“A tragedy.” “A humanitarian catastrophe.” “Horrific.”
Just a few of the words bandied about this week to describe the news that more than 100,000 people in Mexico are now officially registered as “disappeared.”
In Jalisco, the state with the highest number of missing persons (almost 15,000), relatives lit candles at the Glorieta de los Desaparecidos (fomerly Niños Heroes monument) in Guadalajara, and read out the names of their absent loved ones.
In an editorial in this week’s El Informador newspaper, Ruben Martin eloquently described their suffering: “Each disappearance is a story of a life cut short from one moment to another. A room left untouched, an unoccupied bench at school, a place at work … it is the pain of the mother, the wife, the father, the children, the girlfriend who will no longer touch or hug the absent one. It is a neighbor who is no longer in the neighborhood.”
Questioned about the symbolic milestone of reaching 100,000 missing persons, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador defended his administration, deflecting blame onto his predecessors, specifically Felipe Calderon (2006-2012), who, egged on by the U.S. government, waged an all-out war on the cartels, initiating a period of violence that has yet to abate. However, critics of AMLO’s efforts to tackle the issue, in particular in addressing the “staggering rate of impunity” for the perpetrators, as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet noted this week, point to the fact that, while 17,000 people were registered as missing during Calderon’s term of office and 35,000 during the administration of his successor Enrique Peña, over 31,000 people have disappeared during AMLO’s presidency, which has more than two and a half years still to run.