2,443 Unpunished Mexican Officials Linked to Disappearances

Families of the Disappeared at the forum
Photo: Mónica González - Milenio

La Jornada: Blanche Petrich and Leopoldo Ramos

Translated by Shaun Twomey

The president of the National Commission of Human Rights (CNDH), Raúl Plascencia Villanueva, asserted that the impunity “continues protecting” 2,443 public servants singled out as either participants or accessories in missing persons crimes, based on the organization’s analysis since 2005. The commission has explicitly identified and issued resolutions against 30 individuals in particular – affiliated with either Mexico’s marines, army, federal and state police, or the attorney general’s office – all “without any result.”

The national ombudsman spoke in front of the undersecretary of government affairs, Lía Limón; the governor of Coahuila, Rubén Moreira; a representative for the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights (ONU), a dozen officers, and hundreds of relatives of those disappeared that congregated here representing a half dozen states and presented in order to participate in the International Forum on Forced Disappearances.

Governor Moreira, in turn, specified that in his state there have been 1,200 disappearances (although this contrasts with other statistics indicating that the number is north of two thousand). He acknowledged that the families’ petition demanding their return alive “is the correct protest” and that the authorities should accelerate search operations in conjunction with independent organizations because “time is of the essence”. The cases of forced disappearance were multiplied exponentially after the start of former president Calderón’s term, and in the audience there were people that had been searching for their loved ones for at least seven years.

Miguel Ángel Osorio Chong, the governing secretary, was announced attending, but it was the undersecretary for Human Rights, Lía Limón, who was introduced and who insisted that simply recognizing the problem of disappearances is “the first step toward solving it”.

She elaborated on the actions undertaken up to now by the federal government to address the imprecise number – on the order of twenty thousand – of complaints filed by relatives of those disappeared. Among other things, she cited the signing of a convention of search protocols with Red Cross International, the initiative to reform various articles in the Penal Code with the aim of harmonizing them with the standards of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the purging of the centralized database on disappearances, and the recent creation of a Missing Persons Search Unit.

She further remarked that to understand the demands of all of this is not enough, “but it is a first step,” she insisted. And facing the tens of families in the audience that have waited for some meaningful answer from authorities at all levels, she added: “You are not alone. You can count on us.”

The forum, convened by a joint effort of Coahuila’s and Mexico’s United Forces for Our Missing (Fundec-Fundem), was the first to hear voices from other countries like Chile, Argentina, Guatemala, and Peru, who also participated in both the open conference format and in closed door sessions with various Mexican organizations in order to amplify their ability to demand decisive action from the authorities, rather than what has transpired up to now and merely amounts to “paper investigations” that have failed to yield the whereabouts of any one of the more than 20,000 missing individuals.

“We hope that with this forum we can begin to understand what is happening in Mexico, how, and why it is happening. And we want to add knowledge and experience on four distinct themes: search, investigation, the construction of public policies, and the legislative harmonization along these matters,” explained one of the organizers of Fundec, Juan López.

As a result of this Saltillo meeting, it is expected that a “logbook” of concrete proposals will be created that compensates for the meeting’s brevity.

Between speeches, Ombudsman Plascencia highlighted that this “has to be the first point on the national agenda.” He added that there is no justification for allowing someone to go missing or that excuses the authorities from being able to find them.

“A government that is not in a position to determine the whereabouts of the citizens for which it is responsible is, itself, in a questionable position.” 

Spanish original