PEÑITAS, Texas. The daughter of one of two sisters from Texas who went missing in Mexico along with her friend three weeks ago while traveling to a flea market says she has not given up hope that they will be found.
“We are waiting for them to come home,” María Guadalupe Ramírez, 27, told KRGV-TV in Weslaco.
The FBI said in a statement Thursday that it could not comment on the investigation, but said the agency “relentlessly pursues all options when it comes to protecting the American people, and that doesn’t change when they’re in danger on the other side of the border”.
The three women: Ramírez’s mother, Marina Pérez Ríos, 48; Ramírez’s aunt, Maritza Trinidad Pérez Ríos, 47; and her friend, Dora Alicia Cervantes Sáenz, 53, were on their way to a flea market to sell clothes in the Mexican city of Montemorelos, in the state of Nuevo León. The state attorney’s office in Nuevo León has said it is investigating the woman’s disappearance.
The sisters live in Peñitas, a small Texas border town near McAllen, and are legal US residents, while their friend, Saenz, lives in Mexico, KRGV reported.
Ramírez, who spoke with KRGV on Tuesday, said he has been in contact with Mexican authorities. She told the television station that her mother and her aunt, who grew up in Nuevo León, have made the trip to the market several times.
“They had fun hanging out, meeting new people,” Ramírez told KRGV.
Ramirez told The Monitor in McAllen that the last time she spoke to her mother was on February 25, the day after her mother and aunt crossed the border into Mexico.
Another case of Americans going missing in Mexico received a flood of attention earlier this month when their March 3 kidnapping was caught on video after a drug cartel shootout in Matamoros. That case was solved in a matter of days when the four were found in a wooden shack. Two were alive and two were dead.
The massive search for the four kidnapped Americans involved squads of Mexican soldiers and National Guard troops. But for most of the 112,000 missing Mexicans across the country, the only ones looking for them are their desperate relatives.