Thousands of demonstrators took to the streets across Mexico this week to demand action over the country’s staggering number of enforced disappearances, with more than 130,000 people officially reported missing.
Protests unfolded in major cities including Mexico City, Guadalajara, and Córdoba, as well as in numerous towns from the southern state of Oaxaca to northern Sonora and Durango, reflecting the nationwide scale of the crisis.
Marchers — many of them relatives of the missing — were joined by human rights activists, all urging President Claudia Sheinbaum’s government to intensify efforts to locate the disappeared.
The vast majority of disappearances have occurred since 2007, following then-President Felipe Calderón’s launch of a militarised campaign against drug cartels. Many victims are believed to have been forcibly recruited by criminal groups or killed for resisting. While organised crime is widely blamed, security forces are also accused of complicity in some cases.
In Mexico City, protesters carried photographs of their missing loved ones and placards bearing messages such as “President, what does a country that sows bodies harvest?” Their march brought traffic along key avenues to a halt.
Among those marching were members of grassroots search collectives known as buscadores, who independently comb the countryside and desert regions for clandestine graves. These groups often act on information passed to them by the same cartels responsible for the abductions. Their work is perilous. After a group of buscadores recently uncovered a suspected narco-ranch in Jalisco, several of its members were abducted. Authorities later dismissed claims of a crematorium at the site, citing lack of evidence.
The United Nations has described Mexico’s disappearance crisis as “a human tragedy of enormous proportions.” The scale of the crisis far exceeds those witnessed in other Latin American countries: an estimated 40,000 disappeared during Guatemala’s 36-year civil war, and some 30,000 under Argentina’s military dictatorship from 1976 to 1983.
Despite growing pressure, families continue to lead the search for their loved ones with little state assistance — often at great personal cost.
Source: BBC
SMS/
