Woman uses drone to look for son’s body in Mexico’s killing fields

SALINAS VICTORIA, Mexico: Leticia Hidalgo smears her face with sunscreen and walks steadily across the weedy wasteland she has come to know as one of Mexico´s killing fields. Frustrated with a lack of response from authorities, retired school teacher Hidalgo has taken a years-long quest for her missing son into her own hands, learning to use a drone to search for traces of his body. Mexico has been overwhelmed by an escalation of narco violence that has left more than 60,000 people missing since 2006.

Hidalgo´s son Roy is one of them, and she believes he could well be here, somewhere beneath the scrubland at her feet, in what she calls a likely “place of extermination. Roy Rivera was kidnapped the morning of January 11, 2011, by armed men who came to the family home in the northeastern state of Nuevo Leon. Some of them wore police uniforms. He and his brother tried to fend off the men with a knife while Hidalgo called for help from a balcony. She sees that moment as the end of her innocence. Now this courageous 57-year-old has turned into an amateur detective, armed with a drone and a burning passion to find her son´s remains.

“We are going to first fly the drone to find points of interest,” she says to the man beside her, a special prosecutor for missing persons, Eduardo Saucedo. Police officers stand in the background, supervising the search of the four-hectare area of land at Salinas Victoria municipality. At 57, Hidalgo has become an expert in drone flying, because she has had to.