Disappearances in Mexico rose during López Obrador’s first year, now top 73,000

AUTHOR-Washington Post-13 July 2020

MEXICO CITY — Mexico’s government on Monday raised the official toll of people who have disappeared during its 14-year epidemic of criminal violence to more than 73,000, including hundreds of American citizens who vanished and were never found.

The total, now 73,201, is the result of an ambitious search for cases filed with state prosecutors and other authorities that never made it into national totals.

The newly added cases span several years, but the problem remains critical. Last year, the first under President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, was the second-worst on record: 7,350 people went missing and didn’t return.

The announcement underscores the scale of a human-rights crisis with echoes in the Cold War era, when tens of thousands of suspected government opponents were forcibly disappeared by U.S.-backed right-wing governments in Argentina, Chile, Guatemala and other countries.

In Mexico, the disappearances are blamed on a wider variety of culprits: Organized crime gangs, police, the military, or some combination of all three. The victims have gone missing in a period of extreme violence that’s left more than 288,000 people dead since 2006, when the government launched an offensive on drug cartels.

López Obrador has put new emphasis on the search for the disappeared since taking office in December 2018. At that point, the official number of disappeared was 40,000. He named Karla Quintana, a Harvard-educated human-rights lawyer, to lead the National Search Commission; she has hired a staff to appeal to state officials for information and comb through multiple archives to create a database of the disappeared. In January, the commission increased the official number of missing to more than 61,000.

The 7,350 people who went missing in 2019 made it the second worst year after 2017, when 7,910 went missing.

Officials said Monday they were encouraged to see a decline in the first six months of 2020 to 2,394 disappeared. They did not know why the decline occurred.

The new total includes cases dating back to Mexico’s “dirty war” against leftists in the 1970s. But the great majority of the cases date from the last 14 years. The figure is still believed to be an undercount; some families remain too frightened to report disappearances.

The total includes 324 American citizens who vanished in Mexico and weren’t found.

The database does not provide public access to the identities of the missing. There have been numerous cases over the years of Americans who traveled to see relatives in Mexico and vanished, apparently victims of foul play.

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Original source: Washington Post