MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico's official number of missing people surpassed 100,000 for the first time last year and has risen this year, with authorities saying Tuesday that 111,916 people have been “forcibly disappeared” since records began in 1962 and have never been found again.
But the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances, which reported the figures, said the real number is likely much higher due to structural problems with Mexico's system for registering missing persons. For advocates and victims, this is a sign of yet another “backslide” by Mexico's current government since the registry was created in 2018.
While acknowledging that the Mexican government has cooperated with some of its requests since the last full investigation in 2018, the UN said the national registry still lacks a “clear and transparent methodology” or disaggregated data on victims' sexual orientation, gender identity, socio-economic status and migration status.
Elsewhere in the report, the UN said Mexican authorities were guilty of “re-victimizing” some grieving relatives, including by accusing families of hiding their abducted loved ones.
Maria Luisa Aguilar, who has worked with missing people in Mexico for 15 years, said victims' families “face a lot of risks” before officially reporting them as missing.
“In many parts of Mexico, the authorities are complicit with the perpetrators of the disappearances,” said Aguilar, now international coordinator for the Miguel Agustin Pro Juarez Human Rights Center. In other cases, families “don't even have the authority to receive the reports.”
The government registry also does not include “mechanisms for the participation of relatives of missing persons”, the committee said, noting that “some authorities are resistant” to reporting to the central registry, without specifying which authorities.
The register of missing persons was welcomed by victims and advocates when it was enshrined in law in 2018, but it has recently come under attack from the very government that created it.
In July, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador announced a recount of the missing, saying the official number on the missing persons register was impossibly high. The following month, he welcomed the resignation of Carla Quintana, then head of the National Search Committee that had been tasked with maintaining the registry.
What was once a sign of hope for activists like Aguilar is now being destroyed from within.
“This was a great initiative. For the first time, we have a record that actually tried to document most of the complaints,” Aguilar said. “Four years later, this administration, the same administration, is concerned that there are too many.”
“The main concern is not whether these records are higher or lower than the actual numbers,” Aguilar said. “The problem is that (Lopez Obrador's) review is being carried out from a political perspective, rather than really looking at the main issue, which is a crisis of this magnitude.”
Mexico's Interior Ministry did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment from The Associated Press.
