Mexico, a country of the dead and disappeared

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Recently, a group of young people was kidnapped in Guadalajara, Jalisco, and their remains were later found.

Weeks later, another group is kidnapped and possibly killed in Lagos de Moreno, Jalisco.

Speculation runs on the networks: are they recruiting? revenge?

The truth is that no one is safe on the streets. The numbers of dead and missing reach record numbers due to the presidential complacency that insists on blaming previous governments.

“What the case of Lagos lets us see, which is the tip of the iceberg, is that what we are experiencing transcends the numbers of violence,” says Leonel Fernández, director of Advocacy in Public Policy at the National Observatory, “we have to think beyond cold numbers. The magnitude is overflowing: it is no longer a matter of economic kidnapping or fight between groups.

In December 2019, the Undersecretary for Human Rights of the Mexican Government, Alejandro Encinas, tried to summarize in a single sentence his feeling about the difficulties of the Executive to stop violence. “We are in one of those situations where the old hasn’t just died and the new hasn’t just been born,” he said. Andrés Manuel López Obrador was celebrating one year in the presidency, a time when he had pointed out his priority, fighting corruption. That was the key. Without corruption, the waters of violence would return to the channel of cordiality.

The case could have remained in the atrocious limbo in which more than 110,000 families in Mexico live, searching for their disappeared, digging the ground and searching graves to find clues. In Jalisco alone there are 14,890 unlocated people, according to official government figures, it is the state with the highest number of missing persons.

Two and a half years later, the account is done, an undeniable achievement of the current Administration. Mexico has exceeded the symbolic figure of 100,000 disappeared people, the vast majority since the start of the war against drugs, the state onslaught against organized crime launched by President Felipe Calderón in December 2006. His government concentrates around 17,000 reports of disappearance, for 35,000 registered during the next one, headed by Enrique Peña Nieto, and the 31,000 that the current government counts.

At the current rate, this six-year term will break all records. The phenomenon has changed. During the Calderón years, the northeast symbolized the horrors of war, with its extermination camps, which are only now beginning to be investigated. The mass disappearances of Guerrero and the discoveries of huge clandestine cemeteries in Veracruz marked the time of Peña Nieto. Now, the alarm goes off in regions that used to be relatively calm, such as Guanajuato or Sonora.