Mexico’s list of ‘missing people’ grows to more than 100,000
More than 100,000 people in Mexico have been officially listed as ‘disappeared’ by the government.
Since the latest data has been published, desperate family groups have called on officials to ramp up their efforts to help victims of violence linked to organised crime.
Over the past two years, the number of missing people on the Interior Ministry’s national registry – which dates back to 1964 – has risen from about 73,000 people to more than 100,000, with most of them being men.
The majority are between 15 and 30 years old, from lower income families, the National Search Commission (CNB) reported last year.
‘It’s incredible that disappearances are still on the rise,’ said Virginia Garay, whose son vanished in 2018 in the Pacific coast state of Nayarit.
Ms Garay now works with families as part of a group called Warriors Searching for Our Treasures to try to track down missing loved ones.
It is one of some 130 civil society groups doing such work, which sometimes even involves digging up mass graves.
‘The government is not doing enough to find them,’ she said after taking matters into her own hands.
CNB has increased transparency about the missing people, but prosecutors make little effort to investigate those responsible, Human Rights Watch said in its annual report about Mexico in 2021.
According to the organisation, police, the military, and criminal groups are behind many such incidents.
Cases have spiked since 2007, after former president Felipe Calderon deployed the army into the streets to fight drug traffickers.
It unleashed a wave of violence that the current administration is still grappling with.
A report last week also revealed cases of missing migrants in Mexico jumped nearly fourfold in 2021 from 2020.
The latest number also come as three journalists were killed in the country just this month.
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
For more stories like this, check our news page.