It was a bright morning in August 2022 when the Angel took over Montenegro. The 31-year-old construction worker was waiting for a bus back to nearby Cuernavaca after drinking all night with some workmates in the city of Kautla, Montenegro.
At 10 a.m., a white van pulled up: several people jumped out, locking Montenegro and a colleague inside. Montenegro’s colleague was released a few hundred meters down the street, but Montenegro was chased away.
As soon as she heard that her son had been taken, Montenegrin mother Patricia García rushed to Cuitla with his wife, brother and some neighbors. When they arrive at the bus stop, all they find is Montenegro’s hat and one of his tennis shoes.
The group searched all day for any other trace of Montenegro, but came up empty-handed. “The desperation started when night fell,” said Garcia, who has now spent more than three years searching for her son.
Montenegro is one of 130,000 people missing or disappeared in Mexico, an ongoing crisis that has destroyed tens of thousands of families across the country. Although disappearances began to rise in the early 2000s as the Mexican government tried to take over the country’s cartels, a new report by public policy analysis firm Mexico Evala found that in the past 10 years, disappearances have increased by more than 200%.
“This is a problem that cannot be controlled at the national level,” said Armando Vargas, a security analyst at México Evalua. The disappearances “captulate the deadly violence” Mexico is experiencing.
According to Vargas, the increase in disappearances over the past decade reflects the growing possession by the country’s vast criminal gangs, as well as the diversification of activities these gangs engage in beyond just drug trafficking.
Expanding their ranks often involves forced recruitment, Vargas said, but conquering new territory requires the “annihilation of rival groups.” But murdering other gang members is more likely to attract the authorities’ attention: instead, cartels bury the corpses in unmarked graves, burn them to ashes or dissolve them in vats of acid.
By making the bodies disappear, criminal groups “disappear the violence because it keeps them under the radar,” Vargas said.
Meanwhile, criminal groups are increasingly involved in kidnapping and disappearance activities, including organ trafficking, sex- and human-trafficking, as well as migrant smuggling.
The Mexican government, however, says that as the cartels expand territorially and into new markets, large swaths of the country remain under the control of these gangs.
“Criminal power progresses in parallel with institutional negligence,” Vargas said.
In 2018, the government launched a National Search Commission to trace and locate the disappeared, encourage more people to report missing loved ones, and create an interactive public platform that records missing persons across the country.
But the commission was underfunded, and the platform soon became a political thorn in the side of the government: Ahead of elections in 2024, then-President Andrés Manuel López Obrador launched an opaque “review” of the register, reducing the number of disappeared to just 12,377, sparking an outcry among activists and human rights.
Asked about the report from México Evalua, President Claudia Sheinbaum denied that “there are many problems with that platform” and promised that the government would release a new report to more accurately account for the disappeared.
But analysts say the number of reported disappearances, if any, is low due to extreme rates of violence across the country and the government’s weakness in finding and identifying bodies.
When investigations do occur, they are often slow and ineffective, marred by corruption and inefficiency: according to the United Nations, more than 96% of crimes in Mexico will go unsolved in 2022.
The lack of a substantial government response to the crisis has forced many mothers, including Garcia, to fend for themselves. García joined a group of 12 women who went out on a weekly quest, probing the ground with metal rods for signs of buried corpses.
The November after Montenegro was taken, Garcia and the team were on a farm on the outskirts of Kautla when his phone last pinged a cell tower. They found six bodies buried there, but none of them were her son. Four months later, he went back and found five more dead bodies. No one is her son.
Despite the daunting task, Garcia still kept searching, refusing to give up hope. But the search took a terrible toll, Garcia had to divide her time between caring for her family and looking for her son.
“You’re left in broken pieces,” Garcia said. “It’s like a broken vase: you can glue it back together but the cracks are always there.”
