MEXICO CITY (CN) — Families and members of search collectives for Mexico’s forcibly disappeared people protested outside government offices in Mexico City and 16 other states Monday in response to a recent reduction in the number of officially recognized victims.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador announced last Thursday that the number officially recognized by his administration, after conducting a “house by house” census of families of people on the list, had gone from over 113,000 to just 12,377.
“We denounce the lack of responsibility and sensitivity of the public servants who supposedly purged the registry, as well as the fallacy of the numbers that they present as results,” the group said in a statement read outside the Mexico City offices of the Secretariat of the Interior, the agency responsible for administering the registry and census data.
López Obrador has claimed that the official numbers of disappeared people are exaggerated by opposition forces to “affect” his administration.
None of the protesters in Mexico City, who numbered around 80, said they had been contacted by government officials for the census. Protesters in other cities also claimed never to have been contacted.
As the first president of the now-ruling Morena party, López Obrador represented a new hope for people like those who came out to protest on Monday when he took office in December 2018. However, after five years and march after march without anything resembling a solution, families of the disappeared expressed disappointment and anger toward the president.
“AMLO said that eveyrthing would change,” they chanted outside the secretariat offices. “Lies, lies, pure bullshit.”
López Obrador's office did not respond to a request for comment.
“What’s happening is very serious, because in practice what the federal government is doing is erasing the registers of disappeared people, and in reality they are disappearing the disappeared,” said Jacques Coste, a historian and human rights specialist.
Interior Secretary Luisa María Alcalde, who presented the census data during López Obrador’s daily morning press conference in Mexico City last Thursday, said that census data show that of the 110,964 people on the registry at the time, 26,090 lack sufficient data to be identified, 36,022 cases have no evidence to locate them, and that 17,843 have been located. She also said the list includes 1,951 duplicate entries.
The registry number was 113,414 at the time of writing. It topped 100,000 in May 2022.
Civil society groups and human rights defenders called out the census for its lack of transparency. The federal government had not published any methodology for how the data was compiled as of the time of writing.
“They raised the criteria for considering a person disappeared and with a totally opaque census,” said Coste.
Interior Secretariat Director Benjamín Cárdenas spoke to protestors outside the agency offices Monday morning, claiming that his agency is not the proper governmental department to deal with their demands. He did not respond to Courthouse News’ questions about why, considering the secretariat administers both the registry and the census.
He also claimed that National Search Commission Chair Teresa Guadalupe Reyes Sahagún was in the building and preparing to receive the protesters. She never attended their demands.
However, the commission posted on Facebook that Reyes had come out to attend their the protesters' demands earlier that morning in Mexico City's main square, and had promised to meet with them in an auditorium in the Interior Secretariat, but said meeting never materialized.
The protesters claimed Cárdenas was being evasive and left the site to block the intersection of Paseo de la Reforma and Insurgentes Avenues, one of the capital’s busiest.
The commission did not respond to a request for comment.
Officials from Mexico’s Executive Commission of Victim Services arrived at the roadblock on Paseo de la Reforma, but protesters told them to leave, accusing them of only being there for photo opportunities. None of the officials answered Courthouse News’ questions.
Jacqueline Palmeros has searched for her daughter Jael Monserrat Uribe Palmeros since she disappeared in the Mexico City neighborhood of Iztapalapa in July 2020. She was 21 years old when she went missing.
For Palmeros, the reduction in the number of disappeared persons “means that they are being victims of a double disappearance on the part of the state,” she said in an interview outside the Interior Secretariat.
“It’s outrageous and re-victimizing that the president says there are only 12,000 disappeared people, when that is equivalent to just one state in the country,” she said.
Courthouse News has accompanied her search collective on a search for disappeared persons in the south of Mexico City and attended a concert she organized to raise funds for their cause. Palmeros and other searching mothers sold water bottles and folk art adorned with stickers of the missing person posters of their loved ones stuck to them. She is also active in Mexico City’s feminist anti-monument movement.
Laura Kabata has lived in a sit-in in the street outside the Secretariat of the Interior for three years. She joined Monday’s protest to denounce alleged violence committed on her and others in the sit-in, who have demanded justice for sexual assaults, physical attacks and disappearances of their loved ones.
Her son was kidnapped and sexually assaulted for five days by soldiers from the Mexican army, she said.
“My son is dead in life,” she said. At the time of writing, she had gone 11 days without food, carrying out a hunger strike to try and force the Interior Secretariat to take action.
“No one has treated us worse than the Interior Secretariat,” she said.
She and a fellow protester said that security operatives have beaten them, stolen objects from them and committed other acts of violence. They even took away the sit-in’s port-a-potty, forcing them to go to the bathroom in a sewer drain, she said.
“Our only weapon is to throw urine on the officers so that they don’t hit us and steal from us,” she said.
Eric Guichard fled violence in his home state of Chiapas four years ago and since then has lived in the street in the sit-in. He has not been able to return home to meet his daughter who was born not long after he left, he said.
And he repeated a line often said by people in his situation in Mexico: “There’s nothing else for us to do but to keep fighting, because we won’t get justice any other way.”
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