On April 19 and 20, those of us who are part of the Platform for Peace and Justice in Guanajuato, an academic and political project to support and strengthen the groups of victims and survivors of violence in Guanajuato, decided to join the National Search Day Humanitarian, convened in March by more than 250 organizations of relatives of missing persons in the country, and, more generally, the initiative to promote national unity and dialogue between groups.
This occurs in the context of the campaigns for the June 2 elections, in which the candidates and the candidate for the Presidency, and the candidates for the governorship of the state of Guanajuato have not presented concrete, clear and detailed proposals on the disappearance and search of people, and the forensic crisis.
The Day was a joint and simultaneous search action throughout the country, carried out in various ways: in life, in the field, flyers, forums and/or actions in public spaces to make their demands visible. “It is a process of national unification,” the convening families have said. The activities will culminate in May, with a Mega March in CdMx for Mother’s Day.
In Guanajuato, in addition to the support and dissemination of the search carried out by the groups of families of missing persons, the Platform published a bulletin with updated information on disappearances in the entity. It is a periodic exercise that the author of this column and the human rights defender Raymundo Sandoval have carried out for four years, in the absence or inaccuracy of information and official records, through communications, articles and accounts. X / Twitter @DesapGto y @platformagto
About the number of missing people
As of March 15, 2024, there is officially a record of the disappearance of 4,185 people in Guanajuato: their whereabouts are unknown and, by Law, we presume that they have been victims of a crime and must be searched by the authorities. The problem has been constantly increasing in the entity.
Particularly, between April 30, 2018 (last cut of the old and now extinct National Registry of Missing and Missing Persons) and March 15 of the current year, in a period of just under six years, the number of missing persons has grown almost seven times, from 621 cases to almost four thousand 200. Of these, three thousand 572 are men and 611 women (two of “undetermined sex”); 3,933 are adults and 241 are minors (11 of “undetermined age”).
The municipalities with the most missing people (over 200) are: Celaya (505), Irapuato (472), León (459), Villagrán (265), Pénjamo (222) and Salamanca (210).
As a proportion of the population, the cities with the highest rates of missing persons per 100 thousand inhabitants are: Villagrán (with 401.3), Cuerámaro (217.1), Juventino Rosas (215), Uriangato (159.4), Apaseo el Alto (153) and Pénjamo (140). Villagrán and Pénjamo appear on the list of the first six cities both in absolute numbers and as a percentage of their population.
About clandestine graves and unidentified bodies
In the state of Guanajuato, based on cross-analysis of official sources (State Search Commission, State Attorney General’s Office, through transparency requests and public reports), press data (for the years 2009-2020) and information from groups search (Independent Search Brigade of Until I Find You; and Una Luz en Mi Camino), between 2009 and March 2024, we have a record of the discovery of more than 550 clandestine graves, with an approximate number of more than a thousand bodies.
Although the definitive data, by municipality and by type of source, will be disclosed in the coming weeks in a special report by the Platform and the Universidad Iberoamericana León, we know that close to 80 percent of these illegal burials and the people found refer to to the time period of the last four years (2020-2024). Geographically, they are concentrated in the industrial corridor area, the Laja-Bajío region and border areas with Michoacán and Jalisco.
The data on disappearances do not take into account the black figure, that is, the record of those missing people whose families have not filed a report or complaint and who, according to the testimony and documentation of the 26 groups of relatives in Guanajuato, could number in the hundreds. of victims more than the official numbers. The above shows how the practice of under-registration of cases and the absence of reliable, comparable and accessible public records, which comply with the mandate of current laws, are worrying and persistent situations, both at the state and federal levels.
It should be noted that until September 2023, via the National Transparency Platform, the State Prosecutor’s Office indicated the presence of 950 bodies (847 unidentified, 103 identified unclaimed) in custody in the Funerary Park (or “Forensic Pantheon”) of the capital. state. As of January 15, 2024, there were 935 bodies kept in the Prosecutor’s Funeral Park, of which 849 were unidentified and 86 identified were unclaimed. So, these figures have not changed substantially in the last semester.
Mass graves and pantheons: urgent search and identification
However, the fact that the number of bodies buried in mass graves in the state’s municipal cemeteries has changed substantially has changed: the prosecutor’s office in 2023 had a record of 825 unidentified bodies, buried in mass graves in cemeteries throughout Guanajuato. These are bodies buried and registered by the Prosecutor’s Office between 2012 and 2020 that were, until 2023, in municipal cemeteries.
As of February 8, 2024, however, these were only 376, that is, 449 fewer bodies are declared than the 825 last year. On the other hand, it is not stated that these bodies have been moved from the municipalities to the forensic pantheon of the capital. Furthermore, the municipalities themselves give different figures than those provided by the Prosecutor’s Office regarding the number of corpses they keep in their cemeteries. So we infer that the records are poorly integrated, outdated and partial, negatively impacting the search issue, forensic identification and long-standing cases.
In general, we detect an interinstitutional and intergovernmental chain of unfulfilled responsibilities and omitted authorities that, as a whole, tend to make the phenomenon of disappearances invisible, to prevent an adequate context analysis and to carry out searches and investigations without due diligence and promptness.
On non-compliance with international mechanisms
We denounce the lack of progress in the 15 cases of Urgent Actions before the UN Committee against Forced Disappearances that since 2021 the Platform for Peace and Justice in Guanajuato has promoted and accompanied in the entity.
These group the search for around twenty missing people. Of these, 30 percent have been found dead, while the rest remain active, without any progress in fulfilling the comprehensive search plans requested by the UN. Informality, improvisation and re-victimization prevail in the way the authorities act in these cases that are presented to the United Nations.
On February 28, the Platform participated in the historic Hearing at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) in Washington. DC on the murder of searchers in Mexico, denouncing the risk situation faced in the country, showing cases that represent general situations in Sinaloa, Puebla, Zacatecas and Guanajuato.
There have been 26 search groups and dozens of independent searchers who have denounced and pushed the institutions, in the face of the increase in violence and disappearances in Guanajuato, and they have done so at their own risk, suffering threats, forced displacement, harassment and deadly attacks. Which, of course, applies to other regions of Mexico.
In said Hearing before the IACHR, the murder of at least 20 searchers in the country was reported, where unfortunately Guanajuato occupies the place of the deadliest entity for searchers, with at least five murders recorded (and there are at least four others that are not have been made public). This, in addition to the case of the search engine Lorenza Cano, who was missing for three months without any progress in the investigation.
Fabrizio Lorusso
Research professor at the Universidad Iberoamericana León on issues of violence, disappearance of people and memory in the context of globalization and neoliberalism. Master and doctor in Latin American Studies (UNAM). Contributor to Italian and Mexican media. He is a member of the Platform for Peace and Justice in Guanajuato, a project for the collective strengthening of victims.
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