Enforced disappearances: The systematic crime Mexico refuses to acknowledge

More than 5,600 mass graves have been found in Mexico since 2007, and there are more than 72,000 unidentified bodies in the country’s morgues, while 127,000 people are reported missing. Yet the state denies that disappearance is a systematic and widespread crime and stigmatises those who denounce it, Mexican activist and security researcher Lisa Sánchez told openDemocracy.

Enforced disappearance is not new in Mexico. But it has been normalised in part by the violence triggered by the militarisation of the ‘war on drugs’ – formally launched under the government of the right-wing National Action Party’s (PAN) Felipe Calderón between 2006 and 2012, and intensified by his successors.

The crime now has an impunity rate of 99%, explained Sánchez, the director general of Mexico United Against Crime (MUCD), a civil society organisation working on citizen security, justice and drug policy, in an interview held as the national and international conversation around Mexico’s disappearances intensified.

In recent weeks, the media circus surrounding the discovery of an alleged cartel training and extermination site in the state of Jalisco has led to a campaign of attacks on the families searching for their loved ones, which Sánchez described as “particularly despicable”.

And on 5 April, the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances decided for the first time to open a procedure for the case of Mexico and activate Article 34 of the International Convention against Enforced Disappearances. This involves requesting further information from the government “on the allegations received, which in no way prejudges the next steps in the proceedings” and, eventually, referring the matter to the General Assembly. For the committee's experts, who have been studying the case for a decade, there are indications of a “systematic and widespread” practice.

Mexico’s Senate responded by rejecting the committee’s decision and asking the UN to sanction its president, Olivier De Frouville – a response approved by the country’s ruling left-wing party, the National Regeneration Movement (usually referred to as Morena).

“The Senate vote made me lose a lot of my morale,” Sánchez said. The following is an excerpt from our interview, which has been translated into English and edited for length, clarity and style.

openDemocracy: In Latin America, disappearance is identified as a state crime committed by authoritarian governments in previous decades. Why are there so many disappeared people in Mexico in the current context?

Lisa Sánchez: Mexico is an exception in Latin America because, although it had an authoritarian government [ruled by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, PRI, between 1929 and 2000], it was not the result of a coup d'état, and therefore there was no military dictatorship. The disappearances that occurred in the 1960s and 1970s were considered a state crime at a time of political persecution of socialist dissidents, whom the PRI, allied with the United States, pursued very vigorously because it considered them a threat to national security.

Although the Mexican left always rejected these disappearances and considered them a state crime, we never had a process of memory recovery as part of our national debate. Much less did we punish the perpetrators, although in recent years we have inaugurated a couple of truth commissions on the crimes of the ‘dirty war’. But in reality, the disappearances never faced collective, real, large-scale and organised rejection, as they did in South America.

Do you see a link between the failure to acknowledge this past and this new type of disappearance in the context of drug-related violence?

In some ways, yes, and in some ways, no, but I bring it up because the fact that we didn’t go through revisiting that painful reality during our transition to democracy allowed our governments to continue with the narrative that it was not a state policy. And that’s problematic because it is what we are seeing today.

Today, forced disappearances are also denied, and successive Mexican governments keep saying, ‘it is not systematic, it is not widespread, the state is not involved, and therefore we do not need any extraordinary mechanisms or massive sanctions against those who commit these acts’. And these claims are not up for debate. Anyone who dares to bring up the disappearances is accused of making political use of the issue to destabilise governments.

Since the war on drugs was unleashed [under Calderón], public institutions have sought to erase the problem and the enemy. There continue to be forced disappearances committed by police and military personnel who see certain types of citizens as enemies and, instead of investigating, detaining and prosecuting them, they murder, disappear, torture them, and the evidences are removed, or attempts are made to remove them, so that the perpetrators are never found.

Of course, we have another phenomenon of people disappeared by criminal organisations, which began to adopt the disappearances as part of their war with the state forces, but also with other rival cartels. And so, from 2011 to now, we have seen tremendously painful episodes – which did not begin in 2011, but which began to be discussed in the media – involving criminals dissolving their victims in acid so that their remains could not be identified, dismemberment and mass burials with lime and plaster to corrode the evidence as quickly as possible.

These things have been well documented by the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances, leading it to conclude that there is indeed a systematic and widespread issue of enforced disappearance in Mexico, with direct or indirect involvement of the state. This means that police or military forces directly disappear people and that even when the disappearance is committed by a member of organised crime, it’s presumed feasible because these criminal organisations are protected by the state, or the state fails to investigate them or, in one way or another, even provides the infrastructure for this to happen.

So, is there a concurrence of different perpetrators, both from the state and from organised crime, and is there complicity and omission on the part of the state?

Correct. And as if that were not enough, Mexico has been weakening its capacity to administer justice for many years. Disappearances have a 99% impunity rate, and other crimes have impunity rates of over 90%.

In March, international media outlets published images of hundreds of shoes, clothes and backpacks found by families of missing people at Izaguirre Ranch in Jalisco, a training and extermination site of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, which had been under the watch of the authorities since September 2024. Why was this important?

Unlike other mass graves or sites where organised crime gangs were believed to have trained and exterminated people, we had not seen before images of belongings of women, teenagers and even children on such a scale. The images from Izaguirre Ranch are shocking because it’s no longer possible to assume that it’s just ‘bad people’ who wanted to join organised crime who were brutally punished by those who had recruited them, or that these were just those easily invisible victims; dark-skinned, poor men from vulnerable communities in precarious jobs, who have not traditionally been deserving of empathy.

But I sadly have to admit that the news cycle and outrage over Izaguirre Ranch was very short-lived. It did not prompt any kind of coordinated and collective request for truly different responses from the authorities. Because we have already found many cases like this one, and today's horror erases yesterday's horror. And in Mexico, many horrors occur on a daily basis. The Izaguirre Ranch is not far from another property that had also uncovered a similar story of training and murdering people who were recruited against their will to participate in the activities of highly diversified criminal organisations.

At Rancho Izaguirre, we saw how the families of the victims entered the premises, dug, and collected evidence. This is an anomaly because, in a state governed by the rule of law, these are tasks for the police, the prosecution, and the forensic experts.

It is completely and utterly abnormal. But it also reveals the malice with which the Mexican state has dealt with this issue. The searching families did not start out as an organised initiative; they are a group of indirect victims who realised that even when they reported their loved ones’ disappearances, the authorities not only did nothing but also revictimised them every time they sought justice.

It is these families who began to request search files, and those files included photographs of the missing persons so they could be distributed, and the authorities themselves acknowledge that a person was missing.

It is the families who lobbied for a constitutional reform that then allowed a law to establish the National Victims‘ System [a mechanism for coordination between different public institutions for the victims to get comprehensive care, reparation for damages, access to justice and guarantees of non-repetition]. It is also an anomaly to have a national victims’ system, and it speaks volumes about how abnormal the case of Mexico is.

And it is the families who went out with their bare hands to dig the earth, who know the topographical anomalies of a plot to determine that there, beneath the ground, there are mass graves or illegal burials. And it is they who have also had to negotiate on many occasions with criminal organisations to allow them to carry out these excavations and exhume remains to try to identify their loved ones. Many of them have also been victims of violence; the most reliable figure we have is 22 mothers who have been murdered while searching for their children.

Meanwhile, the authorities remain silent or, when they want to appear empathetic, hand out shovels to the mothers so that they can dig with a shovel instead of with their hands.

On 20 March, the Jalisco and federal prosecutors' offices invited family members, the media and influencers to the Izaguirre Ranch. There, the searching mothers found that the evidence they had seen months earlier was no longer there and that some holes containing charred bone remains had been covered up. How do you interpret that day?

We reject it, first of all, in technical terms. The ranch has been known to the authorities since last year, but forensic evidence had not been collected because the property deed had been lost, and it was opened to the searching mothers who had made public the findings we all saw. A media circus was staged so some influencers, who are favourable to the ruling party, could go and dismiss the statements of the searching families.

And that is the political key that we find particularly despicable. Since the six-year term of president Andrés Manuel López Obrador [2018-2024, of the Morena party], one of the most effective narrative strategies has been to criminalise those who denounce what is happening. It didn't matter if they were journalists, civil society organisations, feminists, indigenous people or social movements. They were labelled as opponents and puppets serving dark interests that wanted to damage the image of the president and his government.

One of the consequences of this circus staged by these influencers, especially on social media, has been a hate campaign against the families of the missing, who were accused of intentionally trying to politically hurt [current president] Claudia [Sheinbaum, also from Morena], instead of the society seeking a much more constructive outrage about what to do with this, our reality.

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What have been the results of militarising public security, which formally began in 2007?

Disastrous. Homicide rates are up, crime is up, impunity continues to grow, and so one can describe this militarisation as a failed attempt. It also changed the criminal landscape, with the policy of decapitating the cartels leading to fragmentation and a dynamic of internal conflict in which criminal organisations armed themselves and set up mini-armies. Today, there are between 200 and 300 hitman cells that are not an organic part of cartels such as Sinaloa or Jalisco Nueva Generación, but are groups of armed individuals hired in a very flexible and mobile manner to commit murders or offer protection to certain criminal groups.

There are other negative effects, too. In the Inventario Nacional de lo Militarizado study (National Inventory of Militarisation), we have documented how civil powers have been transferred to the military at least 282 times in the past 12 years. Half of those transfers involved powers that have nothing to do with security, but relate to education, the distribution of public goods, infrastructure, aviation, communications, customs control, and so on.

And there is another important issue: the distortion of the public security and enforcement functions. This is hardly measured or talked about. But the fact that we have become so dependent on the military has caused pernicious cycles of lower investment in municipal and state police forces, prosecutors and law enforcement, and greater military control over the strategic, operational and tactical conduct of security at all levels. This neglect fuels the lack of progress in security statistics. Without prosecutors who know how to investigate, impunity continues; without police who are capable of investigating and detaining suspects or improving peace and coexistence in the territories, crime and violence rise.

Instead of questioning whether the problem was militarisation, what we did was to put the human rights paradigm on the ropes, and then the blame for this not working and not being successful was placed on our demand for due process or on the fact that we give more importance to human rights of criminals than to those of victims.

Which governments promoted this anti-human rights approach?

All governments. During the Calderón administration, a “death toll” was published every day in the national newspapers showing how many people had been killed in criminal rivalries that day. And this category of criminal rivalry assumed that all those killed by gunfire were criminals. So the prosecutors no longer investigated the killings.

And today, with these left-wing governments, the expansion of preventive detention is exactly the same: we have to be able to arbitrarily imprison someone, because otherwise we take the detainees and [the judges] tell us that the detention was illegal. If we investigate using torture, they tell us that torture is not admissible in court.

It became very easy for leaders across the political spectrum to voluntarily call on the military for help... It has been civilians who have handed over these pieces of power to shift responsibility elsewhere

Mexico is not the only country in our region that has granted the military powers that extend beyond public security. We have the historical example of Colombia, but more recently Venezuela, Brazil, Central America and Chile.

I wouldn't even stay in Latin America. After the Cold War, a paradigm of security threats, terrorism, biological weapons and the concept of multidimensional security were adopted in many countries around the world. Security was no longer just public security; everything had to be securitised: poverty, migration, gender relations. So there is a global tendency to conceptualise any instability as a threat to national security.

This, of course, has not just prompted a global critical mass that supports the expansion of military power, but has also produced generations of military personnel trained in a culture that sees this expansion of their powers as natural, because today the threat is everywhere.

At the same time, we wonder whether we are facing a new civil militarism in Latin America. I will talk about Mexico, which is the country I know best. There are political dynamics in which poor security results do not cost anyone their career, there are no political costs, and so it has become very easy for left-wing, centrist and right-wing leaders to call on the military for help voluntarily.

It has been civilians who have handed over these pieces of power to shift responsibility elsewhere, pretending that it is very difficult to fight crime and, in the end, not having to take responsibility for whatever the outcome of their decisions may be. Calderón did it, Peña [PRI] did it, Andrés Manuel did it, and Sheinbaum is doing it. It does not seem to respond to any ideological cleavage.

How to get out of this crisis? Do you have any expectations of what Sheinbaum's government might do?

I do have a little hope. I am very critical of everything that has been done, but I definitely have to grasp at straws to keep working on this. I think Sheinbaum is determined to make security an important issue in her government. I don't think she's afraid to tackle it, and she's making a significant commitment to strengthening the civilian ministries.

While she's not going to demilitarise public security (because Donald Trump keeps asking her to have the National Guard controlling immigration, and the National Guard is at this point a fourth armed force) she has already announced the creation of a civilian-led investigative police force and a series of legislative changes to give the Secretariat [ministry] of Citizen Security greater intelligence-gathering powers. She has also instructed the Executive Office of the National Public Security System to develop standardised guidelines and criteria for police professionalisation at the local level. These are all steps in the right direction.

We have to break the cycle of impoverishment and deprofessionalisation of civil and local bodies so that we can at least restore traditional security – theft on public transport, petty crime – while we seek extraordinary mechanisms to tackle organised crime. In that sense, I see opportunities ahead.

But I’ve lost a lot of my morale because of what happened after the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances said it would activate Article 34 of the Convention to request information from Mexico and potentially bring the case of the disappearances to the General Assembly. There was a vote in the Mexican Senate by the Morena majority, calling for the dismissal of the committee's chair.

Instead of talking about how we managed to build this sovereign and functional technical assistance to address this issue, everyone wrapped themselves in the flag, saying that there was interference, violation of sovereignty and that they wanted to see the head of the committee fall. I think Sheinbaum is going to have to check her own movement much more so that it does not block opportunities that could otherwise be seized.