Last year, Mexico’s official number of missing people grew to more than 100,000 for the first time. This year it is even higher, with authorities on Tuesday announcing that 111,916 people have been “forcibly disappeared” and never found again since records began in 1962.
The true number could be higher still, due to systemic issues with the country’s register of missing people, said the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances, which reported the figure.
For advocates and victims, it is a sign that the government is taking another “step backwards” since the register was conceived in 2018.
Photo: EPA-EFE
While acknowledging that the Mexican government cooperated with some of its requests since its last full observations in 2018, the UN said the national register still lacks a “clear and transparent methodology” or disaggregated data on the sexual orientation, gender identity, socioeconomic and migrant status of victims, among other demographics.
Elsewhere in the report, the UN said that Mexican authorities were guilty of “revictimizing” some grieving relatives, including by accusing families of hiding abducted loved ones.
Maria Luisa Aguilar has worked as an advocate for missing people in Mexico for 15 years and said victims’ families “face a lot of risks” reporting their loss officially.
“In many places in Mexico, what you have is the authorities colluded with those who have been the perpetrators of the disappearances,” said Aguilar, now international coordinator for the Miguel Agustin Pro Juarez human rights center.
In others cases families “don’t even have authorities to receive the reports,” she said.
The government register also includes no “mechanism for relatives of disappeared people to participate,” the committee said, noting “the resistance of some authorities” to report to the centralized register, without specifying which authorities or where.
When the register for missing people was written into law in 2018 it was welcomed by victims and advocates. More recently, it has come under attack by the same administration which created it.
In July, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador announced a recount of missing people, claiming the official register number was impossibly high. The following month he welcomed the resignation of then-head of the National Search Commission tasked with keeping the register, Karla Quintana.
For advocates like Aguilar, what was once a sign of hope is being taken apart from the inside.
“It was a great initiative. For the first time we had a register that actually tried to include most of the complaints,” Aguilar said. “Four years later the current government, the same administration, is now concerned that the numbers are too high.”
“The main concern is not whether these records are under or over the real number,” she said. “The thing is [Lopez Obrador’s] review is being done more from a political perspective than to actually look at the main problem: having a crisis of this size.”
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