Mexico begins new registration of tens of thousands of missing people | Abroad

To collect the data, the Mexican government sends officials to people who have reported a family member missing. That will be a huge task, because while no one knows exactly how many Mexicans have disappeared without a trace, the number is around 100,000, according to the National Search Commission (CNB), a federal government agency. This makes the number of missing persons in Mexico much higher than the total number of cases in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Brazil combined during the military dictatorships in those countries during the 1970s.

The government’s new registration attempt has been poorly received by many relatives of missing Mexicans. Last week it was announced that the director of the National Search Commission, Karla Quintana, has resigned. According to the American newspaper The Washington Post she did so out of frustration that the López Obrador government would try to reduce the number of disappearances. There will be presidential elections in Mexico next year; López Obrador’s party, which cannot be re-elected constitutionally, is the clear winner in the polls.

On Wednesday, International Day of the Missing, several thousand relatives of missing people took to the streets in Mexico City and other cities to demonstrate against the government.

According to Mexican human rights organizations, organized crime in the country is responsible for the vast majority of disappearances. For example, it can be read on the website ‘A dónde van los deaparecidos’ (‘Where do the disappeared go’), which keeps track of news about the missing persons, that the regions where gangs fight each other are invariably also the places where most people disappear without a trace.

The Mexican authorities would also be jointly responsible; according to news website Animal Politico at least 426 disappearances can be traced directly to the army and police.

Mexico has been ravaged since the end of the last century by an extremely violent battle between dozens of larger and smaller drug gangs, against which the government deploys military and paramilitary police units. The drug war has claimed the lives of more than a quarter of a million people since 2006, according to federal government figures.

The actual number of victims is probably much higher, as there is little hope that the thousands of disappeared Mexicans are still alive. Mass graves with dozens of bodies are found every month all over the country. Their identities often remain unknown, because the Mexican government hardly has the resources to identify such large numbers of dead.

To that figure must also be added an unknown, but probably also in the many tens of thousands of current, number of Central American migrants. Central Americans also often fall victim to criminal gangs and people smugglers during the perilous journey across Mexico to the United States.