After President Claudia Sheinbaum relaunched her international projection with last weekend’s trip to the summit of progressive governments in Barcelona, placing Mexico back at the forefront of the global stage, the president faces a difficult challenge this week for the country’s external image. The crisis of the disappeared, one of the biggest structural problems affecting recent governments, entered a new phase after the decision of the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances (CED) to escalate the problem to the General Assembly of the multilateral body. In a harsh report published earlier this month, the CED described them as “crimes against humanity,” a widespread and systematic practice for which it accused the Government of, at the very least, inaction in tackling the crisis. The UN’s stance triggered a strong reaction from the Government and the entire party apparatus, Morena, to flatly reject the report’s conclusions. In this context of tension, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, arrives in the country, who, as the president herself announced this Monday, plans a meeting with the high official on Wednesday at Palacio Nacional.
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Türk announced on his social media that as part of the official agenda of his visit, which has been repeated periodically over the last few years, he will meet with “civil society organizations, authorities, victims of human rights violations, and families of disappeared persons.” In fact, on Sunday he already had a first meeting with a group of social organizations, who handed him a letter signed by a hundred collectives of families of the disappeared, asking him to “explicitly and publicly” support the CED’s decision to elevate the crisis to the General Assembly of the body.
The president has not reacted to the letter from the family collectives, but the response to the report from the beginning of the month was very defensive. Sheinbaum accused the UN committee of “having an orientation” aimed at “criticizing the Government of Mexico.” The Executive also set an official position through a statement that called the report “biased” for “not addressing the Government’s great effort to seriously address this issue.”
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The struggle has already transcended the technical sphere, typical of the Committee that signed the document after more than a decade of information exchange with the Mexican State itself, with human rights organizations, and with victims’ families. Faced with voices recommending a thorough intervention by the UN to tackle the crisis, the Sheinbaum Government is aware of the high reputational cost that escalating to the General Assembly would entail, a forum, after all, for political negotiation with all international attention focused on Mexico.
The Government’s defensive argument, beyond the alleged political campaign against it, is based on the UN’s analysis “focusing only on some states and on disappearances that occurred between 2009 and 2017, a period corresponding to the administrations of Felipe Calderón and Enrique Peña Nieto.” Those years were the peak of the so-called war on drugs, materialized in the military leaving their barracks, still in force, to confront organized crime.
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The report, in any case, indicates that disappearance in Mexico is a crime against humanity that has only worsened, as the structural conditions that foster impunity persist. The UN Committee has documented cases in which local, state, and federal officials have participated, which demonstrates —according to the report— that some authorities are directly complicit, in addition to being overwhelmed to carry out their investigative duties.
The response from several government departments, from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the Ministry of Interior, was to discredit the report as “biased,” lacking “legal rigor,” “partial,” and “skewed.” As an example that “never in the history of this country had there been such a firm commitment to the search for disappeared persons,” as stated by the party president, Luisa María Alcalde, the ruling party highlighted months of work that culminated in the recent announcement about the controversial registry of the disappeared.
The Government reformulated the status of the more than 130,000 disappeared persons, reducing the cases corresponding to the crime to just over 43,000 (one third of the total). The remaining two-thirds are considered persons who have shown signs of being alive, or erroneous, fraudulent entries, or entries with insufficient information in reports to state prosecutor’s offices. These institutions, which receive a large part of the reports for these crimes, are one of the country’s biggest black holes of negligence and impunity, as revealed by the reconfiguration of the registry carried out by the federal Government. Of the 43,128 undeniable cases of disappeared persons, prosecutor’s offices only initiated an investigation in 3,869.