FOUND
Interpreting Nature to Locate Those Who We Are Missing
Over 130,000 persons are reported as disappeared in Mexico. Behind each case there is a family searching for answers. FOUND works at the intersection of frontier technology and the lived knowledge of search groups, driving systemic change and building institutional capacity to improve how governments respond to disappearance.
Explore our journeyFrom the first experimental site in Jalisco to platforms now running inside the national search commissions of Mexico and Colombia.
Tap a year to open its milestones
Watch the Trailer
The story of families, science, and the search for those who are missing.
FOUND in Action
- Multispectral & Hyperspectral Imaging
- Airborne LiDAR
- Seismic Noise Interferometry (TIRSA)
- Electrical Resistivity Tomography, Conductivimetry
- Satellite Spectral Analysis
- Machine Learning
- Forensic Entomology, Botany, Territorial Analysis, Soil Science
- Knowledge Exchanges with local search collectives and authorities
Tap to enlarge
.jpeg?raw=true)
The Role of Buscadoras
Women-led collectives are at the heart of FOUND's work. They have reshaped the national conversation on disappearance and justice. Their search practices, born from lived experience, are vital forensic knowledge. Alongside them, FOUND listens, learns, and incorporates their methods into our technological efforts.
The knowledge was already there.
For years, searching mothers have walked hills, ranches, abandoned houses and countless roads across Mexico. They learned to read the earth with a precision no book or scientist taught them: that disturbed soil looks different, that certain flowers bloom where or when they shouldn't, that vegetation changes colour where the ground holds extra nutrients as a result of the presence of buried bodies. This is, in effect, forensic knowledge; a practice of citizen science. FOUND begins by listening, learning, and building the place where this knowledge can sit at the same table as science, context analysis, and the institutions responsible for the search.
Ethics in their own words (videos)Care as a research topic, a methodology and a practice, and what makes an encounter with a searching family feel like care rather than extraction.
These videos were part of a keynote at the Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities, University of Oxford, at the invitation of FOUND and the Oxford Latin American Graduate Network. June 2026.
At FOUND, the knowledge of searching mothers is the reference standard against which our technology is measured. No spectral index or AI platform replaces that knowledge.
When families speak, they speak in the present tense. "He is a son." "She is a student." The verb stays in present tense. There is an ethic in that grammar.
Co-production. Ethics should not be understood as an external constraint imposed on technology. Rather, ethics must be understood as a relational practice that emerges through the search itself.
Coproduction in practice · Tlajomulco An example of how families codesigned an experimental site
Our experimental sites were not built from institutional data or scientific evidence alone. Families described that when large amounts of soil are moved to install electrical-tower bases, clandestine graves can appear in that disturbed ground. So we built one of our sites beside electrical towers to replicate exactly that condition — and to test how each instrument behaves where the problem actually occurs. The methods adapt to each place; the principle of coproduction with families does not.
Four ways of seeing the territory
Institutional Partnerships
.png)
