Related videos:
Mothers and grandmothers of six Cubans who went missing in Chiapas returned to Cuba on May 9 without having found their children or received concrete answers from the Mexican authorities, following a search operation that took place from May 5 to May 9 in the state of Chiapas.
Families from Matanzas, Havana, Camagüey, and Santiago de Cuba, arrived in Mexico for the first time with humanitarian visas issued by the Mexican government, 17 months after their last contact with their children.
The six Cubans disappeared on December 21, 2024, when approximately 40 migrants from Cuba, Honduras, and Ecuador boarded two boats from San José El Hueyate in the municipality of Mazatán, Chiapas, with a promised destination of Juchitán de Zaragoza, Oaxaca.
The GPS signal from the vessels was lost at 8:25 a.m. in the Pacific Ocean, just a few meters from the shore.
Before boarding, several migrants sent desperate messages to their families: "We don't know how to swim," "they're putting life jackets on us," "there are gunshots nearby," "there's a serious shootout here... these people are armed to the teeth."
The six Cubans identified in the group are: Elianis de la Caridad Morejón Pérez (18 years old), Dairanis Tan Ramos (33), Jorge Alejandro Lozada Santos (24), Meiling Álvarez Bravo (40) and her son Samei Armando Reyes Álvarez (14), Lorena Rozabal Guevara (28), and Ricardo Hernández (33).
The migrants had paid between 8,000 and 10,000 dollars for the journey, a route controlled by the Jalisco New Generation Cartel.
During the brigade, the families traveled through the community of San Miguel "El Hueyate," the Siglo XXI migrant station in Tapachula, and various shelters, where they posted flyers with photos of the missing, but they did not receive enough information to locate them.
The search was coordinated by the Regional Network of Migrant Families and included families from Cuba, Ecuador, Honduras, and Colombia, along with companions from Italy.
Despite the pain of returning empty-handed, the mothers and grandmothers remain convinced that their children are alive and have vowed not to rest until they find them.
The response from the Mexican state has been deemed ineffective by human rights organizations. Attorney Yesenia Váldez from the Justice Foundation reported in June 2025 that six months after the disappearance, there were no active search efforts: "There is not a single effort to find them. It's as if the state has erased them."
The case is part of a broader migration crisis at Mexico's southern border. Between September and December 2024, San José El Hueyate recorded at least three events of mass disappearance, with a total of 83 missing migrants, according to civil organizations.
In parallel, a 19-year-old Cuban woman disappeared in Tapachula on April 30, and in March, the disappearance of eight Cuban rafters who had set out for Mexican shores was reported.
In the early months of 2026, more than 12 migrants disappeared at the southern border of Chiapas, with Suchiate and Tapachula accounting for the majority of cases among victims from Cuba, Guatemala, Venezuela, Haiti, and Nicaragua.
The international brigade was scheduled until May 16, but the Cuban families returned early without having achieved the goal that took them, for the first time in their lives, to leave the island.
Filed under: