Mexico: Over 73,000 people 'missing' and 'untraceable'

Mexico has has seen a whopping increase in the number of disappearances. As of new numbers emerging from the country, over 73,200 are unaccounted for, with literally no trace of their whereabouts.This is more than the entire population of many US cities. For example - Michigan!

The head of Mexico’s National Search Commission, Karla Quintana implied that this data is of enormous value. Quintana said that data goes beyond just “having a registry”, and that now they know not only who to look for, but have in their possession additionalinformation to carry out search missions.

43 students kaput!

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Even though most of these disappearances were lodged after 2006, over 40 per cent of those disappeared after the incumbent President Andrés Manuel López Obrador took over the country’s administration. When he took over in 2018, he pledged to find answers to these mysterious disappearances, including 43 students of a ruraluniversity in Ayotzinapa.

However, these unsolved crimes may be simmering down owing to the ongoing pandemic, and its high infection rates.

The undersecretary of Human Rights, Alejandro Encinas claimed that the numbers have gone down, and said that it was a first significant decreases in the number of disappearances. However, homicide has stayed prevalent in Mexico even during the crisis, with numbers in fact shooting up.

100,000 found as well

Besides the 73,000+ who remain untraceable, a whopping 100,000 were found after disappearing, either dead or alive.

Mexico has been plagued by violence, gang related or otherwise and has appallingly high rates of crime. This has left many questions unanswered about such disappearances.

Data from the commission claims that a fifth of missing people are minors, aged mostly between 10 and 19-years-old.

In January 2020 alone, 61,000 were registered as missing. Over the course of the months following January, 11,000 new cases have been inducted.

A new platform created to trace missing people was recently curated in a bid to facilitate search and rescue operations. Even though many cases were reported to the police by families of the disappeared, the national trend suggests, as the commission put it, that there is considerable “fear or distrust” in approaching the authorities.

Many believe this may be a product of the Mexican Dirty War, which took place between 60s and 70s, or the Cartel Wars, run by drug mafias, which theUS has vehemently fought.