Family of missing women in Mexico fears cops will ‘give up’

The daughter of one of three women from Texas who went missing in Mexico last month after crossing the border to sell clothes said she is still hopeful her mother will turn up alive — but fears that police will give up searching for them.

“We are waiting for them to come back home,” Maria Guadalupe Ramirez, 27, told KRGV in Weslaco.

Ramirez said she’s been in touch with Mexican authorities since her mom, Marina Perez Rios, 48, aunt Maritza Trinidad Perez Rios, 47, and their friend Dora Alicia Cervantes Saenz, 53, vanished Feb. 24 on their way to their wares in Montemorelos in the state of Nuevo León.

“I hope they don’t give up on my mom and on my tia (aunt) and on Dora because we are waiting for them to come back home,” she told KRGV,

Ramirez said her mom and aunt had made the trip to Mexico several times before from their home in the small Texas border town of Peñitas.

But her mom did not mention that she was headed to Montemorelos when she called her shortly before heading across the border.

“She calls me through FaceTime, and she was showing me that she was at her tia’s store in Los Turcos,” she said. “And that was the last time I talked to my mom.”

Ramirez said Mexican authorities have informed her that the truck the women were in — a mid-1990s Chevy Silverado — was spotted on surveillance video in China, a municipality in Nuevo León.

Ramirez said she was asked for DNA samples, but hopes it won’t have to be used.

“They’re doing their best, but how can nothing be coming out,” she asked.

Ramirez said that Peñitas police are putting pressure on Mexican authorities.

“I do feel like they are doing everything they can and are telling the Mexican authorities, ‘Keep doing the searches, keep looking,’” she said.

On Thursday, the FBI said it was unable to comment on the investigation, adding that the agency “relentlessly pursues all options when it comes to protecting the American people, and this doesn’t change when they are endangered across the border.”

The women’s disappearance came just a week before the kidnapping of four Americans in Mexico, who had traveled to the country for plastic surgery.

The friends became caught in a drug cartel shootout in Matamoros — with frightening footage showing them getting abducted in a pickup truck.

Two of the four survived and were found in a shack near the Gulf coast. The other two were found dead.