Mexico’s government is using the disappeared to build a surveillance state, families say
Human rights organizations protested the reform to the General Disappearance Law outside the Chamber of Deputies, July 2, 2025
by Madeleine Wattenbarger, Mexico City correspondent.
A polemical point of the reform to the General Disappearance Law passed by Mexican legislators this week is the use of a biometric CURP to search for missing people. The reform is part of a broad legislative package that includes a reform to the General Population Law, which establishes the use of a CURP with fingerprints and a photograph as an identification document obligatory for access to public and private services. The data will go into a Unified Identity Platform (PUI, by its initials in Spanish), which will, in theory, permit the authorities to locate missing people by their CURP.
A previous iteration of the biometric CURP proposal was backed by the World Bank, and similar initiatives were proposed by Felipe Calderón, Enrique Peña Nieto and former Secretary of the Interior Olga Sanchez Cordero during López Obrador’s administration. The reform comes out of a proposal presented by Claudia Sheinbaum on March 27, after disappearances in Mexico were thrown into the spotlight: search collectives found a ranch in Teuchitlán, Jalisco, where victims of forced recruitment were held, and the United Nations Committee on Forced Disappearance gave the official assessment that systematic state disappearances exist in Mexico.
After Sheinbaum presented the reform to the General Disappearance Law, the government held a series of feedback sessions with search collectives and victims’ families. Some of the families’ proposals appear in the revised law passed by the Senate. It will incorporate legal figures that allow for searching for LGBTQI+ missing people: the law allows official missing-person notices to use victims’ preferred names, and permits those closest to a missing person—their “social family”—to participate in the search process, despite not having blood ties. The law also includes the creation of a welfare program focused on children and adolescents with disappeared family members.
But the proposal of data-monitoring as a search strategy has raised concerns among families of disappearance victims and digital security experts. The legislative package includes a reform to the Law of Security and Intelligence, which establishes that the information in the Unified Identity Platform will be available to the National Intelligence Center; municipal, local, state and federal security authorities; prosecutors’ offices and the National Guard.
“That means that security authorities will have access practically to all of our data,” said Santiago Narváez, a researcher at the Mexico City-based Digital Rights Defense Network (R3D). “There aren’t measures that permit us to supervise how these systems are used.”
On Wednesday, a group of families and human rights organizations protested the measure outside the Chamber of Deputies. “We feel like they’re using us a pretext to establish a mass surveillance system that was already planned,” said Ana Lucia Lagunes, whose brother Ricardo Antonio Lagunes Gasca, a human rights lawyer, was disappeared in January 2023 between Colima and Michoacán.
Whether or not the platform may work to stem future disappearances, it is irrelevant for investigating past cases, and it only functions if missing people use their CURP. “They say this Unified Identity Platform will serve for searching for disappeared people, but when someone wants to disappear someone, the objective is to hide the victim, not to access services in government agencies,” said Jorge Verástegui González, whose brother Antonio and nephew Antonio de Jesús Verástegui Escobedo were disappeared on January 24, 2009, in Parras, Coahuila. “They’re using the cause of disappeared people to say that this is necessary for the search, but it isn’t.”
It also fails to take into account the search for disappeared migrants, who are not considered in the official number of 129,000 disappeared. “If for Mexicans it’s not a substantial reform for searching, for people who are irregular [migrants], it’s even worse. People who enter irregularly don’t have a CURP, so there’s no way to find them,” Verástegui added.
While the digital platform will remain in the hands of authorities, the on-the-ground work of searching for the disappeared still falls to families.
“The families are the ones who search, who receive anonymous notes,” said María Salvadora Coronado, who searches for her husband Mario Aguilar Leroz, disappeared in Córdoba, Veracruz in 2009. “The families dig, put their hands in, search and find. The prosecutors’ office and government say, we found this many people, but they don’t say, the families did our job.”