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News > Mexico

Mexico: The War on Drugs Has Left Over 73,000 Missing Persons

  • Citizens claim the truth in the Ayotzinapa missing students case, Mexico City, Mexico, April 26, 2018.

    Citizens claim the truth in the Ayotzinapa missing students case, Mexico City, Mexico, April 26, 2018. | Photo: EFE

Published 16 July 2020
Opinion

Figures could be higher given that criminal groups hamper investigations in certain areas.

On Tuesday, outlet La Razon revealed that at least 71,678 people have disappeared since 2006 when the so-called "War On Drugs" began in Mexico.

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Mexico: OHCHR Supports Families of the Ayotzinapa Disappeared

The information comes from the Interior Secretariat's report "Search, Identification, and Registry of Missing Persons", a document covering from 1964 to 2020, a period in which 73, 201 people disappeared and were never located.

In the National Registry of Missing and Unlocated Persons, which is managed by the National Search Commission (CNB), it is recorded that the problem of disappearances began to escalate during the Felipe Calderon administration (2006-2012) when 37,601 people disappeared, 15,986 of whom have not been located yet.

Later, during the administration of Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018), 34,110 missing persons were counted. Since Dec. 2018, when the administration of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) began, the problem remains growing as 10,223 people have been reported missing.

Besides, between 2006 and 2020, the Mexican federal authorities located 3,978 mass graves and exhumed 6,625 bodies. Most of the exhumed remains were found in the states of Jalisco (487), Sinaloa (253), and Colima (179).

Social organizations searching for missing persons hold that the numbers could be higher given that criminal groups hamper investigations in certain areas of the country.

“They were waiting for us with weapons and they did not let us pass. We were going on a search and they were already waiting for us… it was a horrifying event”, Solecito director Lucia Diaz recalled regarding a search action that her NGO tried to carry out at the Colinas de Santa Fe port, in the state of Veracruz, in 2017.

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