Mexico believes it has miscounted 40,000 people missing in the country. how is that possible
Mexican authorities said on Friday they had identified more than 40,000 people listed as missing who may be alive by matching official databases such as tax and marriage registries.
After a year-long review of the national missing persons registry, officials said 40,308 records, 31 percent of the total, showed some activity in other government registries, such as tax returns or birth certificates, suggesting these people might be alive and could be found.
Of these, the authorities have so far been able to trace and confirm the identity of 5,269 people, allowing their cases to be reclassified as “found”.
About 46,000 records, around 36% of the total, do not contain basic information such as names, dates or places of disappearance, making searches impossible. Officials said the registry was originally created by uploading unverified lists from federal and state prosecutors, search boards, citizen reports and activist groups, resulting in duplication and incomplete records.
Why are there so many missing people in Mexico?
The Central American country has more than 130,000 people missing, a fallout from decades of drug-related violence, with the number rising as cartels have expanded their power and influence. But the government said the figure was also the result of a poorly managed database full of errors, missing information and duplication.
Disappearances increased after 2006, when Mexico launched its war on drug cartels. Of those still missing, 130,178 are cases since 2006, while 2,356 are old cases, from the period 1952-2005, many being related to so-called “enforced disappearances” committed by agents of the state.
The public policy group Mexico Evalua found that in the past decade, disappearances have increased by 200 percent due to the growing power of organized crime groups.
“We will continue to search for all missing persons until we find them,” Marcela Figueroa, the top security official, told President Claudia Sheinbaum's morning news conference.
