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& quot; They are horror data & quot ;: Mexico reveals that there are more than 60,000 missing in the country

2020-01-06T20:44:17.436Z


A total of 61,637 people are registered as missing in the country since the 1960s, although the whereabouts of the vast majority have been unknown since 2006, when the so-called war on drug trafficking began.


Mexico is not formally at war, but it already has more disappeared than there were during conflicts in other Latin American nations. The authorities revealed on Monday a first major official count of all historical reports of disappearances: the balance is 61,637 people whose whereabouts are unknown.

Until just a few months ago, the government estimate was 40,000 missing people.

In the last 13 months in Mexico alone, 5,184 people were added to the missing count , officials said.

And although the new official figure takes into account all people who have been reported missing from the 60s until December 31, officials said 97% of the disappearances have been recorded from 2006 to date.

It was in 2006 that the then government of Felipe Calderón launched the so-called war on drug trafficking, a strategy of frontal combat to cartels in the country that has meant an increasing bloodshed. With the violence of the narco, the discovery of clandestine graves with unidentified bodies has become almost common.

Since the end of 2018, 873 of these graves have been found with more than a thousand bodies in total, according to data announced Monday by the government.

In contrast to Mexican figures, it is estimated that there were 40,000 missing during the civil war in Guatemala and that around 30,000 Argentines were victims of enforced disappearance in the last dictatorship, according to estimates by non-governmental organizations.

"We are talking about lives"

And the violence by the war against the narco has not given truce. In fact, last year he broke records in the number of homicides and Karla Quintana Osuna, in charge of the National Commission for the Search of Missing Persons, said when presenting the data that the years in which more reports of disappearances have occurred are 2016, 2017 and 2018.

"We have to remember that here we are talking about lives, of people, of families. They are data of the horror that have many stories of much pain behind them, of people from both Mexico and migrants," Quintana said.

74% of the people in the registry are male, especially from 20 to 29 years of age, while the rest are female, mostly between 15 and 24 years old. Of the people whose whereabouts are unknown, there are 11,000 children and adolescents.

The data comes from more than a year of analysis and review by the government, especially from the National Commission for the Search of Missing Persons led by Quintana.

"The information we are giving right now can [change] and will surely vary," Quintana said.

The commission also recently launched a portal to facilitate the reporting, by allowing citizens to provide data on their loved ones when they do not know where they are instead of relying on family members to travel to local prosecutors and that these open investigation folders.

That is usually an obstacle. For example, the Ministry of the Interior of Mexico, Olga Sánchez Cordero, said Monday in the presentation of the figures they know "of people who, because they are of very limited resources, cannot even access" aid. He said he knows of a mother who has four missing children in the state of Guerrero who has not been able to travel to the cities where the officials who can keep the record with which the search for people begins.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador promised since the campaign, in 2018, that resolving the disappearance crisis would be one of his priorities. Hence the focus on really accounting for cases and launching tools such as the reporting platform.

The current government has also created special commissions to deal with paradigmatic cases, such as the 43 of Ayotzinapa. This is how rural students from a school in the state of Guerrero are known, of which nothing has been known since September 2014, when the trucks in which they were traveling were attacked. The last time the students were seen was aboard police vans.

Source: telemundo

All news articles on 2020-01-06

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