Institutions of the same government do not communicate with each other and that hinders the entire process of searching for a missing person.”
Jorge Verástegui, activist.
In a four-year period, the number of disappeared persons in Mexico City increased 1,993.5%, going from 62 cases registered in 2018, to 1,298 in 2022, according to data from the National Search Commission, of the Ministry of the Interior. (Segob).
If the figures of missing persons and those not located in Mexico City are added, from 2018 to noon yesterday, May 4, 2023, they add up to a total of 3,838 cases. In this period, the year with the most reported disappearances is 2022.
This year, between January 1 and May 4, the Segob database records 372 people who disappeared and have not been located.
Michel Cervantes, a lawyer with the civil organization Idheas, which is in charge of monitoring various cases of disappeared persons in Mexico City, affirmed that there is a possibility that this figure is higher, since there could be an underreporting of complaints of persons who disappeared.
“Either because the families cannot move to the city or because the Mexico City authorities told them that it was their responsibility to report in their states of origin (the total number of disappearances could be higher),” he said.
The specialist also considered that, although the issue of disappearances can be multifactorial and there are several causes for which they occur, in the case of the country’s capital, the authorities must work on analyzes that allow them to understand that the disappearances are not They deal with isolated cases, but are the materialization of different types of violence that exist and converge at the same time.
For his part, for Jorge Verástegui, a member of the Glorieta de las desaparecidos family organization, the increase in disappearances in the capital has to do with the new stipulations that are followed for the registration of cases.
Who disappears and where?
Of the 3,838 people who have been registered as missing in the city, from 2018 to the present, 2,386 were male cases, which means 62.17% of the total, while 1,439 are women, which is equal to 37.49. % of the cases. The remaining 0.34% (13 cases) did not identify the sex of the person in the Segob database.
Both in cases of men and women, the age group that registers the most disappearances is between 15 and 19 years, since between 2018 and so far in 2023, 798 of the disappeared persons (471 women, 324 men and three people whose sex was unknown) belonged to this age group.
In second place is the group between 20 and 24 years of age, which reported 363 disappearances (229 men, 132 women and two persons of indeterminate sex).
Michel Cervantes said that most of the cases that occur in the capital are concentrated in municipalities that border the State of Mexico.
According to the figures from the National Registry of Missing and Unlocated Persons, between 2018 and until yesterday, the municipality with the most cases of disappearances was Iztapalapa (630), which borders the Mexican municipalities of La Paz, Valle de Chalco and Nezahualcóyotl. .
In second place, the demarcation that was located was Gustavo A. Madero with 579 disappearances of people, which borders to the north with the municipalities of Tlalnepantla de Baz, Ecatepec de Morelos, Coacalco de Berriozábal and Tultitlán.
Of the five municipalities with the most cases registered during the past year, only Cuauhtémoc (512 cases) and Álvaro Obregón (267) are the demarcations that do not have a border with a municipality in the State of Mexico.
Faced with this situation, Idheas’ lawyer considered that it is necessary to “structurally and contextually review the violence that permeates, sustains and, above all, allows disappearances to go unpunished.”
Jorge Verástegui also pointed out that a challenge regarding disappearances in the capital is the fact that “institutions of the same government do not communicate with each other and that hinders the entire process of searching for a disappeared person.”
He considered that “the main challenge is inter-institutional coordination, mainly between the prosecutor’s office and the search commissions.”
