One person every 45 minutes, for ten years. That is the arithmetic of disappearance in Mexico.
More than 130,000 people are now registered as missing or disappeared in Mexico — a figure that has surged by 200 percent over the past decade, according to data reported by The Guardian and drawn from official government registries. The number is not a crime statistic. It is a census of grief — equivalent to emptying an entire mid-size Mexican city, home by home, family by family, and leaving no trace.
To understand what 130,000 means, consider Querétaro, a city of roughly that size north of the capital. Now imagine every resident simply gone. No bodies, in most cases. No confirmed fates. Families left in the particular torment that the Spanish language captures with precision: la desaparición forzada — forced disappearance — a crime whose cruelty lies partly in its refusal to end.
This is not a crime story. It is a governance story.
The 200 percent increase in disappearances over ten years maps almost exactly onto the territorial expansion of Mexico's major criminal organizations — the Sinaloa Cartel, the Jalisco Nueva Generación Cartel (CJNG), and a proliferating ecosystem of regional operators who have fragmented, federated, and fought for control of corridors, plazas, and illicit economies from Tamaulipas to Guerrero to Colima. Where cartel territorial disputes intensify, disappearances follow. The pattern is consistent enough to constitute evidence of system.
The states with the highest concentration of cases — Jalisco, Tamaulipas, Sinaloa, Guerrero, Veracruz — are not incidentally the states where organized crime has fought its most violent territorial battles over the past decade. The geography of disappearance and the geography of cartel expansion are, in significant measure, the same map.
But cartel expansion does not happen in a vacuum. It happens where state authority has retreated, where municipal police forces have been penetrated or overwhelmed, where prosecutors lack resources, political will, or both. The crisis of the disappeared is a crisis of the Mexican state's capacity to protect its own citizens in large portions of its own territory.
President Claudia Sheinbaum, who took office in October 2024 succeeding Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has articulated a security strategy that emphasizes socioeconomic root causes of violence alongside law enforcement. Her government has pledged continued operation and strengthening of the Comisión Nacional de Búsqueda — the National Search Commission — the body created in 2017 specifically to coordinate the search for disappeared persons and maintain the national registry. The commission's work has been essential to making the scale of the crisis visible: before its creation, the true count of the missing was buried across fragmented municipal and state databases.
Yet the Sheinbaum government has yet to demonstrate that its security approach has materially reduced the rate of new disappearances. The 130,000 figure represents accumulated cases; the pace of new disappearances continues to run at levels that have not declined significantly from the peaks of the López Obrador era. Activists and search collectives — the colectivos de búsqueda — push back against official figures they consider undercounts, noting that many families never file reports out of fear of cartel retaliation or distrust of authorities.
Those colectivos — primarily composed of mothers, sisters, and wives of the disappeared — have taken on tasks the state has failed to perform: excavating clandestine graves in the hills outside Culiacán and Iguala, building forensic databases from fragments of bone and cloth, demanding accountability from prosecutors who have rarely delivered it. They are, without hyperbole, carrying the weight of a national emergency that their government has been unable to fully shoulder.
The crisis reaches across the border. For the Mexican diaspora in the United States — approximately 37 million Americans of Mexican descent, with millions more Mexican nationals living and working across California, Texas, Illinois, and New York — the registry of the disappeared is not an abstraction. It is a list that contains, for hundreds of thousands of families, a brother who stopped calling from Michoacán, a cousin who left for Tijuana and never arrived, a father who drove through the wrong checkpoint at the wrong hour. The crisis of disappearance in Mexico lives inside diaspora communities across the United States, carried quietly across the border in every WhatsApp group that goes suddenly silent.
Mexico's relationship with the United States — already under strain from tariff disputes, migration pressures, and the Trump administration's designation of Mexican cartels as foreign terrorist organizations — is further complicated by the question of shared responsibility. American demand for narcotics fuels the cartel economies that generate much of the violence. American-made weapons, trafficked south across the border, fill the arsenals of the organizations doing the disappearing. The binational nature of the crisis has never produced a binational response proportionate to its scale.
The number 130,000 is official. Activists believe it is low. Whatever the precise count, it represents a decade of failure — by criminal organizations that have operated with impunity, by institutions that have been unable to stop them, and by a bilateral relationship that has preferred to manage the crisis rather than confront it.
Twenty countries, 650 million people, and yes — one of them is living through a disappearance crisis of a scale and duration that should command the attention of every government in the hemisphere. Somos nuestra propia historia. The missing are part of that history too, and they are waiting to be found.
