More than 60,000 Mexicans have disappeared amid drug war, officials say

By The Washington Post

MEXICO CITY — More than 61,000 people have disappeared in Mexico, authorities announced Monday, sharply raising their estimate of those who have vanished in more than a decade of extreme violence by and among organized-crime groups.

The government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador released the new figure after an exhaustive analysis of data from state prosecutors. The previous official estimate, released in April 2018, put the number at 40,000.

While hundreds of cases date to the 1960s, over 97 percent have been reported since 2006, when Mexico launched an all-out offensive targeting drug trafficking and criminal organizations.

Karla Quintana, head of Mexico’s National Search Commission, which coordinates the effort to find the missing, said that at least 61,637 people had been reported disappeared and not been found. “These are data of horror, and behind them are stories and narratives of great pain for families,” she said at a news conference.

The numbers confirm that Mexico is suffering one of the worst crises of “the disappeared” in Latin American history.

In the 1970s and 1980s, forced disappearances in the region became a global human rights concern as governments systematically detained and killed opponents — most suspected of involvement in leftist insurgencies.

Around 40,000 people went missing in Guatemala’s 36-year civil war, which ended in 1996. An estimated 30,000 disappeared during Argentina’s “dirty war,” which lasted from 1976 to 1983.

Unlike those countries, though, Mexico has not been at war — at least, not officially. And while militaries were behind most of the Cold War disappearances, narco-traffickers and other criminals are the likely culprits in the majority of the Mexican cases. Authorities suspect many of them worked with corrupt police and politicians.