Social Issues

Mothers question the 15,000 registries removed from Mexico’s missing persons census

By Sergio Robles

Acapulco, Mexico, Mar 24 (EFE) – As they dig with shovels in a seaside vacant lot in search of clandestine graves containing the remains of their loved ones, mothers of the disappeared denounce that thousands of victims have been erased from the official count of missing persons by the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, which reduced the official number of unaccounted for persons by some 15,000 this week.

Socorro Gil’s son, Jonathan Romero, was detained and disappeared by municipal police officers in Acapulco on Dec. 5, 2018, but does not currently appear in the National Registry of Disappeared and Missing Persons.

She says she has not been contacted by the public officials who, according to López Obrador, “go from house to house” to check if a missing person has returned in order to remove them from the registry.

This is why Gil questions the government’s claim earlier this week that it had already found 15,158 people and was able to reduce the official number of missing to 99,729.

“I think the president is from another planet, he’s not from this country, maybe he’s talking about another place, because here in Mexico there are too many missing people, and in his six-year term, as far as I know, there have been many more,” the woman told EFE in an interview during a search day in Guerrero, southern Mexico.

“The fact that he says it isn’t true and apparently wants to make people believe that nothing is happening is just crazy,” she said.

The activist pointed out that at least 26 mothers from the collective she represents, “Memory, Truth and Justice,” have not been visited by census officials, and that others do not appear on the list of missing persons.

She has even filed an injunction against the government because her son is not on the registry and she does not know whether the government has stopped looking for him.

“Our life consists of nothing more than thinking about where to look, how to look, how my son might be, whether he really is alive or whether it is true that the day they took him away was the day they took his life just as they took his freedom. For us this is not a life, truly,” she said.

“Disappear again”

In May 2022, Mexico surpassed the historic figure of 100,000 missing persons, and this year the number rose to 114,000, but López Obrador demanded a new census, claiming that the previous one was “manipulated.”

This has created uncertainty for citizen searchers like Olga Mendoza, a mother from Chilpancingo, the capital of Guerrero, who has been looking for her son, Jose Rafael Reina, since Mar. 25, 2015, when he was a 19-year-old student that had started working with his father in public transportation.

“The truth is that (the president) doesn’t know, he really doesn’t know all that we know as searchers. The accurate data that he wants to deprive us of, will remove some missing people from the platform,” she told EFE.

“He is making us disappear again,” she said.

Fear and violence Citizens who have set out to find their missing loved ones have also faced violence, with at least five searchers killed in 2022, three in 2023, and up to three more in 2024.

“My family is afraid, they feel that they are attacking us and they will attack them. It’s very difficult,” Mendoza told EFE.

Arturo Carrasco, a priest from the Gustavo A. Madero parish in Mexico City who has joined the search, said the disappearances are a ” permanent torture” for families.

“To have a loved one die is painful.To have a loved one die violently is even more painful. To have a loved one die tortured and brutalized is something beyond words. But to have a loved one disappear is even worse, because we don’t know if they are alive, if they are dying, and under what conditions,” he said. EFE sr/ics

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