In a somber and defiant display of collective grief, thousands of Mexicans marched in cities across the country today, carrying placards with the faces of their missing loved ones and demanding justice for the more than 130,000 people who have vanished. The demonstrations, held to mark the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances, highlight a national humanitarian crisis that activists say has been met with government inaction and a lack of political will.
The largest protest brought traffic to a standstill in Mexico City, where families and human rights activists moved down the main thoroughfare toward the National Palace. The air was thick with chants of “We are not one, we are not 100, damn government, count us well!” and “They took them alive! We want them back alive!”
The crisis of the disappeared in Mexico has grown exponentially since 2007, when then-President Felipe Calderón launched his “war on drugs.” While drug cartels and organized crime groups are widely seen as the main perpetrators, human rights groups and families of the missing have long accused security forces and government officials of complicity in the disappearances.
For many, the protests are a last resort. For years, mothers, fathers, and siblings have formed search teams known as “buscadores” (searchers), who risk their own lives to scour the countryside for clandestine graves. Their work has been made even more dangerous by a recent government review that activists claim was an attempt to artificially lower the number of missing people.
“We are here because the government has failed us,” said Maria Herrera Magdaleno, who has been searching for her four sons since they disappeared in 2008 and 2010. “They want to turn us into numbers, but we are people with names, with families who are looking for them.”
The issue of missing persons has become a major political liability for President Claudia Sheinbaum’s administration. While Sheinbaum’s predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, pledged to address the crisis, his administration faced widespread criticism for minimizing the official count and for a lack of concrete progress. Now, the burden of accountability rests on the new government, which has been urged to heed the United Nations, which has called the disappearances “a human tragedy of enormous proportions.”
As the marchers dispersed, their signs—with the faces of the missing—remained as a powerful reminder of the thousands of lives that have been cut short and the families still searching for answers. For a nation grappling with so much violence, the cries of the disappeared are a haunting reminder of the darkness that lies beneath its surface.