In light of widespread under-reporting and the lack of comprehensive nationwide statistics, these numbers likely offer only a partial view of the situation: day-to-day disappearances are a fact of life in Mexico.

Disappearances reflect rising levels of violence by organized crime in response to the government’s strategy of militarized security, as well as violent repression by state or private groups competing for control of illegal markets, natural resources, and land. More than 150,000 people are estimated to have been killed in Mexico between 2006 and 2018 and, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, more than 357,000 had been internally displaced by violence as of December 2020. Migration from Central America has also fueled a spike in violent disappearances among migrants.

Data on missing persons in Nuevo León collected by ICMP’s NGO partner, Citizens in Support of Human Rights (CADHAC) and analyzed by the University of Oxford, the University of Minnesota, and the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO-Mexico) in 2017, found that at least 47 percent of disappearances in Nuevo León were committed by state authorities and 91 percent of victims had no relationship to organized crime. Across the country, 75 percent of those reported missing are men, and 25 percent are women. The states of Jalisco, Tamaulipas, and Estado de Mexico have the largest number of missing persons, while Nuevo León has one of the highest numbers of municipalities with the highest per capita rate of missing persons.

The forced disappearance of 43 students from the Teacher Training School in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero, in 2014 raised the visibility of the issue of missing persons. In 2017 the National Movement for the Disappeared (MovNDmex), reuniting collectives of families of the missing, along with many CSOs secured the adoption and entry into force of the General Law on Enforced Disappearances and Disappearances by Private Persons.