Mexico says a third of 130,000 missing people might be alive, fuelling criticisms by families

A relative of a missing person, part of a group called the Guerreros Buscadores, lights a candle after finding skeletal remains buried in Tlajomulco de Zuniga, on the outskirts of Guadalajara, Mexico, Tuesday, March 24, 2026. (AP Photo/Eduardo Verdugo)

MEXICO CITY — Mexico’s government said in a new report on Friday that it has identified signs of life for a third of the country’s 130,000 registered missing people, an announcement that was quickly criticized by a number of search groups which called it an attempt to undermine the depth of Mexico’s disappearance crisis.

The mounting criticism cut to the heart of fierce debate over how Mexico tracks disappearances, which have soared since the beginning of the drug war in 2006. While authorities say figures are overcounted, families say the number of missing people in Mexico is actually far higher. Both blame what they see as a lack of reliable data on failures by local governments and deep-seated impunity.

Mexican authorities said Friday by cross-referencing things like vaccination records, birth and marriage registries and tax filings, officials found that 40,367 people — around 31 per cent of reported disappearances — showed some activity in government records since they’d been reported missing.

Marcela Figueroa, a top security official, said that it indicated that those people might still be alive.

Using that search method, and consulting with a number of search groups, she said that the government was able to track down 5,269 people and mark them as “found.”

Figueroa described many of those cases as “voluntary absences,” citing a number of examples of men leaving their partners for another woman being reported as missing and women running away from abusive relationships.

“Not all disappearances are the same,” she said, adding that the government was constantly working to locate Mexico’s missing people.

Efforts to `hide and downplay’ numbers

But Héctor Flores, a leader of a search collective in the heart of Mexico’s disappearance crisis, the state of Jalisco, said that he saw the Friday report as “misleading” and said the government’s methodology lacked transparency.

Groups like his have accused the government for years of trying to disappear the disappeared to save face on an international stage. Historic corruption and lack of investigation into such cases has fueled distrust among families who believe that changes to the registry could cut real cases from the list and hinder search efforts.

“For us, it’s just another attempt by the administration to hide and downplay the numbers and continue to paint a picture that doesn’t reflect the reality of what we’re living through,” said Flores, whose 19-year-old son was forcibly disappeared by agents from the Jalisco state prosecutor’s office in 2021.

According to figures shared Friday, 46,000, or 36 per cent, of those registered as disappeared had missing data like names and dates that made searches impossible.

Meanwhile, 43,128, or 33 per cent, showed no registered activities in government databases. Of those, less than 10 per cent are under criminal investigation, something Figueroa called a failure by Mexican authorities.

Figueroa also said that the government was more vigorously “monitoring” local prosecutor’s offices that have failed to investigate and accurately document cases of missing people, and has sought to boost the number of cases being investigated.

“Society and the families can trust in the records and better tools to search for people,” Figueroa said.

Fierce argument over the disappeared

The reinterpreted figures are part of a larger effort to bring order to a convoluted dataset that connects to a collective trauma scarring the Latin American nation.

Forcibly disappearing people has long been a tactic by cartels to consolidate control through terror while also concealing homicide numbers. Some of Mexico’s most haunting cases of mass disappearances, like the disappearance of 43 students in central Mexico, have also been tied to state actors. The 130,000 people registered as missing since 2006 is enough to fill a small city and the faces of missing people on fliers line the streets of Mexico’s biggest cities.

The controversy stretches back years as different administrations have each proposed revisions of the disappeared database. Maria Luisa Aguilar, director of the Miguel Agustin Pro Juarez Human Rights Center, which accompanies families searching for missing people, said each census has been marked by fierce criticism and plagues families with a feeling of uncertainty as they wonder if such shifts will further set back an already painstaking search process.

Most recently, the issue erupted under ex-President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who was in office from 2018-2024. His government launched a census of the disappeared after claiming that the figures had been inflated to make him look bad. A cascade of criticisms in 2023 led to the resignation of the official leading the search for the disappeared.

Mexico’s government has said that the official registry of disappeared is an overcount, often marred by faulty data from local prosecutor’s offices and cases of people being reported missing two or three times.

Search groups and the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances have argued that the real number is likely higher than the official stats because of failures by local governments, fear by some families to report missing cases, and a lack of “clear and transparent” data.

Aguilar said Friday that while her organization welcomed efforts to make the data more reliable and cut back in impunity, the report “minimizes the state’s responsibility” in the disappearance crisis.

She also said the figures offer few solutions and little specific information to family members and puts the burden on them to continue searches, sometimes at the cost of their lives.

The human rights group Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez Human Rights Center on Friday said in a statement that while it welcomed efforts to make the data more reliable, the way officials framed the data “minimizes the state’s responsibility” in the disappearance crisis and does little to aid families who often have to take justice into their own hands and search for their missing loved ones themselves.

“Centering the conversation around a crisis of this magnitude on numbers, it’s not the response that families of missing persons need after 20 years of such a sharp increase in disappearances,” she said. “When we see reports like the one today, it proves the victims right: What they want is to make the number of disappeared persons smaller.”

Megan Janetsky, The Associated Press