The Diplomat
The People’s Parliamentary Group has asked the Spanish Government to condemn the “numerous disappearances of people” in Mexico and to urge President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to adopt “urgent measures” to guarantee security, reduce the number of missing persons and attack the problem of root.
In a non-law Proposal presented on May 31 for debate in the Foreign Affairs Commission, the PP argues that Mexico faces “one of the most pressing and transcendental problems of the last decades of its history: insecurity.”
In this context, the motion continues, “the number of missing people in Mexico continues to increase dramatically.” Mexico, according to data managed by the PP, experienced a record of 11,923 disappearances in 2023, which represented an increase of 30% compared to 2022. “It is feared that these figures are higher, since the relatives of the disappeared have reported to the Attorney General’s Office the makeup of these figures, through the reclassification of disappearances under other crimes such as trafficking and the alleged manipulation of data by state prosecutors,” the PP warns.
Likewise, so far in 2024, 2,000 cases of disappearances have been reported, of which 64.79% are men and 35.21% are women. With all this data, at the beginning of 2024 there were already “close to 114,000 missing people since records began, reflecting a persistent and growing problem.”
Young women, especially between 15 and 19 years old, and men, between 25 and 29 years old, are the groups with the highest disappearance rates. Likewise, the disappearances of minors are also worrying. In 2023, an average of six disappearances of girls, boys and adolescents were reported every day. The most affected group is adolescents between 12 and 17 years old. Furthermore, one in three missing women was between 0 and 17 years old.
“In the face of desperation, it has been the families of the missing who have assumed a crucial role in the searches, often facing the lack of institutional support and the dangers associated with these activities,” denounces the People’s Group.
“The cruelly nicknamed ‘seeking mothers’ are forced to search for their children with their own hands, with picks and shovels, in the face of government abandonment and several of them have been murdered while the Mexican Government continues with a strategy that is clearly not working,” the motion adds.
The text reports on the discovery, in July 2023, of the human remains of 27 mutilated people by a group of searching mothers from the state of Tamaulipas and the location, on the same dates, of fifteen bodies in various graves in the border cities of Mexicali and Tijuana by other groups of mothers. In both cases, the mothers had been warned through anonymous calls or messages. It also reports the existence of clandestine cemeteries in clandestine houses in the north of the country, including a mass grave in Veracruz in which more than 300 unidentified people were found.
“The lack of government support shows that the only concern of the Government of Mexico is the image, beyond the victims and their families, a Government that has been dragging down more than 114,000 cases of disappearance, 47,000 of which occurred this six-year period,” the PP denounces. “In addition, the resignation – due to pressure – of the national search commissioner, Karla Quintana, demonstrates the disinterest of the López Obrador Government in facing this problem,” it adds.
“Mexico is a brother country, to which we are united by historical and personal ties,” and, therefore, “we must be consistent with our foreign policy, which defends human rights and speak out on the matter, with the aim that the brother country promotes better public policies that solve the problem of the missing in Mexico,” warns the People’s Group.
For this reason, the Non-Law Proposition asks the Government to condemn “the numerous disappearances of people that occur in Mexico”, to urge the Mexican Government “to adopt urgent measures to guarantee security, reduce the number of missing people and attack the problem at its roots.” ” and to convey to the López Obrador Government “the need to publish the lists with reliable information on disappearances in the National Registry of Data on Missing Persons.”
