Central American Mothers Look for Missing Migrants Even before the tour bus comes to a stop, the women rise from their seats and wait in the aisle to exit. In their arms rest rolled-up flags of the Central American countries they come from. Large laminated photographs of missing loved ones hang by lanyards from their necks. They descend the stairs to a gaggle of waiting press photographers. This is their moment of hope, stirring once again the possibility of putting to rest years of uncertainty and desperation. Maybe someone has seen a missing son or father making his way to the United States in search of work. Maybe someone knows a daughter is OK. "The goal is to come to look for them," said Virginia Olcot, 42, of Chimaltenango, Guatemala, who last heard from her husband in September 2009 when he arrived at the U.S. border in Sonora. This is our intention: to not get tired, to persevere and get the government to help us. It was her third trip with this caravan of women, which for six consecutive years has traveled from Central America to points all over Mexico looking for relatives who have gone missing on their way north. Even if they don't find their loved ones, at the very least they hope to bring attention to the plight of migrants who have disappeared in Mexico. The group sponsoring the trip estimates that some 70,000 Central American migrants have disappeared in the past six years based on reports from nonprofit groups. Some of them have been found in the most brutal of circumstances: Hundreds of would-be migrants were discovered murdered in the community of San Fernando in the border state of Tamaulipas: first 72, most of them Central Americans, massacred on a farm in 2010, and nearly 200 people, some Mexicans, discovered in clandestine graves about six months later. Extortion of migrants' families is common since the smuggling business has been taken over by organized crime in recent years. The Zetas cartel in particular is known for holding migrants in houses near the U.S. border and threatening that their loved ones will be killed if their families don't pay more money. Other migrants are believed to have been forced to work for the Zetas or other cartels or were killed if they refused. This year, 38 women, mostly from Honduras, as well as El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua, will cover 2,800 miles (4,500 kilometers) and 14 Mexican states, traveling from Mexico's border with Guatemala to Reynosa, a major entry point on the Texas border to the United States. Along the way, they stop at festivals and Catholic Masses and meet with organizations that advocate for human rights and the missing. They visit migrant shelters, show photos of their missing relatives to people who may have seen them and patiently give interviews, recounting the sad details in each new city. It worked for Olga Marina Hernandez, 52, of Progreso, Honduras, who came last year looking for her 31-year-old son, Gabriel Salmeron Hernandez, whom she hadn't heard from since he left five years earlier. Salmeron's girlfriend saw the photograph the mother was carrying when it was published in the local press and contacted the caravan's organizers. Within weeks of returning to Honduras, Hernandez received a call from her son, who's a recovering drug addict training to be an evangelical preacher in General Escobedo, a working-class suburb of Monterrey.