Mexico registers 73,201 missing persons from 1964 to date

Mexico has accumulated a total of 73,201 missing persons and 3,978 clandestine graves since 1964, according to a report updated Monday by Mexico's Interior Ministry. "Since the 1960s, with the first record dating back to 1964, to date we have reported 73,201 people," said Alejandro Encinas, Segob's undersecretary for Human Rights, Population and Migration, at the presentation of the document.

He specified that, of that total, 1,523 people correspond to years prior to 2006. While 71,678 people have disappeared in Mexico in the last 14 years. Encinas stressed that in thousands of cases "there is a lack of reliable information" from state prosecutors' offices or the Attorney General's Office. As a result, in 11,191 bodies - representing 15 percent of the total - "there is no certainty of the year of discovery, of reporting and of disappearance.

In the presentation of the Report on the Search, Identification and Public Version of the Register of Missing Persons, Encinas said that since December 2006, when President Felipe Calderón's administration (2006-2012) began and an open war against crime was launched, 3,978 clandestine graves have been found where 6,625 bodies have been exhumed.

He said that, of this total, 1,143 correspond to graves located between December 1, 2018 and June 30, 2020, during the government led by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. In these graves, 1,682 bodies have been exhumed and 712 have been fully identified, and some of them have even been handed over to the families. "Results are beginning to appear. Previously, the figures for identification and return with family members were practically non-existent," he said.

The states with the highest number of graves are Veracruz (173), Sinaloa, Colima, Guerrero, and Sonora, which together account for 57 percent of the graves nationwide. Encinas also reported a drop in the number of missing persons in the first half of 2020 with 2,332 compared to 3,679 missing persons in the same period in 2019.

Encinas pointed out that in the historical indicator from March 1964 to date the total number of people reported as missing, unlocated and located reached 174,844. Of these, 73,201 remain missing or unlocated. During this period, 104,643 persons were located; 6,401 were found dead and 98,242 were located alive. 

While so far this administration, which began on December 1, 2018, Encinas said 63,523 people have been reported missing. Of this total, 27,871 remain missing or unaccounted for. While of the 35,652 finally located, 2,352 were found dead.

At the conference, the head of the Ministry of the Interior, Olga Sánchez Cordero, presented the update of the register of missing and unaccounted-for persons, as well as its public version, which will make it possible to find out about reported cases in real time. "We are opening the way to having the greatest amount of information that will allow us to know who the missing persons are, in addition to making search actions more efficient," she said. At the beginning of 2020, Mexico's Interior Ministry estimated the total number of people not located in the country since records began at 61,637, a figure that has now increased by more than 11,500 to 73,201.