Mexico: 100,000 Disappeared and Missing People

May 17, 2022

By: Stephanie Brewer

For years now, relatives of Mexico’s disappearance victims – led especially by women – have been walking the streets and scouring the countryside daily in search of the tens of thousands of people who have been disappeared at the hands of private individuals, state agents, or people acting in collusion with authorities.

Families turn to one institution after another and even conduct their own investigations to track down and search for their loved ones alive, devoting time and resources to a search that can be as dangerous as it is difficult and exhausting. Grouped in the many collectives that have sprung up across the country, families have also led the forensic search. Working with picks and shovels, they have discovered clandestine graves and extermination sites, facing risks, lack of resources, and extreme conditions. Groups of Central American families have arrived to search for their missing migrant relatives who have been disappeared in Mexican territory.

Disappearances generate continuous impacts on families, who experience both the pain of absence and the uncertainty of the fate of the disappeared person. Seeking to put an end to this cycle of violence and rupture of everyday life, families and collectives, in addition to going out to search, have not stopped demanding that the Mexican government provide truth, justice, and an end to these crimes. Their demands and participation have led in recent years to the adoption of important norms and the creation of institutions to address disappearances.

Despite the progress made, including hundreds of discoveries and identifications of remains, today the absence of 100,000 people – a number that increases daily – continues to have a devastating impact on Mexican society.

AP Photo/Felix Marquez

This reality was exhibited, among others, in November 2021, when the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances (CED Committee) visited Mexico. The Committee visited 13 of Mexico’s 32 states (Chihuahua, Mexico City, Coahuila, Guanajuato, Guerrero, Jalisco, State of Mexico, Morelos, Nayarit, Nuevo Leon, Sinaloa, Tamaulipas, and Veracruz), holding 48 meetings with more than 80 authorities and 33 meetings with hundreds of victims and dozens of victims’ collectives and civil society organizations. Based on the information received, the Committee found that  “the phenomenon of disappearance continues to be widespread over much of the territory of the State party in the face of which, as we have stated in the past, ‘impunity and revictimization prevail’”.

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