lomas de Tepemecatl.
Back then, it was a less urban area, and there were few people there, except for weekend visitors, her mother tells DOMINGA. “At kilometer 11.2, there is an area with bars and taverns,” she adds. In those settlements, she distributed and posted information to help locate Pamela.
The so-called "Spy Law" was focused on improving protocols and tools for searching for missing persons in the country.
María del Carmen Volante Velázquez, mother of Pamela Gallardo.
In Mexico City, there was a Support Center for Missing and Absent Persons, but it didn't conduct searches. So, during her first searches in 2017, María del Carmen was accompanied by family and friends; later, they were guided by the Action Group for Human Rights and Social Justice, which brought lessons learned from groups in the country's interior.
A couple of weeks after Pamela's disappearance, the family learned that a woman had been found dead behind a restaurant in Ajusco, near kilometer 13 of the Picacho-Ajusco highway. The body was burned, but the coroner determined it was a woman between 20 and 28 years old with signs of a cesarean section, which ruled out Pamela's identity.
Over the years, this mother witnessed how the organization of search groups gained strength in the city. Due to pressure from families, the Specialized Prosecutor's Office for the Search, Location, and Investigation of Missing Persons was created in September 2018; and in June 2019, the local Search Commission for Persons began operating.
That same year, the mother joined others to found the group Hasta Encontrarles CDMX (Until We Find Them CDMX). And María del Carmen, focused on studying the Ajusco region as a site of disappearances, identified a revealing fact.
"I've been hearing that it was said that native people from there also disappeared," she says, referring to residents of the indigenous communities of San Miguel Ajusco and Santo Tomás Ajusco.
From 2000 to September 30, 2025, Mexico City recorded 6,439 missing and unaccounted for people, according to the National Registry; 342 of them in Tlalpan. Five indigenous communities at the foot of or within the Ajusco forest have the highest numbers in the municipality: San Miguel Topilejo (15), San Andrés Totoltepec (11), San Pedro Mártir (11), Santo Tomás Ajusco (11), and San Miguel Ajusco (9).
María del Carmen's intuitive analysis already pointed to specific locations. By 2019, she says, they had established the "Llano de Vidrio" (Glass Plain) as a search quadrant, a large expanse of forest that the press had already identified as a "clandestine cemetery."
Since 2014, three years before Pamela's disappearance, the alleged leader of a gang of kidnappers, Los Camachos, had made public his statement. She pointed out that this place in the middle of the forest was used to bury their victims. Miguel Ángel Mancera, then mayor of the city, announced checkpoints and patrols by the Army, the Federal Police, and even a mounted police force to reinforce security in the area.
None of this prevented the disappearances from continuing. This area of clandestine burials would become one of the sites of greatest interest to María del Carmen Volante and other searching mothers who emerged as the disappearances increased in the nation's capital.
Maria Isabella Orozco Lozano, aged 16, disappeared on 2 September 2025 in the vicinity of Ajusco.
Llano de Vidrio, an old and well-known disappearance site
At the open-air Glorieta de las Mujeres que Luchan (Women Who Struggle) square, a group of people held a funeral ceremony on the afternoon of Friday, January 31, 2025. As vehicles passed along Paseo de la Reforma, the group surrounded a white coffin containing only 20% of the body of Monserrat Uribe Palmeros, who disappeared at the age of 21 on July 24, 2020.
The remains of the young mother of two children were found in November 2024 in the Glass Plain. Jaqueline Palmeros, Monserrat's mother and founder of the collective Una Luz en el Camino (A Light on the Path), participated in the brigade that found the bone fragments in Ajusco. Two months later, on January 17, authorities confirmed that they were her daughter's.
The groups and family members made a brief tour.
After a procession, the coffin was placed in one of the side streets next to an altar with flowers, seeds and a floral arrangement that read: "Because only we found you."
Although Monserrat disappeared in the Iztapalapa borough, Jaqueline conducted her own investigations that led her to Ajusco. "What prompted me to go there was an anonymous report via Messenger. In which they described what had been done to my daughter, something very cruel," she says.
Since it wasn't a geolocation or formal statement, the Prosecutor's Office didn't consider it valid information to include in the investigation. But the mother did take it as a clue.
Jaqueline moved forward intuitively. "I had to do my own analysis of the context, of the organized crime that prevailed in Ajusco," she says, adding that she identified at least six criminal cells, "not counting those coming from Morelos and the State of Mexico."
She also learned of some patterns that served as a guide: “They find lifeless women, fragmented, but since there are areas that are difficult to access, they obviously lend themselves to concealment.” One of those polygons is Llano de Vidrio, which has been reported in the press since 2014 as a “clandestine cemetery” and where recent brigades found the remains of three people, formerly of Monserrat.
“It's a ravine about 50 meters deep, more or less. But it's about 150 meters long. It's in the middle of nowhere, there's no signal, no lighting, nothing. It's a place that's totally suitable for hiding,” says Jaqueline about the spot where they've found bodies and human remains.
Other sites that searching mothers have identified as "deposit boxes" are the Mirador de Topilejo, the Ecoguardas Environmental Education Center, and points along the Cuernavaca Railway Cycleway, which uses the old train route. They have been able to identify them, not thanks to the sophisticated technology or methodology applied by the authorities, but rather to a basic strategy used by search groups.
"We work with 'peace boxes.' They are small boxes, ranging from shoes to wooden boxes; we have some boxes that were donated to us. We raise awareness in the community, and if they know of any discovery points or safe houses, etc., we invite them to send them to us by sending an anonymous message to these peace boxes placed in churches," Jaqueline explains.
The search for Jael Monserrat on the Picacho-Ajusto road ended after six hours of work.
Margarita: The Discovery That Changed the Searches in Ajusco
In Ajusco, the Una Luz en el Camino collective placed these peace boxes after finding the remains of Margarita Carmona in June 2021. A 17-year-old woman disappeared in Santo Tomás Ajusco in July 2019. She was the first young woman found by a brigade in which Jaqueline Palmeros participated. First, they found a skull exposed to the naked eye, and from there they began searching.
“It may seem like something out of a movie, but that's how it was. The women said, 'Follow your heart.' Then, 'Well, go there.' We started walking and found an acrylic nail. We continued walking and found a vertebra. And who knows how they start following a butterfly, and there she was. Margarita wanted to be found.”
Thanks to the peace boxes, the search areas in Ajusco became more diverse. And as the disappearances increased each year, more groups emerged and grew.
The young woman was last seen on Pablo Galeana Street, in the Santo Tomás Ajusco neighbourhood of the Tlalpan district.
In August 2024, a brigade was organized to search for Miguel Ángel Lazo Roldán, who had disappeared a few months earlier, on February 12 in Santo Tomás Ajusco. Daniela Ramos, mother of Axel Daniel Gonzáles Ramos, who disappeared on June 23, 2022, in San Miguel Ajusco, also participated. On that occasion, Jaqueline attended, thinking she was connected to those mothers because their sons disappeared in the same place: Ajusco. Three months later, in November, they would return to Llano de Vidrio and recover Monserrat's remains.
“I told my colleagues, ‘Let's go down there, on the plain. We have to go down there, I'm so damn curious, something, something's moving me.’”
It was a spot in the Llano de Vidrio industrial estate where, she explains, they had searched before. “If instead of going straight ahead, I had gone to the left, I would have found her from the first search. But today I can tell you that God's timing is perfect. As a result of Monse's disappearance, and through her, I've been able to help so many people.”
Another result of the searches in Ajusco also came at the end of 2024. The remains of Leonardo Sandoval Cázares, who disappeared in May 2022 in San Miguel Ajusco, were found 20 kilometers from where he was last seen, on the border with the Tlalpan municipality, and are being kept unidentified in the Semefo (Secretary of the Interior) of Xalatlaco, State of Mexico.
After more than two years of searching for Leonardo, his mother, Rosalinda Cázares, received notification from the authorities. In November, she held a farewell ceremony at the spot where he was found.
Leonardo Sandoval Cazares, who disappeared in May 2022, was the youngest of six children.
“I will never leave Ajusco”
On Sunday, September 7, 2025, Pamela Gallardo Volante turned 31. Her mother, María del Carmen, says the family maintains the tradition of celebrating her, even though they have missed eight birthdays with her. “Every year we tell her, ‘You are here, we love you here, we await you with open arms.’ We cut her cake, we tell her, ‘You are not forgotten.’”
This year, 2025, Pamela's family has participated in several search events in Ajusco, in February and March; in May, they held a sit-in in Tlalpan because authorities canceled the scheduled search; and the last one was in July, two days after Ana Amelí's disappearance.
That event brought renewed attention to the area, as had happened before with the cases of Monserrat and Margarita. But María del Carmen says she has “very little hope” that recent events will change the way authorities address the complex dynamics of disappearances.
Last April, Mayor Clara Brugada presented a plan for the search for missing persons for the next five years. Among the various measures announced is the “creation of generalized and patterned search models,” which they defined as “a new search model at sites of forensic interest in the field.” However, the searchers believe there is nothing new about this; they have been working this way for years.
The case of Ana Amelí once again drew attention to Ajusco as a centre for disappearances.
At that time, the mothers and volunteers were participating in the Fifth Regional Brigade in Ajusco. At the end of five days of work, they reported the recovery of six skeletal remains that remain to be identified.
On July 2, Luis Gómez Negrete was appointed the new head of the Commission for the Search for Missing Persons in Mexico City, following the dismissal of Enrique Camargo, who had held the position since 2022. This change of administration has kept the search groups on tenterhooks.
A few days after receiving news of the identification of Monserrat's remains, Jaqueline and other searchers returned to the spot where she was found. They tried to rescue more of the young woman, without success; in the end, they held a ceremony and placed a cross in her memory.
"I will be someone who will never leave Ajusco, for good. At least until we find the truth, until we know what happened, and until we find as much as I can about my daughter and the others, about everyone who is there," says Jaqueline.
For her, neither the search is over nor has justice arrived. She believes there is still much to demand, starting with the investigation into the disappearance and from the judge who released two alleged perpetrators, now fugitives. She has also called for increased surveillance on the routes to Llano de Vidrio to ensure this does not continue to happen. Brugada's recent plan also includes the recovery of spaces used to hide people.
"Of course, there are decisive actions that can end or at least begin to eradicate the disappearances and scavenging there. What are they hiding, what is behind the disappearances in Ajusco?"
The Cumbres del Ajusco National Park near Mexico City
Source: Milenio
