Members of the group "Los otros seardores de Huitzuco", carry out a search in clandestine graves in the state of Guerrero.Dassaev Téllez / Dassaev Téllez
The Government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador has released this Friday the updated data on missing persons and clandestine graves found in Mexico.
With cut to December 2020, today's figures close the first two years of the six-year term.
The outlook is bleak.
Since December 2018, authorities have rescued 2,395 bodies from clandestine graves.
In this time, the disappearance of 16,875 people whose whereabouts is unknown has been registered.
In total, Mexico has more than 80,000 disappeared since 2006, when the government of Felipe Calderón began its offensive against organized crime.
The Undersecretary of the Interior, Alejandro Encinas, has been in charge of presenting the figures.
Encinas has had an impact on the only positive aspect that could be highlighted, the slowdown of the tragedy.
In 2020, authorities found 33% fewer graves than in 2019. Likewise last year, 18% fewer bodies were found in graves than during the previous year.
The official has also pointed out the progress in the identification of corpses.
Of the 2,395 bodies found in graves in the last two years, authorities have identified 39%.
Most of the bodies recovered from graves, Encinas said, are concentrated in five states: Jalisco, Colima, Michoacán, Zacatecas and Guanajuato.
Contiguous regions that span much of the center of the country and hundreds of kilometers of coastline, these five states have seen increases in crime rates in recent years.
Encinas has pointed out in particular the case of Guanajuato, a battlefield for mafias that for years have fed on fuel theft.
In the last three months of 2020, authorities located there more than 200 bodies in at least 102 graves.
The situation in Mexico has been critical for years.
First because of the number of missing persons registered since 2006. And then because of one of the consequences of the offensive, the overflow of forensic services and the inability of governments to even have reliable databases of missing persons, graves or human remains.
In June 2019, Encinas himself said that the country was experiencing a forensic crisis.
“Although at the national level there are 217 laboratories and 263 amphitheaters, most of the states have only the capacity to identify only 20% of the bodies they receive, while the facilities for storing bodies are overcrowded at least than 40%, ”the official wrote on his blog.
Encinas announced an investment of 410 million pesos, just over 20 million dollars, for the construction of five regional forensic institutes in Coahuila, Nuevo León, Sonora, Veracruz and Mexico City, in addition to 15 forensic cemeteries in as many regions.
In all this time, the Undersecretary for Human Rights has repeatedly criticized the "resistance" of local governments.
Not only in solving the problem, but in recognizing it.
"Unfortunately on many occasions due to indifference or ineffectiveness of the authority itself, they have not lived up to the forensic emergency that we are experiencing," said the official in June of last year.