On January 11, 2011, armed men dressed as local police officers took Roy Rivera from his home in Nuevo León, in northern Mexico. He was 18 at the time. His mother, Letty Hidalgo, was there and has been searching for him ever since. Roy is one of more than 116,000 people missing in Mexico, the country with the highest number of disappeared people in all of Latin America. Unlike the dictatorships of the Southern Cone, in Mexico, people continue to disappear every day.
This Friday is the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances and President Andrés Manuel López Obrador ends his term leaving a bad taste in the mouths of families and groups. “We thought what he was proposing was real, but we were deluded to believe that he really had a serious intention to put an end to it,” Hidalgo laments.
Although for decades political dissidents disappeared in Mexico’s so-called dirty war, the crisis erupted when, in December 2006, President Felipe Calderón declared war on drugs, deploying the army to fight organized crime and take charge of public security.
In 2018, López Obrador inherited this problem from his predecessors. But it was during his six-year term that the largest number of people disappeared: around 50,000 according to official data. On October 1, power will pass to Claudia Sheinbaum, from the same party, with a record number of disappearances, empty institutions and the paradigmatic case of the 43 students of Ayotzinapa unresolved.
“The number of missing people is increasing because violence is increasing in the country and impunity persists. “Disappearances do not occur alone, they are part of a regime of violence where there are homicides, sexual violence, torture…” says Sandra Serrano, director of the Observatory of Disappearances and Impunity at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Mexico has 23 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants and nine women are murdered every day. In addition, nine out of ten crimes go unpunished.
The online media Where do the missing go? He seeks to “investigate trends to try to understand how disappearances, the crisis of unidentified bodies and the discovery of clandestine graves occur,” explains Efraín Tzuc, one of his reporters. He was born in 2018 and they have followed López Obrador’s six-year term step by step. “Everything started very well, there were a lot of expectations, interesting things started to be done and then everything went backwards. I feel like we are in the same place as at the beginning. Public security remains militarized and organized criminal groups continue to control entire regions and use disappearances as a mechanism of control and punishment without anyone doing anything,” Tzuc summarizes. “López Obrador’s six-year term on the issue of missing persons was a simulation. Nothing we did in six years exists anymore,” Hidalgo categorically assesses.
50,000 unidentified remains
López Obrador not only inherited a crisis, but also a path to its solution. The General Law on Forced Disappearances was a triumph for the families and groups, who promoted it to lay the foundations for research, investigation and identification in the face of the inaction of the Prosecutor’s Office. The law was enacted under the previous government of Enrique Peña Nieto, but it was up to López Obrador to implement it from the beginning.
Among his first actions, he formed the National Search Commission, transferred money from the federation to create state commissions and met with the parents of the 43 students who disappeared in Ayotzinapa, to whom he promised that the case would be clarified and that justice would be done. He also created a Commission of Access to the Truth for this case and another for the dirty war.
They hoped to reduce the disappearances and locate more people, but this has not been the case. Added to this is an unprecedented forensic crisis. The National Search Commission estimates that there are nearly 3,000 clandestine graves in the country. Added to this are nearly 50,000 unidentified human remains. The Government then created the Extraordinary Mechanism for Forensic Identification with the support of the United Nations. However, from the beginning, they showed great institutional weakness and were unable to carry out their mission. “The effort was sabotaged. The mechanism does not work and is not autonomous and I think it will eventually disappear,” Tzuc anticipates. The initial political momentum has faded over the years.
A controversial census
As the election approached, López Obrador questioned the numbers and ordered a new count. The census of missing persons subsequently declined by 20,000 people, which, while not reducing the magnitude of the crisis, is a problem for those no longer registered. The search commissioner, Karla Quintana, resigned and families cried out. “It’s falsified. My son appears with four pieces of information, two of which are incorrect, and they say they don’t know if he’s disappeared because they can’t find the family member who reported him to confirm his disappearance. That’s me.” “It’s a terrible disappointment,” Hidalgo laments. The United Nations Committee against Enforced Disappearances also expressed concern in a report “because the data is being updated without following the approved search protocol and international standards.”
The National Investigation Commission and the Extraordinary Mechanism for Forensic Identification were losing personnel and capacity for action. In turn, the truth commissions and the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI) that investigated Ayotzinapa began to produce results that affected the army, both by obstructing the investigations and by participating in them.
López Obrador protected his armed forces and then began attacking the GIEI and the lawyers of the Ayotzinapa fathers and mothers. “Something shifted regarding the disappearances where there is an army,” Tzuc says. And no one has given the military more power in Mexico than López Obrador: he entrusted it with the construction of the main infrastructure of his government, gave it control of the ports and customs, and created a new military police force – the National Guard – to be in charge of public security.
No waiting with Sheinbaum
On June 2, Mexico elected its first president. Claudia Sheinbaum is a co-founder of MORENA with López Obrador, with whom she has collaborated for two decades. Since the election of the candidates within the party, Sheinbaum has embodied the line of continuity. During the campaign, he did not make any specific proposals on the issue. For this reason, and because of his policy on the matter when he was head of government in Mexico, he does not arouse much hope.
“The Mexico City Search Commission was very weakened and instead focused on the prosecutor’s office to control the numbers, so that they did not turn into missing persons but rather into kidnappings,” Serrano explains. Same strategy that they wanted to implement at the national level.
Hidalgo is also not enthusiastic about the new president. “The only thing that can be trusted when it comes to missing persons is what we, the families, do, those of us who dig our nails into the ground. They don’t find them because they don’t look for them,” he says. And this is not a metaphor. Faced with the lack of diligence of the State, there are more than a hundred groups in Mexico that search alone, extracting resources from under the stones and devoting themselves body and soul to it. Many researchers (mostly women) have disappeared in the line of duty and, since 2019, at least nine have been murdered. Others search for years and end up dying without knowing what happened. For them, the new government changes nothing, they will continue to brandish their shovels and fight for the State to take responsibility for this crisis.
