López Obrador responds to the UN committee on enforced disappearances: "They are not acting in accordance with the truth"

The president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, this Wednesday, at the National Palace. José Méndez (EFE)

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has criticized the report prepared by the United Nations committee that documented forced disappearances in the country.

The group of independent experts that visited the country for the first time in November concluded, after meeting with federal and state authorities, search commissions, relatives of victims and civil rights organizations, that the situation is "worrying", that impunity is "almost absolute" and that the Government must abandon the strategy of militarization of public security.

The president responded this Wednesday from the National Palace: “They do not have, with all due respect, all the information.

They are not acting in accordance with the truth."

"No international organization is going to put us in the dock if we are acting legally, with humanism, if we do not allow corruption or impunity," said López Obrador, who continued: "What can they do?

Any.

Invent, yes”.

The president has thus activated, once again, his strategy of confrontation and disqualification in the face of criticism of his government.

Human rights organizations such as Centro Prodh, however, have lamented the reaction and have highlighted that "the crisis of violence and disappearances continues."

The president has defended that no longer as before.

“It is no longer that time,” he has said, “when the Army was used to repress or finish off the wounded, as was done in the time of [Felipe] Calderón, or to make people disappear.”

The PAN member, who governed between 2006 and 2012, implemented the so-called war against drug trafficking and brought the military into the streets to fight organized crime.

Although López Obrador promised to end this strategy, the Ministry of Defense continues to be in charge of public security tasks.

"[The independent experts] did not see anything of the abuses that were committed during the neoliberal period," the president has complained, although the document asks to take into account the recommendations "for cases that began in the past, as well as for those recently perpetrated”.

More than 98% of the disappearances observed in the report happened between 2006 and 2021. Currently, in Mexico there are 98,944 missing people, 66,651 so far this six-year term, according to the National Registry of Missing and Unlocated Persons.

As of November, only between 2% and 6% of disappearances had been prosecuted and 36 sentences had been issued throughout the country, according to the committee's investigation.

An “almost absolute” impunity, the experts pointed out.

The report states that the data "shows the close relationship between the increase in disappearances" and the militarization of public security.

For this reason, it has recommended that the Government "strengthen the civilian forces of order" and launch an "orderly, immediate and verifiable" withdrawal plan for the military from these tasks.

The independent experts have also urged the Government to “urgently” adopt a national prevention and eradication policy “so that disappearance in Mexico ceases to be the paradigm of the perfect crime.”

After the presentation of the report, which was communicated in a virtual press conference from Geneva (Switzerland), the Ministry of the Interior assured that "it appreciates the work of the committee and respectfully receives its recommendations with the commitment to implement them."

The Undersecretariat for Human Rights, led by Alejandro Encinas, will be in charge of coordinating its implementation.

Encinas highlighted on social networks that the visit, the first made by the committee after having tried since 2013, is a sign of "openness to constructive dialogue and international cooperation."

“We have to make them aware that it is already another reality,” López Obrador said this Tuesday, “and the Ministry of the Interior is doing it.”

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