It was a bright morning in August 2022 when Ángel Montenegro was taken. A 31-year-old construction worker, Montenegro had been out all night drinking with some work buddies in the city of Cuautla and was waiting for a bus back to nearby Cuernavaca, where he lived.
At about 10am, a white van pulled up: several men jumped out and dragged Montenegro and a co-worker inside before speeding off. Montenegro’s co-worker was released a few hundred meters down the street, but Montenegro was driven away.
As soon as she heard that her son had been taken, Montenegro’s mother, Patricia García, raced to Cuautla along with Montenegro’s wife, brother and some neighbors. Arriving at the bus stop, all they found were Montenegro’s cap and one of his tennis shoes.
The group spent all day looking for any other trace of Montenegro, but came up empty-handed. “The desperation started when night fell,” said García, who has now spent more than three torturous years looking for her son.
Montenegro is one of more than 130,000 people who are considered missing or disappeared in Mexico, an ongoing crisis that has devastated tens of thousands of families across the country. While disappearances began to surge in the early 2000s as the Mexican government sought to take on the country’s cartels, a new report by the public policy analysis firm México Evalúa found that, in the last 10 years, disappearances have increased more than 200%.
“It’s a problem that has become uncontrollable at the national level,” said Armando Vargas, a security analyst at México Evalúa. Disappearances “capture the lethal violence” that Mexico is experiencing.
According to Vargas, the surge in disappearances over the last decade reflects the increasing takeover by criminal groups of vast swathes of the country, as well as the diversification of the activities these gangs are engaged in beyond just drug smuggling.
Expanding their ranks often involves forced recruitment, while taking over new territory requires the “annihilation of rival groups”, said Vargas. But simply murdering other gang members is likely to catch the authorities’ attention: instead, cartels bury corpses in unmarked graves, burn them to ash or even dissolve them in vats of acid.
By making bodies disappear, criminal groups “invisibilize the violence, because that puts them under the radar”, Vargas said.
Meanwhile, criminal groups are increasingly engaging in activities that can involve abducting people and making them vanish, including organ trafficking, sex and human trafficking, and migrant smuggling.
The Mexican government, however, has been unable to keep up with cartels as they expand territorially and into new markets, leaving large areas of the country under near-total control of these gangs.
“Criminal power advances in parallel with institutional neglect,” said Vargas.
In 2018, the government launched a the National Search Commission to track and find the disappeared, encouraging more people to report their missing loved ones and creating an interactive public platform that recorded disappearances across the country.
But the commission was poorly funded, and the platform soon became a political thorn in the government’s side: ahead of elections in 2024, the then president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, launched an opaque “review” of the register, and reduced the number of disappeared to just 12,377, sparking an outcry among activists and human rights experts.
When asked about the report from México Evalúa, the president, Claudia Sheinbaum, was dismissive, saying “that platform has a lot of problems” and promising that the government would be releasing a new report to more accurately account for the disappeared.
But analysts say that, if anything, the number of registered disappearances is an undercount, given the extreme rates of violence across the country and the government’s weakness in finding and identifying bodies.
When investigations do take place, they are often slow and ineffective, marred by corruption and incompetence: in 2022, more than 96% of crimes in Mexico went unsolved, according to the United Nations.
The lack of a substantial government response to the crisis has forced many mothers, including García, to search on their own. García joined a collective of 12 women who went out searching weekly, probing the ground with metal rods for signs of buried corpses.
The November after Montenegro was taken, García and the group searched in a field on the outskirts of Cuautla where his phone had last pinged a cell tower. They found six bodies buried there, but none were her son. Four months later they went back and found another five bodies. Again, none were her son.
Despite the gruesome work, García is still searching, refusing to give up hope. But the search has taken a terrible toll, with García forced to divide her time between caring for her family and looking for her son.
“You’re left in broken pieces,” said García. “It’s like when a vase shatters: you can glue it back together but the cracks are always there.”
