EFE.- Mexico acknowledged before the group of experts of the UN Committee for Forced Disappearance (CED), which begins a visit to the national territory this Monday, that the country faces a humanitarian crisis due to forced disappearances, by accumulating more than 94,000 people not located.
“This is the most painful inheritance that the Government of Mexico is facing and where we have to make the greatest effort as a priority of the Mexican State,” said Alejandro Encinas, undersecretary of Human Rights, Population and Migration of the Ministry of the Interior, during the welcome to the CED, headed by the president of the Committee, Carmen Rosa Villa Quintana.
During his speech, Encinas reiterated that the crisis of disappearances that the country is currently experiencing stems from the dirty war and the “misnamed war against drug trafficking “, which was declared during the administration of President Felipe Calderón (2006-2012 ).
He affirmed that despite the approval of the General Law on Forced Disappearance of Persons in November 2017, disappearance committed by individuals and the National Search System, these mechanisms have been inoperative.
“ The truth is that there was no implementation; there was no registry of missing persons; there were no protocols for the search and only eight state commissions operated in very precarious conditions, ” Alejandro Encinas said.
He exalted that after the arrival of the government, the president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, on December 1, 2018, “very clear signals” have been sent to address this problem.
He affirmed that until that date the Mexican State “abdicated” its responsibilities in matters of disappearance and delegated the search for the disappeared persons to the victims’ families.
However, he stressed that the current Government has taken a turn in the approach to the problem, such as the issuance of a decree to design a strategy to clarify the disappearance of the students of Ayotzinapa and recently the creation of the Truth Commission related to the Dirty War that took place in Mexico between 1965 and 1990.
In addition, he said that the National Search System was reinstated, with which 2,300 days of searching for missing persons have been carried out, in addition to the creation of approved search protocols, and additional protocols for children and adolescents.
Likewise, the National Registry of Disappeared and Unlocated Persons was created and 1,200 million pesos (about 58 million dollars) have been allocated to strengthen the state search commissions.
In addition to this, the Table for Missing Migrants was installed; regional centers for human identification were created in Coahuila and San Luis Potosí; and mobile forensic laboratories were provided in Sonora.
He praised the progress in the searches of clandestine graves that have allowed recovered bodies and the installation of the 32 state search commissions.
Villa Quintana described the visit to Mexico for the next two weeks as historic, not only because the country has opened itself to the scrutiny of the Committee, but because it is the first visit that this body has made at the international level 11 years after its creation.
“We very much welcome the willingness of the Mexican State to receive this visit requested since 2013. It is a sign of the will of the Mexican State to open itself to international scrutiny,” he said.
And he recalled that in these two weeks the group will visit 12 states, where it will meet with authorities and relatives of the victims, with which it seeks to collaborate constructively with the Mexican State in order to advance in the prevention of forced disappearances and the fight against impunity.
Finally, he said that at the end of the visit, on November 26, they will offer a brief press conference, but the report on the situation in Mexico will be given at the next Committee session between March and April 2022.
Source: Forbes Mexico
