The Jalisco Attorney General’s Office (FGE) will create a special prosecutor’s office that will focus on cases of missing persons in the state.
The new office is expected to be finalized within a 45-day time frame, Attorney General Eduardo Almaguer said this week during a public hearing tied into the state governor’s annual report (informe).
The final details are currently under revision by the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, which will submit its observations, Almaguer explained.
As well as beefing up investigations and reopening cold cases, one of the main functions of the new office will be to rapidly expedite reports of missing persons. This could mean substantial changes to the current policy of only starting investigations after 72 hours have lapsed following the filing of a missing persons report.
Jalisco has the third highest rates of missing persons in Mexico. The FGE says 6,940 people were reported as missing in the state between January 1, 2014 and September 30, 2016 – an average of just under seven per day. Of these, FGE records show that 5,064 persons were localized, either within Jalisco or elsewhere in the country. Unfortunately, among this number, 282 were found without life.
The total of 1,876 “open” cases of persons still considered missing in Jalisco is disputed by some NGOs. Victims support groups claim the real figure is closer to 3,000, as many families are too frightened to file a report with authorities for fear that their loved ones have been kidnapped and will face retribution if authorities are notified.
Alma Chávez Guth, the citizens’ representative on the FGE’s Executive Committee for Attention to Victims, said this week that despite the state law-enforcement agency’s “good intentions,” much more needs to be done to create a “reliable” list of missing persons in Jalisco. She said investigations into the probable causes of why people go missing “lack depth.”
Chávez also noted that Jalisco’s Forensic Sciences Institute lacks the necessary resources to make proper DNA matches between the 300 unclaimed corpses in the Guadalajara morgue and persons reported as missing.