TL;DR
A report by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights reveals that state actors in Mexico are involved in disappearances at an alarming rate, with over 130,000 people missing. The findings highlight collusion between organized crime and state agents, as well as ongoing disappearances directly by government officials.
State actors are involved in disappearances in Mexico at an “alarming” rate, according to a report from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).
The sweeping investigation, to which the Guardian was given exclusive access, presents a dire picture of the crisis of disappearances in Mexico, where more than 130,000 people have gone missing, mostly in the last 20 years since the government declared its war on drug cartels.
While criminal gangs are responsible for the vast majority of disappearances, the IACHR report found that “many of the disappearances committed by organised crime occur in deep collusion and coordination with state agents”.
Meanwhile, “disappearances committed [directly] by state agents have not yet been eradicated”, the report reads, noting that, in some parts of the country, at times there were almost as many disappearances carried out by government officials as there were by criminals.
The report also described an “alarming” number of cases involving “torture, forced disappearances and disappearances which include state security actors”.
Forced disappearance – where a person is detained, extrajudicially killed by the state and their body then destroyed or hidden – has a long history in Mexico, going back to the country’s so-called dirty war of the 1960s and 70s where dissidents were even thrown out of planes and into the Pacific ocean.
In more recent years, the tactic has been adopted by organised crime groups to sow terror in local communities, intimidate rivals or erase evidence of homicides by burning bodies, burying them in mass graves or dissolving them in vats of acid. In the last 10 years, disappearances have increased by more than 200%.
However, as the IACHR report makes clear, state actors are often involved, either directly by snatching people from their homes or cars without warrants and handing them off to criminal groups, or indirectly by looking the other way as these crimes take place.
The IACHR also found that “organised crime in Mexico recruits state agents in charge of security tasks, law enforcement, and even political authorities”.
Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, and her government have repeatedly rejected such assertions.