By Ana Báez
Mexico City (EFE).- There are over 127,000 missing persons who remain uned for, being searched for by their families in Mexico in the absence of an official response in their relatives’ cases.
“When the authorities say there are no enforced disappearances, they are insulting them,” said the executive director of Amnesty International (AI) Mexico, Edith Olivares, to EFE.
“It is not the of the Committee on Enforced Disappearances (CED) who are being insulted, but the families,” Olivares stressed, referring to the Mexican government’s accusations against this United Nations committee, which described the missing persons crisis as “systematic and widespread.”
AI’s latest report, “The State of the World’s Human Rights,” presented on Tuesday, shares this “structural character of human rights violations” on Mexican territory.
“During the year, at least one woman searching for her disappeared relative was killed and another disappeared,” the report said.
The report noted the disappearance of Lorenza Cano in Salamanca in January and Angelita Meraz, who was killed in Tecate, Baja California in February.
“In February, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights held a public hearing about the protection of women searching for disappeared people, highlighting the serious risks they face, including enforced disappearance, killing, repression, and threats,” the report added.
The state “does not look for the disappeared”
According to official figures, there were 13,588 missing persons in Mexico in 2024. As of April, there were already 1,050 new cases.
Nevertheless, Olivares explained, “the Mexican state does not guarantee we will not disappear” and the other problem is that “it does not look for those missing.”
“The discovery of Rancho Izaguirre (in Teuchitlán, Jalisco, in the western part of the country) shows it is the relatives themselves who find those who disappeared,” she stressed.
These searches expose the families “to a lot of violence and risks” because “the state does not protect them, we have already had more than 29 searchers murdered, in April they murdered four (…) We are facing a critical situation,” she noted.
In the face of these risks, Olivares highlighted that the reforms announced by Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, following the discovery of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel training center in Teuchitlán, should guarantee that “the institutions do their job during the search, that there are sufficient, trained and professionalized agents of the state.”
In addition, the amendments to the General Law of Enforced Disappearance “must guarantee the protection of the search teams (…) and it is essential that the Mexican government abandons its insistence on reclassifying the crime of enforced disappearance.”
The AI report (2024-2025) also said that the military strategy of involving the Mexican army in public security operations for 17 years has “failed.”
“What is the military selling us in Mexico? Because it is not true that Mexico is a safer country, the military strategy is a failed one. This is a much more dangerous country today,” said Olivares.
The document also revealed a “great concern” about the Mexican government’s collaboration with United States President Donald Trump, a neighbor “increasingly close to the anti-rights groups” that incite attacks against migrants. EFE
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