A new toll in Mexico’s drug war: more than 61,000 vanished

More than 61,000 people have been forcibly disappeared in Mexico in recent years, government officials announced Monday, a drastic increase of an earlier estimate of the toll of the country’s endemic drug-related violence and cartel warfare.

“These are data of horror,” Karla Quintana, head of Mexico’s National Search Commission, which leads the efforts to find the missing countrywide, said in a news conference. Behind the numbers, “there are many painful stories from families both in Mexico and of migrants,” she said.

The new figures showed a sharp increase from a prior official estimate of 40,000 disappearances from early 2018, and Quintana said it comes from updated and carefully revised information from the offices of local prosecutors.

The official tally is now 61,637 people who have disappeared since 1964, Quintana said, the vast majority since 2006, the year the crackdown on drug cartels was launched by then-president Felipe Calderón.

Last year alone, during the first year of leftist government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, more than 9,000 people forcibly disappeared, said Alejandro Encinas, undersecretary of human rights. More than 500 field searches across Mexico led to the discovery of 800 clandestine graves and the unearthing of 1,124 bodies.

Mexican officials said most disappearances have taken place in 10 different states in swaths of the country with a heavy presence of drug cartels.

More than half the overall reported cases were of young people between 15 and 34 years old, 74% of whom were men, officials said.

The government announcement differed from those of past administrations, which often played down the issue of drug violence and offered little details about the extent of the issue.

A long-standing history of disappearances in Latin America during anti-leftist “dirty wars” in the 1960s and ’70s left tens of thousands of political dissidents and activists either dead or disappeared in countries like Argentina and Chile.

In Mexico, the number of cases of disappeared people surged more recently amid raging violence as drug cartels battled each other over territory and trafficking routes.

As Mexican security forces were deployed to the streets to confront the ever-growing power of organised crime groups, criminals began implementing a highly efficient and vicious strategy: disposing of bodies and tossing them into graves in desolate areas, rivers and mountains, to leave no evidence behind.

One of the most emblematic disappearance cases, which shed light on the entrenched corruption of Mexican security forces who sometimes participate in crimes, occurred in 2014 when 43 students from Ayotzinapa, were attacked and kidnapped by local police officers working for a local drug gang in southern Mexico.

The López Obrador government has faced criticism that it lacks an adequate security strategy to deal with the country’s rampant violence, underscored by recent cases like the siege of the city of Culiacán by the Sinaloa cartel and the massacre of nine members of a Mormon sect in northern Mexico last fall.

© 2019 New York Times News Service