April 2022

With an official record of one hundred thousand missing people and not located, which grows every day, the president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador sent this Thursday to the Chamber of Deputies an initiative for the creation of the National Center for Human Identification.

Through a draft Decree amending and adding various provisions of the General Law on Forced Disappearance of Persons, Disappearances Committed by Private Parties and the National Search System for Persons, the initiative proposes the creation of the Center as a administrative unit within the National Commission for people searchwith technical and operational autonomy.

“It will have as a fundamental strategy the generalized search from a massive approach methodology and according to the needs, it will apply a hybrid approach for the correct forensic treatment of the bodies and human remains of unidentified people, who are recovered from mass graves and clandestine burials, who have not been identified,” the document states.

The main objectives will be to create a multidisciplinary forensic system focused on the identification of missing persons; coordinate and execute the search and identification strategies in the state or region of coverage under a massive approach and increase the probabilities of identification and provide the relatives of missing persons.

It is also sought that it have a specific and focused approach in the search and identification of human persons, in order to guarantee their right to the truth.

The document highlights that the government of the Republic has as a priority the search for disappeared persons and in the event that they are found dead, the identification of his skeletal remains. “This right to seek identification as part of the right to the truth implies, on the one hand, having certainty regarding the people who have been located and, where appropriate, making a dignified handover to their families and, on the other, know who happened to the disappeared person in order to guarantee an effective investigation as part of the right of access to justice.”

The federal government pointed out that in 2019 there were only 217 laboratories and 263 amphitheaters, in addition to the fact that most of the states have only the capacity to identify 20% of the bodies they receive, while the facilities to store the bodies have an overcrowding of at least 40%.

Mexico has a record of 100,000 missing and unaccounted for people, according to official figures from the Ministry of the Interior (Segob), although the number might be much higher, because there are families who do not report it out of fear or mistrust of the authorities. .

The Mexican State recognized for the first time in this six-year term a deep crisis in terms of disappearances, but also in forensic and justice matters, which grew from 2006, when there was an upturn in the disappearance of people, a phenomenon that continues to this day. our days.

Read also: Relatives of the disappeared accuse lack of progress in investigations

In this context, the government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has stressed that the search for and identification of all disappeared persons is a commitment and a priority.

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