The 'Extraordinary Disappeared' in Mexico Is a Serious Human Rights Crisis Laura Carlsen - CIP Americas
go to original February 14, 2016

The disappearance of 43 students in Mexico in September 2014 became an international outrage. Since 2007, more than 25,000 people have disappeared across the country. The AP interviewed relatives of 158 of the “other disappeared” in September last year. (Associated Press)

When the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights presented its preliminary report on the “serious human rights crisis” in the country, the Mexican government responded angrily that the report “does not reflect the situation in the country”. Human Rights Undersecretary Roberto Ciprian Campo added that the notorious mass disappearance of the 43 students from Ayotzinapa is “an absolutely extraordinary case.”

What country are our government officials talking about? According to their own statistics, the number of disappeared persons in Mexico is between 23 and 27 thousand. Government figures from different agencies contradict each other on the exact number. The disappearances include scandalous cases of 20, 40 and more people disappeared at once, and the constant hemorraging of human lives in areas where individuals disappear, one by one, almost every week.

In August last year, the media reported the disappearance of at least 20 people in San Antonio Coyahuacan, Guerrero. In Allende, Coahuila, the then-mayor reported that 300 residents were abducted in 2011 by police and organized crime commandos in an alleged act of revenge for a betrayal among its members. In an act of disappearing the disappeared, the state government now says it was “only” 28.

Life is so insignificant in the time of the war on drugs that no one has even bothered to explain the huge discrepancy between the versions of the Allende disappearances. Much less find and identify all the bodies of the disappeared, even though local people say that the remains are still there.

Disappearance and forced disappearance (involving elements of the State) have become ordinary, almost everyday, events in many parts of the country.

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Laura Carlsen is the director of the CIP Americas Program in Mexico City. This column is based on the Spanish original published in Desinformémonos and available here.

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