To Disappear in Mexico

This project seek to understand the logics and mechanics of forced disappearance in Mexico in the context of the War on Drugs and to produce sound information and analyses that will empower collectives of families of victims of disappearance in their search for truth, justice, and reparations. Since the onset of the War on Drugs more than 115,000 persons have disappeared (possibly this number is 30% higher) and the impunity rate is around 99%. The project has a research component (“To Disappear in Mexico”) and a policy and practice component (“Until We Find You”). At the macro level, “To Disappear in Mexico” seeks to 1) develop an accurate estimate of the number of disappeared persons in Mexico since the Mexican federal government launched the War on Drugs in 2006 and 2) assess whether and how the War on Drugs and the multiple turf wars and local struggles for de facto political control that the government’s military intervention unleashed may be causally associated with disappearances. At the micro-level, “Until We Find You” is a policy and practice project in which a V-TJ Lab team will work with collectives of families of disappearance and local researchers and NGOs from different cities across Mexico to conduct case-by-case analyses of hundreds of disappeared persons, the modus operandi of the disappearances, and the police investigations. Both projects build on a decade of research on large-scale criminal violence and gross human rights violations in criminal wars in new democracies (with a particular focus on Mexico) and on a two-year V-TJ Lab project in which lab members have accompanied a collective of 365 families of victims of forced disappearance from the city of Acapulco in southern Mexico in their search for truth, justice, and reparations.