Mexico says 40,000 of country’s 130,000 disappeared people may be alive
By Stephen Eisenhammer
MEXICO CITY, March 27 (Reuters) – More than 40,000 people listed as missing who may be alive could potentially be identified by cross-referencing official databases such as tax records and marriage records, Mexican officials said on Friday.
After a yearlong review of national records on missing persons, officials said 40,308 entries (31% of the total) showed some activity on other government records, such as tax returns or birth certificates, suggesting they may be alive and located identifiable.
Authorities have so far identified and confirmed 5,269 of them, allowing their cases to be reclassified as “found.”
RECORDS CONTRIBUTE TO LOSSES OF MISSING CASES.
There are more than 130,000 missing people in Mexico; This is the result of decades of drug violence as cartels expand their reach and power. But the government said the figure was also the result of a poorly managed database full of errors, incomplete information and duplications.
About 46,000 records (roughly 36%) are missing basic information like names, dates or places where they disappeared, making searches impossible. The registry was initially compiled by uploading unverified lists from federal and state prosecutors, search committees, citizen reports and activist groups, creating duplicates and incomplete entries, officials said.
Another 43,128 cases have complete records but show no activity through cross-reference with other government databases. But less than 10 percent of that number is under criminal investigation; That gap reflects years of failure by prosecutors and law enforcement, officials said.
Losses increased after 2006, when Mexico launched a war against drug cartels. Of those still missing, 130,178 are from 2006 and 2,356 are old cases from 1952 to 2005, most of which are linked to enforced disappearances by state agents.
Public policy group Mexico Evalua found there has been a 200% increase in disappearances over the past decade, a result of the growing power of organized crime groups.
Officials on Friday stressed that no records would be removed from public records, only reclassified based on people’s location, and said new legal reforms now block entries without minimum data.
“We will continue to search until we find all the people who are missing,” senior security official Marcela Figueroa said at Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum’s morning press conference. he said.
Mexican political analyst Viri Rios said any change to the missing persons list was controversial because mothers searching for their children feared legitimate cases could be erased by mistake or negligence.
But for decades, he said, the registry was run with “very little control,” with cases added to the registry haphazardly and officials neglecting to follow up on them.
“Local prosecutors’ offices will now have to open investigative files for all disappearances, and this is a big step,” Rios said.
(Reporting by Stephen Eisenhammer; Additional reporting by Inigo Alexander; Editing by Emily Green, Rod Nickel)
