More than 100,000 people have disappeared in Mexico since the count began in 1964. The National Register of Missing and Unlocated Persons, an instrument created during this six-year tenure, this Monday surpassed the number showing the serious situation in the country. Most of these people have been registered as missing since 2006, when Felipe Calderón’s government began, which brought the army into the streets to combat organized crime violence. Collectives of victims, activists and civic organizations have called for the government to deal with the crisis “urgently, vigorously and comprehensively” and have called for the implementation of the enforced disappearance law passed five years ago to be completed.
100,010 people have been missing from their homes in the North American country since 1964, according to the latest official data update. However, starting in 2006, the numbers skyrocketed. That year, PAN member Felipe Calderón was waging the so-called war on drug trafficking. His successor Enrique Peña Nieto of the PRI maintained the same security tactics from 2012 and during his six-year tenure 43 Ayotzinapa students disappeared. Although President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (Morena) took office in 2018 and promised to return the military to barracks, the militarization strategy was maintained. A panel of independent UN experts visiting Mexico in November urged the government to abandon the strategy “immediately”.
Enforced disappearances continue to be committed directly by federal, state and local public authorities. Organized crime has also become “a key perpetrator” of enforced disappearances, as documented by the United Nations Committee, “with various forms of collusion and varying degrees of involvement, connivance or omission of state officials”. Most of those who have disappeared are men (75%) between the ages of 15 and 40 who are missing from their homes, mainly in Jalisco (14,971), Tamaulipas (11,971) and the state of Mexico (10,996), according to data released by the seven Next is Nuevo León (6,222), where last month the disappearances of María Fernanda Contreras, Debanhi Escobar and Yolanda Martínez drew attention to the state in the north of the country and highlighted the failure of the system.
“The perceived impunity, high level of violence and widespread insecurity in Mexico mean that the enjoyment of fundamental rights is perceived as more of a discursive or theoretical situation than a concrete one,” he said in a statement Monday. the National Citizens’ Council of the National Tracing System, made up of victims’ relatives, human rights experts and representatives of civil society organisations. “We make a strong call for the Mexican state to prioritize this issue and define a public policy of the state to prevent and stop enforced disappearances in the country,” claimed the panel, which has also called for the mechanisms and tools under consideration in the Enforced Disappearances Act of 2017.
The relatives of the disappeared, organized in the Movement of Our Disappeared, also wanted to recall that the number reached this Monday is “not just a number”: “They are people with a story and they are loved ones who even “Although families know for sure that this number is far below the number of cases that we see and live in our contexts every day, the number reached is still alarming “It says there. “Our fight,” they shared in the letter, “is also for a country where no one else has to search for a missing love.”
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