Mothers search in the scrublands, poking the earth for signs of a corpse. Desperate pleas fill social media, crying out for clues that may bring relief. Tattered posters flutter in the wind, asking for help in the search. Often, all that is left of the missing are scattered bones bleached by the sun.
It is arguably Mexico’s greatest human rights crisis. More than 130,000 people have vanished since the state went to war against drug cartels a decade ago. Now, activists and human rights experts say the authorities are trying to erase their loved ones from the record.
The government recently presented a new report which said a third of the country’s missing had actually showed signs of life, while another third lacked sufficient data to be found – causing fury and condemnation from relatives who have spent years searching for their missing.
“What the government is doing is illogical and outrageous,” said María Herrera Magdaleno, a leader in the movement of mothers looking for their missing children: Herrera’s four sons are among the disappeared. “Instead of looking for our disappeared, they’re disappearing them.”
The recent uproar is the latest in a longstanding battle between authorities who insist the number of disappeared is an overcount, and search collectives and human rights groups that say the true number of disappeared is far higher than reported.
Last week, the government announced that by cross-referencing registered disappearances with documents including tax filings, marriage registries and vaccination records, officials found 40,308 people – about 31% of total disappearances – had shown some activity in state records, indicating they were probably still alive.
Through this method, authorities were able to locate 5,269 missing people. But the government said another 46,742 records – about 36% – lacked basic information such as full names, dates or places of disappearance, making searches impossible. A further 43,128 had complete records but showed no signs of life when cross-referenced with other state databases.
“We reaffirm our commitment,” said President Claudia Sheinbaum. “We will continue searching for all missing persons until we find them.”
But activists and human rights experts have said while the registry required improvement, the revision of data was just another attempt to minimise the crisis and did little to actually locate missing people. Many believe that by insisting the 46,000 disappeared people had insufficient data to be found, the state has washed its hands of a third of reported victims.
The review has prompted comparisons with an effort by the former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador who, before the national elections, claimed the number of people confirmed as disappeared in Mexico was just 12,377 of the more than 113,000 then registered as missing.
“The state is ultimately making the disappeared disappear all over again,” said Armando Vargas, a security analyst at the public policy thinktank México Evalúa. The recount “fails to deliver any form of justice to the victims and completely disregards the recommendations put forward by civil society. Under these circumstances, it will be extremely difficult to put an end to disappearances in this country.”
Forced disappearance in Mexico dates back to the 1960s and 70s during the country’s dirty war, when the government at the time began detaining activists, students and guerrillas. Most were killed and buried in mass graves, others flown out to sea and dumped in the Pacific Ocean.
The practice surged again in 2006 when the government launched its war against the country’s drug cartels, fracturing the conflict between rival gangs. Disappearance became a tool to sow terror in communities and hide evidence of homicides, with traffickers burying victims in mass graves, burning bodies or dissolving them in vats of acid.
In presenting the report, Marcela Figueroa, a top security official, said unlike during the dirty war, disappearances in recent years had been “committed by individuals”, not the state, and could not be classified as forced disappearances. The interior minister, Rosa Icela Rodríguez, said the data also included “voluntary absences”.
But many of the most egregious cases of disappearances, including the mass disappearance of 43 students from a rural teacher’s college in 2014, have involved state actors. And while authorities often claim people regularly disappear voluntarily, the vast majority are killed or forcibly recruited by organised crime groups, sometimes working with local officials.
“The idea that forced disappearances don’t happen, or that most disappearances are related to voluntary absences, minimises the responsibility of the state,” said the Centro Prodh human rights group on X. “Limiting the number of missing persons to 43,128 minimises the magnitude of a crisis that has a human face and that won’t be solved through administrative searches.”
As far as the 46,000 cases with insufficient data, advocates said the government presented no plan to fill in gaps of information, or how they would undertake the search for the subset of missing people. Instead, the task would appear to fall on families that, in the face of government inaction, often take the search upon themselves at great personal risk.
The government also placed renewed emphasis on encouraging relatives to open a case file at their local prosecutor’s offices, even though many are too fearful to report their missing loved ones to the authorities. Of the more than 43,000 missing people who could not be located through cross-referencing, less than 10% were under criminal investigation.
“We are reverting once again to the idea that only those with case files at the public prosecutor’s office will be considered,” said Rosalva Aída Hernández Castillo, an anthropologist with an upcoming book on disappearances in Mexico. “There is deep mistrust of the prosecutors’ offices; there is significant collusion between these offices and criminal groups – that’s common knowledge.”
