In April 2025, Mexico City unveiled a comprehensive 20-point strategy to address the crisis of forced disappearance. Developed in collaboration with families of the disappeared and various organizations, the plan features technological upgrades, advanced protocols, significant investment, and support for families. While the announcement offers some hope for the capital, it has also cast a harsh light on the decades of delays and neglect that preceded it, as Charli McMackin reports.
‘Desaparecido’ is a word that has haunted Latin America for many years. In the crawlspace between those six syllables sprout wounded memories of the so-called ‘dirty war’, during which time US-backed military dictatorships killed, tortured, and disappeared hundreds of thousands throughout the region.
While this period has not ceased to divide and ignite opinion in our current era of historical revisionism, the notion of the desaparecido for countries like Chile and Uruguay is inextricably rooted in an epoch which, though brutal, effectively ended with the return to democracy in the 1980s and 1990s. For Mexico, on the other hand – despite undergoing its own hobbled democratic transition in 2000 after 71 years of the PRI’s uninterrupted rule – that ‘sinister transitive verb,’ to disappear, remains a profoundly contemporary affliction.
As of 2025, at least 128,000 people are missing in Mexico. The oldest entry on the missing person’s register dates back to 1962, but around 90 percent of the total cases occurred after 2006, when Felipe Calderón declared the so-called war on drugs. For the hundreds of ‘search collectives’ who comb remote corners of the country looking for human remains, political promises to tackle Mexico’s crisis of violence had worn increasingly thin with each successive administration; until the revelation of the new search and rescue strategy for 2025-2030, that is.
Unveiled to the public on 28 April by Mexico City Mayor, Clara Brugada, the government
elucidated an ambitious plan to combat the crisis of enforced disappearances in the capital, which consistently ranks in the top five states with the most missing people. An additional 255 million pesos (nearly £9 million GBP) will be invested in the search efforts, and the 72-hour mandatory wait period – an enduring source of despair for victims’ families forced to wait three days before search efforts begin – will be eliminated.
The 2025-2030 strategy also has a ‘metropolitan’ component, which guarantees the cooperation of the six surrounding states in the search efforts, as well as the obligation for private companies, like banks and phone companies, to share relevant information with the victims’ families. For Adela Alvarado, who has been searching for her missing daughter since 2004, the legislation is akin to ‘a Christmas list’—a long-awaited response to the buscadores after years of neglect by one administration after another.
But while the announcement offers a glimmer of hope for collectives in the capital, it has also cast a harsh light on the decades of delays that preceded it. The crisis of enforced disappearances in Mexico did not emerge overnight; it has been compounded and intentionally obscured by the policies, omissions, and political calculations of successive administrations – including this one.
To assess whether this new strategy truly represents a departure from what came before, then, it is necessary to first revisit how the last four Presidents have (mis)managed the crisis and, at times, contributed to its perpetuation. Only by tracing this history can we understand all the sanguinary connotations of the word ‘desaparecido’ in Mexico, and how the tactics of state repression developed in the dictatorial past continue to intrude on the present.
‘Haiga sido como haiga sido’
A few days after Felipe Calderón made his hotly-contested ascent to the presidency in 2006, the National Action Party candidate donned army slacks and launched ‘Operación Conjunta Michoacán’. Situated in Calderón’s home state, the initial operation deployed in excess of 6,500 soldiers and federal police officers in a purported effort to battle Michoacán’s complex mosaic of drug cartels.
Despite early indications that the Operation was having the opposite of the intended effect – to reduce cartel-related violence – the President ploughed resolutely on, expanding militarization to states like Baja California and Guerrero where competition between warring factions was especially high. Alongside the sharp increase in homicides and disappearances, public confidence in Calderón and his security policy was further damaged by several widely-televised incidents in which the President appeared to be inebriated – including the infamous ‘haiga sido como haiga sido’ grammatical blunder in which he tried to downplay irregularities in the 2006 election – as well as his alleged links to the very cartels he vowed to dismantle.
By 2011, the crisis had spiralled to new depths. With more than 26,000 people missing and no plan in sight to curb the escalating violence, the Mexican citizenry took to the streets to declare their outrage. Though organized crime had long been a regrettable feature of daily life, the measures taken by Calderón fanned the flames to such an extent that the whole country was soon overtaken by the blaze. He exited the presidency in 2012 with more murders having occurred during his single-term than in war-torn Iraq and Afghanistan.
‘A monument to denial’
When Peña Nieto was elected the following year on the promise to distance himself from the bellicose tactics of his predecessor, there was a period – albeit brief – of hope. EPN’s Pact for México, though reticent on the issue of enforced disappearances, marked an urgent moment of cross-partisan collaboration, signed by the PRI, the PAN, and the PRD. The legislative gridlock which had solidified along party lines and crippled previous administrations’ attempts at imposing structural reforms seemed, at last, to be softening under the handsome new President.
But the relative calm was not to last. In 2014, news broke that 43 students from Ayotzinapa, Guerrero, had been forcibly disappeared after commandeering several buses headed for Mexico City to commemorate the 1968 massacre of Tlaletlolco. Despite the discreditation of ‘the historic truth’ touted by Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam (currently under house arrest in Mexico City for his role in in the atrocity), EPN staunchly defended Karam’s fabricated version of events, and continued to deny the state’s role in the disappearances.
The following year, Peña Nieto presented the first draft of the General Law for the Prevention and Punishment of Crimes Related to Disappeared Persons, but it was far too little, too late. Victims’ groups denounced the proposed Law as a ‘monument to denial’ and criticized the government’s failure to include them in the consultation process.
For some of the buscadoras I spoke with in the capital, this has been a relative strength of the Sheinbaum administration so far; the 2025-2030 legislation was developed with loose collaboration from victims’ families in Mexico City, and dialogue through the Interior Ministry remains ongoing (though at a national level, tensions remain high). Peña Nieto, on the other hand, avoided the colectivos like the plague; not even the landmark ratification of the 2017 General Victims’ Law during his tenure was sufficient to thaw icy relations. By the time that EPN’s tenure drew to a close, his approval rating had plummeted to just 18 percent, making him the least popular president since Ernesto Zedillo in the second half of the 1990s.
‘Politics and publicity’
By the end of Peña Nieto’s disastrous tenure, the Mexican electorate could no longer tolerate the creaking political establishment. The election of left-wing populist Andrés Manuel López Obrador in 2018 marked the first time in nearly a century that a candidate unaffiliated with either the PRI or the PAN had won the popular vote. Considering that López Obrador was the primary casualty of the allegedly fraudulent election against Calderón in 2006, he was predictably vocal both pre- and post-election in his condemnation of the former president and his disastrous war against the cartels. The MORENA party candidate positioned himself as the antithesis of the militarized and technocratic administrations that had preceded him, vowing to break once and for all with Mexico’s history of impunity and bloodshed.
But this was not an accurate depiction of what was to come. A 2019 report by Amnesty International likened López Obrador’s security strategy to that of Felipe Calderón at the height of the drug war. Just as Peña Nieto had done before him, López Obrador amplified the role of the military in civilian life, despite having campaigned on the promise to do the contrary. Meanwhile, following the 2022 truth commission into the enforced disappearances at Ayotzinapa, independent investigators reported being forced to abandon their inquiry due to obstruction, mistreatment, and tampering of evidence by the military. As the elaborate investigations into historic crimes wore on, the patience of victims’ families was rapidly deteriorating: recognition of historic injustice would not compensate for the President’s reticence on its contemporary repetition.
López Obrador’s meeting with Estela de Carlotto, Argentine human rights activist and President of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, was the final straw. In one of his signature mañaneras (daily televized morning press conferences) shortly after the meeting in the summer of 2023, the President categorically ruled out the possibility of meeting with the colectivos at home, despite having just met with a buscadora from abroad. He accused the Mexican victims’ groups of engineering a show of ‘petty politics and publicity’ intended to harm his public image.
‘The problem is that we’re not Argentine’, quipped Ceci Flores, leader of the Madres Buscadoras de Sonora collective and a vocal critic of the former President. A few months’ prior, when a suspected clandestine crematorium was discovered on the outer edge of Mexico City, López Obrador’s administration claimed that journalists and search collectives like Flores’ were suffering ‘a delirium of necrophilia’ due to their claims of finding human remains at the site.
By the time López Obrador’s presidency came to an end in 2024, the number of enforced disappearances had risen to a historic high – including among the victims’ families. 16 buscadores – 13 of them women – were murdered during the previous MORENA administration, compared to just three and five respectively under Calderón and Peña Nieto.
One should not underestimate that López Obrador inherited a crisis when he was elected in 2018. However, his administration’s botched attempt at historical truth and reconciliation – in combination with efforts to falsify the official statistics of disappeared people ahead of the 2024 elections and consistent incendiary rhetoric towards the buscadores – went beyond the myopic Machiavellianism of his predecessors. Those forced to scrape the earth looking for the bones of their loved ones deserve a basic level of respect which López Obrador resolutely failed to deliver, gravely damaging already-fraught relations with the colectivos in the process.
‘Daughter of Tlaletlolco’
Fortunately for MORENA and Claudia Sheinbaum, AMLO’s belligerent approach to the demands of the buscadores had not dampened the party’s overall popularity. A series of long-overdue minimum wage increases, falling poverty rates, and populist diatribes lamenting the ills of neoliberalism had secured the MORENA frontman as a heroic figure in the national imaginary. When Sheinbaum was elected to replace AMLO in the 2024 election with the highest vote percentage in Mexico’s democratic history, this was not the only record broken; it was also the bloodiest campaign period on record, with at least 41 candidates murdered in the run-up to the election.
Much like López Obrador before her, however, Sheinbaum initially shied away from addressing the explosion of violence. She showed greater willingness to address the repression of the dictatorship in the 1960s and 70s in lieu of the rapidly-mounting cases of the present day – rising 26 percent in her first four months in office. She even referred to herself as a ‘daughter of ‘68’ in the run up to the election – in reference to the massacre of unarmed students in Tlaletlolco – and included ‘truth and justice’ for the victims of Ayotzinapa in her 100 Commitments to Mexico (the buscadores didn’t make the cut).
This initial hesitancy to engage with the contemporary dimension of the crisis of disappearances has garnered speculation as to whether the Sheinbaum administration’s hand was forced by the recent uproar surrounding the discovery of an extermination site in Jalisco. A few weeks after the Guerreros Buscadores de Jalisco announced the presence of bone fragments and makeshift cremation ovens at the Izaguirre ranch in Teuchitlán, a mother and son who belonged to the colectivo were shot dead in the street, further intensifying international scrutiny of the case. The biggest insult was delivered with the Attorney General’s claim on 29 April that no evidence of human remains were found at the site, prompting the Buscadores to send a letter to the president accusing Alejandro Gertz Manero of trying to ‘kill the truth’. Sheinbaum has yet to meaningfully respond.
One buscadora, who asked to remain anonymous, told me that her collective has ‘high expectations’ for the 2025-2030 plan. They only wish it hadn’t taken an Izaguirre Ranch for the world – and the President – to pay attention to their desaparecidos.
For colectivos beyond the capital, Sheinbaum’s assurances during a mañanera following the revelation of the Izaguirre case offered little comfort. In another open letter to the President, they pointed out that the creation of a ‘CURP’ (a mandatory digital identity system incorporating biometric data like fingerprints and facial recognition – also part of the Mexico City security plan) was in fact the revival of an earlier strategy proposed first by Calderón and later Peña Nieto. Moreover, without a clear idea of how the CURP would be utilized in the search for missing persons, they fear that biometric data could instead be used for nefarious means like state surveillance, with no guarantee of human rights protection.
While it is still far too early to know if the Mexico City strategy will be effective – let alone whether it would function at a national level – it has given victims’ families hope. One buscadora, who asked to remain anonymous, told me that her collective has ‘high expectations’ for the 2025-2030 plan. They only wish it hadn’t taken an Izaguirre Ranch for the world – and the President – to pay attention to their desaparecidos.
Charli McMackin is an academic researcher at Royal Holloway, University of London. She holds an MSc in Latin American Studies and an MA in Modern Languages, both from the University of Oxford.
