Mexico's missing and the fight against organized crime

By James Blears

In a report just out, Mexico`s  National Search Commission  states that 73,201 people have gone missing over the years.... 97.9 percent of these unfortunate individuals vanished after 2006, when then President Felipe Calderon publically declared war on the powerful and ultra violent drug cartels.

Almost twenty eight thousand of those who went missing  still remain unaccounted for.

Deputy Minister of the Interior Alejandro Encinas, who`s described Mexico as an enormous hidden grave, says that more than a thousand clandestine grave sites have been found, and more than one thousand six hundred bodies have been exhumed during the 19 months of this Administration. 

The States where the majority of the missing come  from are: Sinaloa, the State of Mexico, Tamaulipas and Veracruz, where the drug cartels are at their most lethal and hold brutal sway.

The true number is far higher, because many people are just too terrified to make reports to the Police of missing family members, for fear that the gunmen will come back for them. 

This report doesn`t take account of the thousands of Central American migrants who try to traverse Mexico each and every year, desperately hoping  to migrate to the United States.

The human traffickers who are  linked to organized crime, often turn them over to the narcos. Then they face  the stark options of asking relatives back home to pay kidnap ransoms, to work for the cartels, or they`re murdered and buried in the vast and desolate hinterland or badlands.