@Zeta
On October 7th at the morning conference of President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO), the Undersecretary of Human Rights, Alejandro Encinas, and the National Commissioner for Searches of Missing Persons, Karla Quintana, updated the data that have been systematized regarding disappearances and clandestine graves in the country.
Of the 77,117 people reported missing since 2006, 18% have been registered with this administration, Alejandro Encinas reported. Of the 4,092 clandestine graves that have been identified, 41.7% are concentrated in ten municipalities where 31.4% of the exhumed bodies have been found. Since the beginning of the AMLO government, 1,257 clandestine graves have been detected and 1,957 bodies have been exhumed (30.7% of the registry), a fact that he considered was “due to the intensification of search efforts in coordination with relatives, a task that the Mexican State had abandoned.”
When referring to the increase in complaints in 2019, Lopez Obrador attributed it to the fact that there was no confidence of the people to do so in the past and that is why, given the change, they did it. He reiterated that the search for the missing is the number one priority of his government.
Encinas argued that the weak point to advance in the investigation of the disappeared is the limited response capacity of the Public Ministries and state prosecutors: “Perhaps the most revealing data is the fact that practically no file is included, none is judicialized for forced disappearance in the country a year, there are no concrete results and that implies impunity.” However, he emphasized in the progress that “the data we have is that there has been a significant decrease in forced disappearance committed by authorities. More than 90 percent are associated with organized crime and this percentage, in which agents of the Mexican State or some police force can participate, are linked to municipal police.”
For her part, Karla Quintana mentioned in other advances the Special Forensic Identification Mechanism, the acceptance of the competence of the United Nations Committee Against Forced Disappearances to hear individual cases and the Approved Search Protocol, which has already been published in the Official Gazette of the Federation. She added that in 2020 almost 334 million pesos were delivered to the 26 state search commissions that requested resources; and that there are already state commissions in the 32 states of the country, although two dierectors have yet to be named.
For more information in Spanish:
En 10 municipios, 41% de las fosas clandestinas encontradas en dos años (Pie de Página, 8 de octubre de 2020)
En 10 municipios del país, 41.7% de fosas clandestinas: Encinas (La Jornada, 8 de octubre de 2020)
En los últimos 15 años se han encontrado 4,092 fosas clandestinas; mil en el gobierno de AMLO (Animal Político, 7 de octubre de 2020)
2019, el año con mayor número de personas desaparecidas desde 2006: Encinas (El Universal, 7 de octubre de 2020)
En México hay 77,171 desaparecidos: Encinas; 2019, el año con más denuncias(Proceso, 7 de octubre de 2020)
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