One person disappears every hour in the six-year term of López Obrador

Cesar Martinez

During the six-year term of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, one person has disappeared every hour. And year after year, the proportion has been increasing.

Between December 1, 2018 —the day López Obrador assumed the presidency— and May 24, in those 1,635 days of government, 42,029 disappearances were registered throughout the country; an average of 25 people per day.

The highest record was reached between 2022 and 2023. If on May 16, 2022, 100,000 missing persons were exceeded, in the following 365 days another 10,064 were added, according to the National Registry of Missing and Unlocated Persons ( RNPDNO). This means 27 disappearances per day in the last year.

It is the highest number recorded since 2006, when President Felipe Calderón declared the “war on drugs”, and confirms a trend in this administration, in which the figures for disappearances of the previous six-year terms have already been exceeded.

Reports of these crimes are piling up. Between May 20 and 26, seven young people who worked in a call center in Zapopan, Jalisco, they were disappeared. They are Carlos Benjamín García Cuevas, the brothers Itzel Abigail and Carlos David Valladolid Hernández, Jesús Alfredo Salazar Ventura, Arturo Robles Corona, Mayra Karina Velázquez Durán and Jorge Velázquez.

In the State of México, on Saturday May 27, Aniram Estrella Buenrrostro and Andrea Ramos disappeared, two teenagers who boarded a taxi by app and were located until Thursday night. Meanwhile, in México City, relatives of the four-year-old boy Joan Sánchez marched on May 31 along Paseo de la Reforma to demand that the minor be located, who was last seen five days earlier in the Mexican municipality of Donato Guerra.

In March 2013, The Ministry of the Interior released the first official figure for this humanitarian crisis registering 26,121 disappearances during Calderón’s six-year term, between December 2006 and November 2012. The scandal was international.

The disappearances continued in the administration of Enrique Peña Nieto, which ended with more than 34,000 victims. This figure, according to data from the RNPDNO, has already been exceeded in this government, closing 2022 with more than 37,600 missing persons.

During the mandate of López Obrador, a total of 42,029 disappearances were registered until May 24. There was a decrease in 2020, the year of the pandemic, but the following they increased. If this trend continues, his six-year term will end with more than double the number of documented victims in Calderón’s six-year term.

As for clandestine graves, so far in the current federal government, 2,710 have been located, according to the Map of Findings of the National Search Commission (CNB). While from 2006 to 2018, 2,835 illegal burials were found.

Women, three out of 10 victims

Unlike the historical trend, in which Jalisco and Tamaulipas are the states with the highest number of disappearances, in the last year three out of 10 of the reports of missing persons took place in the two most populous states in the country: the State of México and México City.

In the accumulated reports since 1962, Edomex is the third entity with the most disappearances, but in the last 24 months it is the state that accumulates the most complaints. While México City went from the seventh to the second state with the most reported disappearances.

Of the total of 10,064 cases of disappearance, 1,630 were registered in the State of México and 1,335 in México City. Michoacán follows with 670, Nuevo León with 652 and Zacatecas with 651. In Jalisco there were 141 reports; in Tamaulipas, 448, and in Veracruz, 418.

The proportion of missing women also increased. From 1962 to date, 27,386 women have disappeared, representing 24.5% of the total records in the database made by the National Search Commission, but in the last year three out of 10 victims were women, that is, 3 thousand 093.

If in Calderón’s six-year term they were 19% and in Peña Nieto’s 23%, in the last year, with the upward trend, 28 out of every 100 disappeared persons are women.

black figure

Although the official number of missing persons exceeds 110,000 victims in México, the reality is worse.

Jacobo Dayán, a specialist in international criminal law, researcher, activist and member of the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity, warns that the RNPDNO has deficiencies and its data does not reflect the reality of the problem.

“The number reported there is the number of people who remain missing. If tomorrow the State finds everyone, we would say that the number is zero. But they do not represent the complete phenomenon. What should the number be then? The number of people who are still missing plus those who were found dead or alive, but who were also missing. We will never know that ”, he explains in an interview.

Another problem, he adds, is the lack of clarity as to whether the reported figure includes the most up-to-date data from state prosecutors’ offices.

“There is a third problem: the dark number. We know, from information from the groups (of relatives of disappeared persons), that when you compare the number of disappeared in any state, these groups have a much higher number than the one reported by the prosecutors.”

* www.wherethedisappearedgo.org is a research and memory site on the logic of disappearance in México. This material may be freely reproduced, as long as the credit of the author and Where do the disappeared go (@DisappearInMx).