Mexico
According to the National Registry of Missing Persons, which is administered by the National Search Commission (Comisión Nacional de Búsqueda, CNB) and incorporates data from Federal and State attorney general´s offices and local search commissions, by the end of July 2023 more than 110,000 active cases of missing persons had been reported since 1964.
In view of underreporting from families, and the unreliability of state-level databases, the actual number is likely to be considerably higher.
Active cases include victims of political repression from the 1960s to the 1980s, and from specific periods of heightened violence since the adoption of the Security Strategy in 2006.
In some areas of the country, disappearances peaked in 2009-13, while in others disappearances have continued at the same level. Many families report disappearances immediately; others report several years afterwards, and many, it is believed, do not report due to security concerns or lack of trust or information.
The National Registry lists more than 87 percent of active cases as enforced disappearances or disappearances by private persons. It says that in 25 percent of cases the victims are women, while more than 65 percent of cases involving victims below the age of 20 are female, mostly aged between 15 and 19. From the 32 states in Mexico, six – Mexico, Guanajuato, Nuevo León, Puebla, Tamaulipas, and Mexico City – account for 51 percent of cases of disappeared girls and women.
All 32 jurisdictions in Mexico are dealing with active cases of missing persons. Only seven states report fewer than 500 missing persons, and this may reflect underreporting. Given the high mobility in the country, cases often concern residents of one state who were last seen in another state. People also go missing en route from Central America or the Caribbean through Mexico to the United States.
In December 2021, the CNB reported that since 2006, at least 4,839 clandestine sites had been located, from which 8,278 bodies had been exhumed. Of this number, the government says 1,136 have been identified and 1,019 have been returned to families.
Consolidating data from 27 jurisdictions, the National Movement of Families of the Missing reports that there are 52,000 unidentified human remains across the country. This does not include bone fragments recovered from execution sites.
The abduction of 43 students in the state of Guerrero in southwestern Mexico in September 2014 focused worldwide attention on Mexico’s missing persons crisis. The case of the kidnapped students, which revealed a culture of close cooperation between the local political establishment and criminal gangs, apparently with the connivance of police, has been viewed as a microcosm.
In March 2021, El Economista, a Mexico City newspaper, reported a rise in the number of missing women and girls in Mexico. Quoting figures published by the CNB, the paper noted that between 1964 and 2021, almost 30,000 women and girls had been reported missing – but almost a third of these cases occurred between the beginning of 2016 and the end of 2020, and the upward trend has continued since then.
In its recommendations following a visit to Mexico in November 2021, the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearance called on the authorities to “strengthen institutions, searches and investigations; ensure systematic and effective coordination of institutions; remove obstacles preventing cases of enforced disappearance from being brought before the courts; duly address disappearances occurring in the context of migration; facilitate search, investigation, reparation and memory efforts related to long-standing cases; address the forensics crisis; facilitate access to searches, truth, justice and reparation using a differential approach; recognize the role of victims and duly address their support and protection needs; protect public officials involved in searches and investigations; and use registers to devise efficient strategies for preventing and eradicating enforced disappearance.”
Individual states, most prominently Nuevo Leon, have made progress in tackling the issue, largely in response to pressure from local human rights NGOs. The civil society organization, Citizens in Support of Human Rights (CADHAC) has brought together families of the missing to lobby the Nuevo Leon authorities, including the office of the Attorney General, to investigate missing persons cases transparently and effectively.
Between 1 January 2019 and 31 July 2022, supported by USAID, ICMP and CADHAC implemented a project in cooperation with the Office of the Attorney General in Nuevo Leon (FGJNL). ICMP helped Nuevo Leon to enhance its DNA identification capacities, through the establishment of a laboratory for the analysis of osseous remains (LARO) and the adoption of optimized DNA extraction methods; to improve capacity to recover and analyze human remains, through the adoption of standard operating procedures, training on forensic anthropology and direct technical assistance in the processing and analysis of the more than 19,000 remains recovered from the case “El Tubo”; and to implement a data-processing infrastructure with a consolidated registry of missing persons and the launch of the Online Inquiry Center for the FGJNL.
Additionally, during 2021 and 2022, ICMP worked with the Federal Attorney General´s Office (FGR), with funding from USAID through its activity “Promoviendo la Rendición de Cuentas por los Derechos Humanos” (RED-DH). The project concluded with the adoption of two new DNA extraction methods for skeletal remains, which obtain a greater number of genetic profiles while working with smaller bone samples. The project also included the publication of a Handbook of DNA extraction methods that can be accessed on the FGR and ICMP websites.
