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News > Latin America

Mexico's Crisis of Enforced Disappearances Hits Women Hard

  • Students protest in front of the attorney general’s office in Mexico City during a protest over the disappearance of 43 Ayotzinapa students in Iguala, Guerrero.

    Students protest in front of the attorney general’s office in Mexico City during a protest over the disappearance of 43 Ayotzinapa students in Iguala, Guerrero. | Photo: AFP

Published 11 April 2016
Opinion

High rates of impunity and rampant gender violence have forced the state of Jalisco to create stronger measures to search for disappeared women and girls.

A gender crisis that sees four women forcibly disappeared every month in the western Mexican state of Jalisco has prompted authorities to launch a new initiative to immediately begin searching for missing women and girls in the state, local media reported Monday.

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The new plan to ensure prompt searches comes after the state declared a gender alert in February over the crisis of femicide and forcibly disappeared women and girls in at least eight of its largest municipalities.

The protocol follows in the footsteps of similar measures already introduced in the northwestern state of Chihuahua, home of the historic femicide verdict last year that saw five men sentenced to a landmark 697 years in jail for the murder of 11 women.

Meanwhile, the Mexican Senate released a report claiming that there were 136 cases of forced disappearance in the country between 2008 and 2015, putting it in the realm of countries living under civil war and extreme political violence, La Reforma reported Monday.

But the Senate statistics pale in comparison to the number of forced disappearances reported by human rights groups. More than 27,600 people are missing in Mexico, and at least 10,000 people have been victims of enforced disappearance since President Enrique Peña Nieto took office in December 2012.

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Ayotzinapa Epitomizes Mexico State Collusion with Drug Cartels

In the western state of Michoacan, bordering Jalisco, the state human rights body has received 20 formal complaints of forced disappearances in the past two years. Only one was documented in 2015. The other 19 were received in 2014.

The crisis of forced disappearances in Mexico has received international attention since the disappearance of 43 Ayotzinapa students in 2014 in Iguala, Guerrero, one of the most violent states. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights reported last month that the Ayotzinapa case is an “emblematic” example of Mexico’s state collusion with organized crime groups that points to “grave deficiencies” including rampant structural impunity.

Human rights defenders have stressed that, as such a symbolic case, justice for Ayotzinapa is key in the broader fight against systemic violence, forced disappearances, and impunity in Mexico.

Mexico disappearances
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