Searching Mothers Protest at Cancún’s Kilometer Zero Over Delays in Ex-Prosecutor Case

Cancún, Quintana Roo — Members of the Madres Buscadoras de Quintana Roo, a collective of mothers searching for missing relatives, launched a peaceful protest at the Kukulcán roundabout — known as Kilometer Zero of the Hotel Zone — after a court postponed for a third time the intermediate hearing in the case against a former homicide prosecutor over the handling of Francisca Mariner Flores Patrón’s remains.

María Patrón Pat, the collective’s president and Francisca’s mother, said the former prosecutor’s defense attorney shows up at the oral criminal courts, greets his client and then walks out just as the hearing is about to begin, which is enough to postpone it.

Beyond the emotional strain on victims, the delaying tactics also force families to cover travel costs and lawyers’ fees, she said.

“It’s a mockery of us and of the authorities as well,” Patrón Pat said, adding that the protest will stay at the roundabout for now while the group waits for a response from the State Prosecutor’s Office and the judiciary.

She noted that in December the proceedings against the public servants will reach the two-year mark. Their negligence left her daughter’s body inside the forensic medical service for three and a half years without being identified.

A mislabeled sample and a false negative

Francisca Mariner disappeared in June 2020. Her remains were found a month later, but the homicide prosecutor in charge did not follow the required protocols for identifying the victim. A forensic expert who took a DNA sample from the family mislabeled the container, producing a false negative.

As a result, her mother spent three and a half years staging protests and organizing search efforts without knowing that her daughter’s body had already been found.

The former prosecutor for missing persons has already admitted guilt in the case through an abbreviated proceeding.