She was looking for her missing brother. Now people are looking for her.

Only a few torn pieces of the crime scene tape around Lorenza Cano's home remain. The shards of glass from the front door are gone. This also applies to the bullet casings.

All that remains is the hope that Mrs. Cano will be found.

The 55-year-old activist is one of hundreds of women in Mexico who became advocates for the country's disappeared population after their own loved ones went missing. Ms Cano's brother, José Francisco, was kidnapped in 2018 and never found.

Now she herself has disappeared.

Last week, gunmen entered her home in Salamanca, an industrial city in Mexico's central Guanajuato state, killing her husband and son and taking her away into the night.

The kidnapping has exposed one of Mexico's most terrifying national tragedies: a crisis of disappearances.

Impunity is rampant, public security forces are involved in some of these crimes and clandestine graves have been discovered across the country.

Ms Cano's disappearance has dealt a devastating blow to her community in Salamanca, where cartel wars have led to record violence in recent years. Local searchers are now concerned about their own vulnerability.

“We are left with the question: 'When will they come and take me away?'” said Alma Lilia Tapia, the spokeswoman for Salamanca United in the Search for the Disappeared, a group of 206 families searching for their missing loved ones, and of which Mrs Cano is a member.

Ms Tapia has been searching for her son, Gustavo Daryl, since he was kidnapped from his food stall in 2018, wearing an apron and holding grill tongs.

The government says more than 94,000 people are missing in Mexico, although this could be an undercount, according to the United Nations. The majority of cases remain unsolved, such as detailed research is often not completed. Family members are left to their own devices to sift through clues and follow leads in desperate attempts to find their loved ones – or perhaps find closure.

“There is no protection,” Ms. Tapia, 55, said from her living room, a few blocks from Ms. Cano's home. “We are all at risk here.” Dozens of missing personnel airmen were scattered across her dining room table. Handmade embroidery on the walls paid tribute to the disappeared.

Violence in Guanajuato has surged in recent years as the Jalisco New Generation Cartel and the local Santa Rosa de Lima Cartel battle for control in the state. About 21,200 people have been killed in Guanajuato over the past six years, according to government figures, making it one of Mexico's deadliest states.

Those left to search for the disappeared have also become targets. In Guanajuato, the UN human rights office documented the murder of at least five people searching for their missing relatives between 2020 and 2023.

“The search for missing people affects the interests of criminal groups, or possibly agents of the state, and therefore poses a threat,” said Raymundo Sandoval, member of the Platform for Peace and Justice in Guanajuato, a coalition that supports the families of the disappeared. The attacks on searchers “have an immediate, decelerating effect.”

It is unclear why Ms. Cano was targeted. She was not a high-profile activist and mainly did administrative work because a bad hip prevented her from going into the field.

“Unfortunately, in this case, there was no previous indication, no previous threat,” said Guillermo García Flores, Salamanca's municipal secretary. “It was a completely surprising event.”

Last week, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said at a news conference that he had no information about the case. “But every day we protect the people and there is no impunity for anyone,” he added.

Volunteer seekers in Salamanca say they have little trust in local and federal officials.

“We feel wronged,” said María Elena Pérez, 62, another member of the collective whose daughter, Martha Leticia, was kidnapped in 2018.

“We have no government support, no security or anything like that. There are times when we have to look around for ourselves, however we can,” she said. “We want this all to change.”

Julio César Prieto Gallardo, the mayor of Salamanca, defended his government's actions. “We provide support regardless of whether they deny it,” he said in an interview, referring to families critical of the government's response to disappearances. “The doors of the municipality of Salamanca are open.”

This week, two men were arrested and charged with murder and disappearance in connection with Ms. Cano's case.

Just five days before her kidnapping, Claudia Sheinbaum, the presidential candidate of Mexico's ruling Morena party, held a rally in Salamanca and acknowledged the violence engulfing the region.

“Guanajuato was a prosperous, safe state. And today it ranks first in homicides across the country,” she told the crowd. “Instead of growing the economy, investments here are fleeing because of uncertainty.”

Before the speech, Ms. Tapia, Salamanca's collective spokeswoman, climbed over a railing to hand Ms. Sheinbaum an envelope with a list of demands calling on whoever is elected president later this year to not abandon the organization and its mission to abandon.

Ms. Sheinbaum promised she would not do that, Ms. Tapia said. But those were words the collective has heard before. “It has happened to us that they take up the issue and then forget about us,” she said.

López Obrador's government has been criticized for a recount of the official register of disappeared people presented in December – an effort, the government said, to update the database and eliminate false entries. The new census dropped the number of disappeared people from nearly 111,000 to about 94,000 in the national register, but critics argued that the process was opaque.

At the end of the recount, officials said only about 12,370 people could be “confirmed” as missing, though they acknowledged that more than 62,000 cases lacked even basic information to launch a search.

Some members of the collective recently met outside a bar in central Salamanca. They were looking for human remains that they had been told were buried near a river.

“We are running out of time. We are getting older,” Ms. Tapia said. Fragments of bones, which she identified as being from animals, scattered across the field.

Still, age, health problems or pressure from family members can't stop them from doing their work, says Francisca Caudillo, another seeker.

Ms. Caudillo, 50, is one of the few who have found a missing loved one. Last July, she was on site when the collective exhumed the body of her son, Martín Eduardo, from a landfill. She had been looking for him for over two years. When his remains were eventually returned home, Mrs. Caudillo had flowers, live music and fireworks to remember him.

“I like it when I find someone, no matter who they are,” she said. “It gives me a little bit of peace to know that they are reunited with their families.”

Simon Romero contributed reporting from Mexico City, and Miguel García Lemus from Salamanca, Mexico.