Accounting for Disappeared Persons in Violent Democracies: How New Technologies Can be Used to Estimate the Number of Disappeared People and to Predict the Geolocation of Clandestine Mass Graves in Mexico

This project seeks to develop new modeling tools to understand one of the Western Hemisphere’s most dramatic human rights crises: the disappearance of 133,000 people since the Mexican government declared a War on Drugs in 2006. 98% of all cases remain in complete impunity. Working in close collaboration with a collective of 586 families of victims of enforced disappearance from Acapulco, Mexico, the project develops three lines of research that will produce a stream of articles: (1) “Estimating the Extent of Enforced Disappearances in Mexico: A Network Scale-Up Analysis in the City of Acapulco,” 2) “Predicting the Location of Clandestine Mass Graves in Urban Areas: A Geospatial Machine Learning Model for Acapulco, Mexico,” and (3) “Using New Technologies to Empower Victims of Human Rights Abuses in their Struggle for Justice: Developing a Chatbot for Families of Victims of Disappearance in Acapulco, Mexico.” These projects seek to use new technologies to empower victims in the search of their loved ones and in their struggle for truth and justice. I am requesting financial support to extend the contract of a Data Scientist working with whom I am working on these projects.