Overview
- Two family searchers, activist Ceci Patricia Flores and her daughter Milagros de Jesús Valenzuela Flores, obtained formal certification under CONOCER’s EC1542 standard for searching missing and unlocated persons.
- The certification was issued through the CONOCER framework with institutional backing from Guanajuato’s Instituto Estatal de Capacitación (IECA) and technical evaluation by Forensic and Legal.
- Activists describe the awards as a pilot meant to let more relatives access training and formal credentials that validate field skills developed over years of searching.
- Flores and her daughter stress the initiative is meant to strengthen family search capacity through methodology and tools and not to replace the investigative duties of state authorities.
- The move formalizes expertise built by mother-led and youth search collectives in a country with a long disappearance crisis and could affect how family groups are trained, supported, or integrated into official search efforts.