In Jalisco, where there are currently 15,943 missing persons according to the State Registry of Missing Persons as of September 30, 2025, bodies are also disappearing, in a state plagued by a severe humanitarian crisis.
Even the figures reported to the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI) in its most recent Census on Forensic Medical and/or Expert Services, published on September 2, 2025, reflect a vastly smaller number of bodies and human remains in the custody of the Jalisco Forensic Medical Service.
Wilful homicide is a common law crime, and during 2024, a total of 100,019 bodies were received for investigation by the Attorney General’s Office and the State Prosecutor’s Offices. The 2024 Census of Forensic and/or Medical Services conducted by INEGI (National Institute of Statistics and Geography) reports that 10,045 unidentified bodies were held by the forensic services of the Attorney General’s Office and the State Prosecutor’s Offices.
There are cases, such as in the state of Veracruz, where the number of unidentified bodies held by forensic medical services reaches 2,773, and in Quintana Roo, where the number rises to 1,609. In Jalisco, the INEGI registry only reflects four bodies, which is implausible for a state with profound problems of missing persons and exhumations of bodies from clandestine graves.
This strange case was clarified on Thursday, September 18, 2025, by the director of the Jalisco Institute of Forensic Sciences (IJCF), Alejandro Axel Rivera Martínez, who acknowledged in a press conference that the institution he oversees has an average of 1,300 complete bodies in custody, as well as 8,000 human segments: “It was an error in the transmission of information between the Institute and INEGI. In fact, it also strikes me that other states appear to have zero. So, something happened there with the system for transmitting information between the prosecutor’s offices, in this case the IJCF and INEGI.”
However, the case of the bodies in custody of the Jalisco Forensic Medical Service is not the only one in which serious inconsistencies are evident. Former University of Guadalajara rector and researcher Víctor Manuel González Romero posted on his social media account “X” last Saturday, October 11, 2025, that Jalisco reports only 1 in 6 missing persons to the national database.
According to the state database of Jalisco, 161 people disappeared in September 2025, and only 27 records appear in the national database. Researcher González Romero ironically states that, as is the motto of the state government of Jesús Pablo Lemus Navarro, “Jalisco Style,” even the disappeared disappear.
