Mexico City – The Mexican government announced Friday it has identified indications of continued activity for over 31% of the 130,000 people registered as missing across the country, a claim immediately met with skepticism from search collectives who allege the move is a bid to downplay the scale of the nation’s ongoing disappearance crisis.
According to Marcela Figueroa, a senior security official, the government cross-referenced the national registry of missing persons with databases of vaccination records, birth and marriage certificates, and tax filings. This process revealed that 40,367 individuals – roughly 31% of those reported missing – have had documented interactions with government systems since their disappearance was reported. Figueroa stated this suggests the possibility that these individuals are still alive.
The government reported successfully locating 5,269 people through this methodology, reclassifying them as “found.” Figueroa characterized many of these cases as “voluntary absences,” citing examples of individuals leaving relationships or fleeing abusive situations. “Not all disappearances are the same,” she said, emphasizing the government’s ongoing efforts to locate Mexico’s missing.
However, Héctor Flores, a leader of a search collective based in Jalisco – a state at the epicenter of Mexico’s disappearance crisis – dismissed the report as “misleading” and criticized the lack of transparency surrounding the government’s methodology. Flores’s son, a 19-year-old, was forcibly disappeared in 2021 allegedly by agents of the Jalisco state prosecutor’s office.
“For us, it’s just another attempt by the administration to hide and downplay the numbers and continue to paint a picture that doesn’t reflect the reality of what we’re living through,” Flores said. Search groups have long accused the government of manipulating disappearance statistics to improve its public image, fueled by a historical lack of accountability in these cases.
The government’s report also revealed that data gaps hinder investigations in a significant number of cases. Approximately 46,000, or 36%, of those registered as missing have incomplete data – lacking crucial information such as names and dates of birth – making searches impossible. 43,128, or 33%, have no record of activity in government databases, and less than 10% of these cases are currently under criminal investigation, a shortfall Figueroa acknowledged as a systemic failure.
Figueroa stated the government is increasing scrutiny of local prosecutor’s offices that have failed to adequately investigate and document missing persons cases, and is working to increase the number of cases actively investigated. “Society and the families can trust in the records and better tools to search for people,” she asserted.
The re-evaluation of the missing persons registry is part of a broader effort to address a deeply flawed dataset connected to a national trauma. Forcibly disappearing people has turn into a tactic employed by cartels to consolidate control through intimidation and to obscure the true number of homicides. The sheer scale of the crisis – 130,000 people missing since 2006 – represents a population equivalent to a small city, and posters bearing the faces of the missing are ubiquitous in Mexico’s urban centers.
The controversy surrounding the registry dates back years, but intensified during the presidency of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (2018-2024). His administration initiated a census of the disappeared, claiming that previous figures had been inflated to discredit his government. This effort was widely criticized, and in 2023, the official leading the search for the disappeared resigned following a wave of criticism.
The Mexican government maintains that the official registry contains an overcount, attributing this to inaccurate data from local prosecutor’s offices and instances of individuals being reported missing multiple times. However, search groups like Flores’ and the U.N. Committee on Enforced Disappearances argue the actual number of missing persons is likely higher than official statistics due to failures in local governance, reluctance among some families to report disappearances, and a lack of transparent data collection.
The Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez Human Rights Center released a statement Friday acknowledging the need for more reliable data, but cautioned that the government’s framing of the information “minimizes the state’s responsibility” in the disappearance crisis and offers little practical assistance to families who are often forced to conduct searches for their loved ones independently.
