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.”
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
RSS