There’s a photograph of Jael Monserrat Uribe from when she was 10, standing in the snow on Parliament Hill during a trip to Canada, a place she’d dreamed of visiting because she heard it was the home of Winnie the Pooh, her mother said.

But that was another life.

Jacqueline Palmeros wore a white T-shirt with a different photo of her daughter on a recent Wednesday. She is a young woman in this image; a tightly cropped portrait, hand pressed against her cheek, framed by the words, “I am my daughter’s voice.”

The photo was used in a missing persons poster published by Mexico City’s Attorney General’s Office after she disappeared at 21 years old, on July 24, 2020 — one of the tens of thousands who have gone missing across a country convulsed by years of cartel and state-fuelled violence.

This same photo now lies across a heart of concrete poured and moulded into the earth, a memorial for Monserrat Uribe. The tribute, with a cross and a statuette of the Virgin Mary, sits near where her partial remains were found last November, about 60 metres down an embankment.

The remains revealed she’d been shot in the head.

Jael Monserrat Uribe, aged 10, on Parliament Hill during a trip to Canada. (Submitted by Jacqueline Palmeros)

Palmeros returned to this spot, a lookout called el Llano de Vidrio — the Plains of Glass — in Cumbres del Ajusco National Park, a mountainous and remote region on the southern edge of Mexico City, to search for the rest of her daughter’s body.

“If God wants, I want to return her whole, because I gave birth to a complete daughter,” said Palmeros, the founder of a collective for the families of the disappeared called Una Luz en El Cami