2024-03-23 19:21:58
The Mexican government said this Monday that there are almost 100,000 missing people in the country, and assured that some 20,000 people have been found since August of last year.
“Currently there are 99,729 people that we are still in the search process,” said the Secretary of the Interior (Interior), Luisa María Alcalde, at a press conference.
The official revealed the updated data from the registry of missing persons maintained by the government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. These figures have earned the government criticism from search groups and the opposition, who accuse it of trying to disguise the numbers.
According to the Mayor’s explanation, the government located 20,193 people between August 2023 – when it presented a first census – and March 15 of this year.
86% of the people located, according to the government, were not victims of any crime. “The vast majority are voluntary absences,” said Alcalde.
Dozens of search groups in the country have accused the government of passivity in the face of the missing persons crisis in Mexico.
Hundreds of families go to wild areas of the country with picks and shovels to search for the remains of their loved ones on their own. Along the way, several of these relatives have been murdered.
Cecilia Patricia Flores, leader of a group of search mothers from the northern state of Sonora, protested this Monday in front of the presidential palace in Mexico City.
“We are doing the job that should be done by the government, because they are not doing it,” said the woman while holding a shovel with which she usually searches for her two missing children.
«I want to personally deliver this shovel to the president. “I want him to receive me and for him to take responsibility for him,” he added.
Mexico’s registry of missing persons includes cases since 1962, but the vast majority of disappearances have accumulated since 2006, when the federal government of the time launched a controversial military anti-drug operation.
One of the most emblematic cases is the disappearance of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa normal school (Guerrero state, south), in September 2014.
According to official figures, since December 2006, more than 450,000 murders have been recorded, most of them victims of criminal acts, in addition to those who have disappeared.
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© Agence France-Presse