IACHR says Mexico disappearances involve state actors at alarming rate

More than 130,000 people have gone missing in Mexico, most of them in the two decades since the government launched its war on drug cartels, according to a new report by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. The commission says disappearances involving state actors are occurring at an “alarming” rate, with some parts of the country registering nearly as many cases attributed to officials as to criminals. Families of the missing marched in Mexico City on 10 May as the government again rejected claims that the state plays a role.

According to the Guardian’s report on the IACHR findings, criminal gangs remain responsible for the vast majority of disappearances, but many cases hinge on “deep collusion and coordination” with state agents. The commission describes patterns that include torture and abductions by security forces, as well as detentions without warrants followed by victims being handed to criminal groups. It also points to the quieter form of participation: officials who do not search, do not record, or do not investigate, allowing the crime to persist without a paper trail that could force accountability.

Mexico’s disappearance crisis has a long institutional memory. The IACHR traces forced disappearance back to the “dirty war” of the 1960s and 1970s, when dissidents were killed and their bodies disposed of at sea. Today’s cartels have industrialised the same logic for different ends: sowing fear, intimidating rivals, and erasing evidence, including by burning bodies, burying them in mass graves, or dissolving them in acid. The commission says disappearances have risen by more than 200% over the past decade, a trend that coincides with the expansion of militarised security policy and the growth of criminal organisations that can pay, threaten, or recruit the very officials tasked with stopping them.

The dispute is also about who carries the burden of proof. The Guardian reports that Mexican authorities presented a report in March suggesting that a third of disappearance cases lacked sufficient data to be pursued—effectively writing off about 40,000 missing people as untraceable entries. María Luisa Aguilar Rodríguez of the Centro Prodh human rights centre told the newspaper that authorities were minimising the scale of the problem while shifting the responsibility for searches onto families. That transfer has a measurable cost: since 2010, at least 27 people searching for missing relatives have been killed.

President Claudia Sheinbaum’s government has repeatedly denied that the state commits forced disappearances. After a UN statement last year cited possible evidence of widespread or systematic enforced disappearance, Sheinbaum said: “In Mexico there is no forced disappearance by the state.” The government also rejected a UN report last month that said there were indications enforced disappearances have been and continue to be committed as crimes against humanity, calling it biased.

The IACHR report lands in a country where the missing are counted in six figures, but the search is increasingly conducted by mothers with shovels and WhatsApp groups rather than investigators with warrants. On 10 May, relatives marched in Mexico City; the commission’s central claim is that, in parts of Mexico, the line between uniform and cartel has become a staffing question.