“Disappearing the disappeared” in Mexico
In what critics are referring to as “disappearing the disappeared,” AMLO’S government recently spoke about numbers representing less than 15% of what is already seen as an unrealistically low total.
In an article published last month in the Los Angeles Times, Virginia Garay Cazares, the mother of a 19-year-old man who disappeared six years ago while on this way to work in Tepic in the Mexican state of Nayarit, decried the Mexican government’s recent efforts to remove cases from the list.
“They’re going to close the Tles and shut down all the cases,” Cazares worried. “They don’t understand the pain and heartbreak for those of us with missing loved ones.”
For his part, AMLO – under whose watch the number of missing persons more than doubled – insists that no one who should legitimately be on the list is being removed, telling reporters, “What is happening is a revision and general search, nationwide, to clarify precisely the number of disappeared, and put that in order.”
The sad truth pointed out by The L.A. Times is that many, perhaps the vast majority, of those listed as missing, “are probably among the more than 50,000 unidentited bodies that have been collected since 2006 and are buried in public cemeteries or still stored in morgues.”
Mexico’s best-known case of the disappeared is of course that of the 43 teaching students who were abducted in Iguala in the state of Guerrero ten years ago, but people had been going missing in the country for years. Mexico started keeping records of missing persons in 1962, and from then through October of 2023, the number of o6cially listed disappeared grew to 111,896.
The problem escalated signitcantly in 2006, collateral damage in the newly launched “war on drugs” being waged by the government of President Felipe Calderon. In the years since, there have been few respites in the violence perpetrated by increasingly powerful and well-armed cartels, and it is the ordinary Mexican people who continue to pay the highest price.
The cartels, emboldened by a seemingly endless supply of weapons brought south from the United States, have entrenched themselves deeply in various facets of Mexican society, wielding signitcant power and in3uence. Their battles for territorial control and dominance in the drug trade have resulted in countless abductions and disappearances, often leaving law enforcement powerless or unwilling to intervene.
On the international stage, Mexico's handling of the crisis affects its relationships with other countries, particularly the United States, with which it shares a lengthy and complex border. Issues of drug tra6cking, human tra6cking, and migration are intertwined with the crisis of disappearances, necessitating bilateral cooperation to address these challenges. However, Mexico's perceived inability to curb violence and Tnd the missing nationals can strain diplomatic relations and impact negotiations on other matters.
As Mexico grapples with this crisis, the citizens of that nation along with the international community are watching closely. The resolution of this issue, or lack thereof, will undoubtedly in3uence Mexico’s path forward, both politically and socially, in the years to come. (La Semana)