A year-end report by Mexico's government registered a figure of 95,000 missing persons nationwide, with an estimated 52,000 unidentified bodies buried in mass graves. The report by the Comisión Nacional de Búsqueda de Personas [9] (National Missing Persons Search Commission) found that the great majority of the disappearances have taken place since 2007, when Mexico began a military crackdown on the drug cartels. Alejandro Encinas, the assistant interior secretary for human rights, said that there are 9,400 unidentified bodies in cold-storage rooms in the country, and pledged to form a National Center for Human Identification tasked with forensic work on these remains. He admitted to a "forensic crisis that has lead to a situation where we don't have the ability to guarantee the identification of people and return [of remains] to their families."
More than 4,000 clandestine mass graves have been unearthed around the country. The unmarked graves are popularly known as narco-fosas [12]. Citizens and kin of the missing in many states have formed their own informal search committees, scouring the deserts and brush for remains of their loved ones. (DW [13], DW [14], BBC News [15], Télam [16])
Women continue to be disproportionately targeted. The Executive Secretary for the National Security System (SESNSP [17]) reports 3,462 women slain in Mexico between January and November last year, a rate of more than 10 per day. Of these cases, 922 were classified as "femicides"—women targeted for their gender. While the overall number of killings of women dropped 0.32% last year compared to the previous, there was a 3.25% rise in the number of femicides. (LAT [18])
See our last report [19] on the body count in Mexico's drug war.
