How Mexico disappears the missing
Mothers and relatives of Mexico’s 125,000+ disappearance victims demonstrate in Mexico City on Mother’s Day, 2025. Image credit: Associated Press / Alamy.
by Emiliano Polo.
Mother’s Day in Mexico has increasingly become a day of protest for women whose children have disappeared in the context of a deepening national crisis. This year, demonstrations in cities such as Mexico City and Guadalajara on 10 May demanded both recognition for the search efforts undertaken by families and guarantees for their safety, particularly in light of the growing number of searchers who have been murdered. These protests stressed a disturbing pattern: those who step in to do the work the state has failed to carry out are now being targeted themselves. In reclaiming public space and visibility, these women not only confront institutional abandonment but also redefine courage as a form of political resistance towards a government that promotes impunity to hide its incapacity.
Behind the more visible violence of organized crime and drug trafficking in Mexico lies a more profound, less acknowledged crisis. While homicides and cartel-related violence dominate headlines, the fate of over 125,287 missing persons - according to the Ministry of the Interior’s registry - remains unknown. The impunity around the tragedy results from both deliberate government action and inaction.
The Mexican government has thoroughly undermined its own capacity to respond to this crisis by slashing budgets, weakening judicial and investigative institutions, and manipulating official databases to obscure the exact scale of the missing persons crisis. The Office of the Attorney General, for example, has ignored its legal responsibilities, particularly in identifying the thousands of bodies buried in clandestine graves and in establishing a comprehensive National Program of Exhumations.
This institutional collapse has created what civil society organizations have called a crisis of “bodies without names and names without bodies,” an expected outcome for a government unable and unwilling to search for thousands of victims and therefore revictimizing their families. The crisis of disappeared persons in Mexico has deteriorated due to governmental efforts to manipulate data and obscure the scale of the emergency. Data released by the National Public Security System and the National Registry of Disappeared often conflict with figures from other agencies, such as the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI) and the Ministry of Security. These discrepancies further conceal the true extent of the calamity.
Currently, around 93% of crimes in Mexico go unreported, significantly understating official statistics on disappearances and other offenses. Yet impunity around missing persons in Mexico is not incidental but designed, and ultimately, a system that erases people twice: first by violence, then by bureaucratic negligence and fraud. The government has engaged in deceptive practices, including comparisons across arbitrary time periods, the selective use of different databases, and the creation of new crime categories to artificially show declining figures.
Some of the now-evident tactics include reclassifying crimes to lower the visibility of serious offenses and the negative public perception of violence. For instance, homicides are recategorized as disappearances or classified under vague new groupings like "other crimes against life." Similarly, kidnappings have been relabeled as "other crimes against liberty," while human trafficking cases are marked as "other crimes against society."
Despite the enactment of the General Law on Disappearances in 2017, which was intended to create a robust National Search system for coordinating searches and handling forensic crises, this system remains essentially non-existent due to severe institutional neglect and a lack of resources and funding. All commissions tasked with locating disappeared persons and managing forensic databases have been systematically underfunded and unsupported.
By December 2024, Mexico reported a total of 344,592 disappearances, with 35% (120,628 persons) still missing. Approximately 89% of these disappearances occurred within the last 18 years, coinciding with an increase in violence linked to organized crime. Notably, 2024 recorded the highest annual number of disappearances, with 13,449 cases, a rise of 30% from the previous year.
Recently, the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador notably implemented a deceitful "census" under the Secretariat of Welfare, lacking any transparent methodology or official support from relevant commissions specialized in missing persons. This registry capriciously and drastically reduced the official number of disappearances from 110,964 to just 12,377, even when parallel official records from the National Registry of Disappeared reflect a much higher figure, exceeding 120,000 cases, thus creating a situation of dual official statistics.
Fiscal priorities further demonstrate the institutional neglect and a lack of concern for the human rights crisis. Budget allocations to the Specialized Prosecutor's Office for the Investigation of Disappearances were cut by 40% between 2014 and 2025, and funding dedicated to investigating disappearances is 47% lower than funds assigned to prosecuting copyright violations, highlighting the government's main concerns. It is not a surprise that, as a result, impunity remains rampant, with 99% of disappearance cases between 2019 and 2022 unresolved. The failure of authorities to implement forensic programs has forced the National Search Commission to maintain a map of clandestine graves independently. Between 2006 and April 2023, 5,698 clandestine graves were discovered across Mexico, half under López Obrador’s administration alone.
Disappearances in Mexico recurrently receive political and public attention only when they are co-opted by political groups and framed as partisan banners. Shortly after the well-known disappearance of the 43 students from Ayotzinapa in 2014, a tragedy that was seized upon by Andrés Manuel López Obrador and played a significant role in propelling his 2018 presidential victory, authorities discovered 65 clandestine graves containing 132 corpses around Iguala, Guerrero. Yet, that toll was never added to the official count of the 43 missing students.
The manipulation of statistics is a deliberate effort to obfuscate, underlining the precedence of political considerations over the handling and regard for one of Mexico's most pressing human rights disasters. Moreover, hiding and disregarding victims reflects not only cruelty, government incapacity, and institutional decay but, more importantly, it evidences how the ruling political group views citizens and victims: numbers worth manipulating for political purposes and self-preservation.
Editor’s Note: the author is a Mexican lawyer with an MA in Global Affairs and International Security from The Fletcher School at Tufts University.