MEXICO CITY – These are shocking and almost inconceivable figures: more than 73,200 people of whom there is no trace.
It is roughly the equivalent of the entire population of American cities like Deerfield Beach, Florida or Kalamazoo, Michigan.
In Mexico, it is the number of missing people, according to new official data. The value of these data is enormous, authorities said.
“It is not just about having a registry, we not only want to know who we are looking for, but to have all the possible information to carry out searches,” said Karla Quintana, head of the National Search Commission, presenting the first public registry of these data. in Mexico.
The majority of disappearances have been reported since 2006 and 40 percent have been recorded since December 2018, since the beginning of the administration of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who promised to obtain answers on disappearances such as those of 43 university students. rural Ayotzinapa, which has attracted international attention.
Fewer missing in the middle of a pandemic?
Alejandro Encinas, undersecretary for Human Rights, indicated that at least in the last months of the COVID-19 pandemic, the numbers have decreased compared to last year’s levels.
“It means a significant decrease for the first time in crimes related to the disappearance of people,” Encinas said at a press conference. The drop is surprising because other crimes such as homicides have continued to increase despite the closure caused by the coronavirus.
In addition to the 73,200 cases of people who have not yet been located, there are 100,000 people who were reported missing at some point and were later found, dead or alive.
Data from the National Search Commission show the surprising number of lives in limbo, people who have not been able to see or bury their loved ones again as they fight against the violence that has affected Mexico.
A fifth of those registered as missing are minors, mainly between the ages of 10 and 19.
In January, the registry had more than 61,000 people missing. In just a few months, more than 11,000 cases have been added to the database.
Several were cases reported directly by relatives of disappeared persons on a new platform created to speed up the registration and search of the disappeared. The new platform was created, according to the National Search Commission, to recognize that many families “do not report to the authorities, either out of fear or mistrust.”
There are also disappearances that are now being recorded around previous events that took place in the country, including possible victims of the Mexican Dirty War marked by acts of government repression, such as the Tlatelolco and El Halconazo massacres, according to Undersecretary Encinas .
Registering missing persons has been a work in progress; An older version of a registry was created in 2012, but it was updated infrequently and received criticism from experts and associations due to a lack of key data. One of those expert groups, Data Cívica, even created its own database to fill in the blanks, including the names of the more than 30,000 people known to be missing.
“There was no approved version,” said Quintana. “Then all available records had to be reviewed” to form the new official version with more and better information.
Despite attempts to standardize everything in a single database, the new record has not been without its problems, mainly due to incomplete or incorrect ways in which some prosecutors had recorded previous data.
For example, some people were classified as missing, although they turned out to be Mexican women who had fled violent situations.
However, the majority of cases involve people who have disappeared, including children, adults, migrants and around one hundred Americans who have not been found.
“Surely it can be improved,” said lawyer Sofía de Robina, from the advocacy group Centro Prodh. “But recognizing that this is a crisis, that it continues and that there are thousands of missing faces, is a good step.”
Currently, many of the searches for missing persons are only carried out by families. Some search the field, often inserting a post into the ground. If the post smells rotten, they dig in that area, hoping to uncover a mass grave that may contain the remains of their missing loved one.
In contrast to the latest Mexican numbers, it is estimated that around 40,000 disappeared during the Guatemalan Civil War and around 30,000 Argentines were victims of enforced disappearances during the country’s Dirty War, according to calculations by non-governmental organizations.
This story was originally published in Noticias Telemundo.
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