A Mexican mom hopes that Nancy Guthrie will be found alive and reunited with her loved ones, unlike the thousands of victims whose remains she has found in mass graves.
Ceci Flores founded Madres Buscadoras de Sonora, a collective of mothers searching for their missing family members, after two of her six sons were kidnapped by a criminal gang May 4, 2019 in Bahia de Quino, Sonora.
A day later, the gang released Jesús Adrian Sauceda, who was 15 at the time, after she reportedly confronted the leader at his home and threatened to use violence if they were not released safely.
Her other son, Marcos Antonio Sauceda, 31, was never freed and has not been seen since. A third son, Alejandro Guadalupe Islas, is also missing after he mysteriously vanished Oct. 30, 2015, while traveling to Los Mochis, Sinaloa.
She has now taken up the task of finding the 84-year-old Guthrie, who was last seen Jan. 31.
“Someone made an anonymous call to our group, telling us that she had been smuggled across the border to Nogales through a place called Las Mariposas,” Flores told The Post of the Mexican community just over the southern border from Tucson, where Guthrie lived.
“Someone called to give us that information. We don’t know if it’s true or just something to play with our emotions; we don’t know the truth,” Flores said.
“We verify all the information we receive. We go to the location and check. Regardless of whether it’s true or not, we go.
“We went to Las Mariposas but found nothing.”
Flores and at least 30 other group members have spent the last 10 days combing about 60 miles of terrain across from Tucson with no traces of Guthrie, the mother of NBC Today co-anchor Savannah Guthrie.
Since setting up the collective a decade ago, Flores and her team have found the remains of more than 2,000 victims, while locating at least 130 missing persons alive.
Flores hopes to obtain immigration documents for her team to enter the United States and join the search in Tucson and surrounding cities.
But she claimed federal and local authorities would be embarrassed if a search group from Mexico solves the high-profile case.
“Look, honestly, I don’t think they’ll give us permission because they know our search history, they know the results we’ve achieved, and I think that if we went into the Arizona field to search for Mrs. Nancy and found her, we would embarrass the U.S. authorities,” Flores said.
“They know that if we go in to search, we can find her because we have many years of field experience, something they don’t have,” she added. “So, for that simple reason — knowing that we could embarrass them in the media, in the eyes of society — they won’t do it.”