The number of people missing in Mexico exceeded 100,000 on Monday May 16 since 1964, according to official statistical data compiled by the Secretariat of the Government (Interior).
According to the National Missing Persons Register, 100,012 people were reported missing between March 15, 1964 and May 16, 2022. About 75% of them are men.
Disappearances in Mexico have multiplied against a backdrop of violence linked to drug trafficking which has ravaged the country for 16 years.
And according to the Movement for our Disappeared, an association that campaigns to shed light on these disappearances, this figure is far below the number of cases recorded each day in Mexico.
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Last April, the UN committee against enforced disappearances denounced an
“alarming upward trend”
in these occurrences, calling on the Mexican government to take
“immediate measures”
to remedy them.
This United Nations organization judges organized crime as the main culprit, also pointing to the negligence of the public authorities.
The lack of personnel within the security forces to investigate these disappearances has led families, often mothers, to come together to search for their loved ones in clandestine mass graves.
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According to the government, there are more than 37,000 unidentified corpses in morgues across the country, but civil organizations put the figure at 52,000.
Authorities are trying to create a database of these missing, but many bodies are buried without identification due to overcrowding in Mexican morgues.
The first disappearances date from the “dirty war” waged by the authorities against revolutionary movements in the 1960s and 80s.
Mexico has also recorded some 340,000 deaths, the majority victims of organized crime, since 2006, when the authorities launched a controversial military operation against drug traffickers.