On July 13, at a press conference, the Ministry of the Interior (SEGOB) updated the registry of missing or not located people in Mexico to 73 thousand 201 people, of which 97.9 percent were reported after 2006 (year of the start of the “war on drug trafficking” launched by former President Felipe Calderón) and to date.
These figures are part of the Report on Search, Identification and Public Version of the Registry of Missing Persons of the National Search Commission (CNB).
Other data included in this same report refer that, from March 1964 (date of the first disappearance registered in the country) to date, there is a record of 177 thousand 863 missing persons but 58.8% were located (6 thousand 401 without life and 98 thousand 242 alive).
The Minister of the Interior, Olga Sánchez Cordero, announced that from now on this tool will be available on the web and that private individuals will be able to report cases of disappearance anonymously, to open up “all the paths to have more information that may allow us to know who the disappeared are, and to make search efforts and disappearance patterns more effective”. “Starting today, it will be possible to know in real time how many girls, boys, adolescents, men and women are reported or denounced as disappeared by state, municipality and locality from the 1960s to the present day,” she said.
When presenting the report, the Assistant Secretary for Human Rights of the Ministry of the Interior, Alejandro Encinas Rodríguez, also indicated that there are 3,978 registered clandestine graves in which 6,625 bodies have been exhumed. Of these, 42 percent have been fully identified, and 25.6 percent have already been handed over to their families. The states where 57.13% of these graves have been found in the last two years were Veracruz, Sinaloa, Colima, Guerrero and Sonora.
These are not definitive figures, recognized SEGOB, since there are six states that have not yet provided all their data: Guanajuato, Baja California, Aguascalientes, Tabasco, Sonora and Tlaxcala.
“I want to point out that the work that has been promoted to strengthen the forensic and expert services both within the scope of the Office of the Attorney General of the Republic and at the level of the states begins to have results, because practically, previously the identification and return to family members were trivial, they practically did not exist, today there are important results”, said Encinas.
Before the announcement, the president of Amnesty International in Mexico, Tania Reneaum Panszi, acknowledged that “it is an important step to give a name, a figure to what has been the phenomenon of disappearances in this country.” “Transparency of data shows us the dimension of the problem, but the National Search Commissions (CNB) have to be strengthened,” she said in an interview for Forbes Mexico. She also warned about the fact that “in the context of the pandemic, today the black number could be higher than before, the prosecutors are not in a position to receive the complaints as before or families do not have the conditions to be able to go out and report”.
For more information (in Spanish):
Registro histórico en México de 73 mil 201 personas desaparecidas (La Jornada, 13 de julio de 2020)
En México hay más de 73 mil desaparecidos y más de 3 mil fosas clandestinas (Animal Político, 13 de julio de 2020)
La 4T localiza mil 143 fosas clandestinas y exhuman mil 682 víctimas (MSN, 13 de julio de 2020)
Desde hoy, Segob informará en tiempo real número de desaparecidos (Político.mx, 13 de julio de 2020)
La nueva normalidad da oportunidad para fortalecer búsqueda de desaparecidos (Forbes México, 14 de julio de 2020)
For more information from SIPAZ (in English):
National/International: First Latin American Encounter “We Embrace Horizons Facing Disappearances” (June 16, 2020)
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