At the beginning of March, an expansive clandestine crematorium was discovered on a ranch in the western Mexican state of Jalisco, complete with burned human remains and 200 pairs of shoes. According to local officials, the apparent extermination site was likely operated by the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, which also reportedly used the ranch as a recruitment and training centre.
As Al Jazeera correspondent John Holman noted in a video dispatch following the discovery, the “strange thing” was that Mexican authorities had “seized the ranch five months ago, but reported none of the infrastructure” located there. Instead, it took a group of volunteers dedicated to the search for Mexico’s missing people to unearth the underground ovens.
Out of Mexico’s 32 states, Jalisco is the one with the most disappeared people, which numbered more than 15,000 as of the end of February. Countrywide, the official tally of victims of enforced disappearance and missing people reached 125,802 on March 26, although this figure is without doubt a grave underestimate given the frequent reluctance of family members of the missing to denounce such crimes for fear of reprisal.
Cases of enforced disappearance in Mexico began to soar – along with homicides – in 2006, the year that then-Mexican President Felipe Calderon launched the so-called “war on drugs” with the encouragement and backing of his charitable gringo counterpart George W Bush.
As has pretty much been par for the course with all ostensible global anti-narcotic endeavours orchestrated by the United States, the Mexican drug war did nothing to curb international drug traffic but much to render the country’s landscape ever more blood-soaked. After all, hyper-militarising Mexico in the name of fighting drugs does not resolve the fundamental issue of sky-high demand for illicit substances in the US itself, the criminalisation of which is what makes their trafficking so lucratively appealing to organised crime outfits.
Nor, to be sure, does the inundation of Mexico with US-manufactured weapons help matters, though it does enable the arms industry to continue making a killing off of killing.
As per the official narrative, Mexico’s violence is entirely the fault of drug cartels, period. This rationalisation conveniently excises from the equation the Mexican state’s established track record of killing and disappearing – not to mention the lengthy history of collaboration between Mexican police and military personnel and cartel operatives.
The Jalisco New Generation Cartel, alleged steward of the secret crematorium, was one of various groups recently designated as Foreign Terrorist Organizations by the administration of US President Donald Trump, which has also been making noises about potential US military raids on Mexico to combat the cartels.
Such action by the US would take the old “war on drugs” to a whole new level – and as usual, Mexican civilians would be the ones to pay the price.
In the meantime, Mexicans continue to disappear at a mindboggling rate, the country converted into a mass grave in its own right. In response to a longstanding government policy of not lifting a finger on behalf of missing people and their families, volunteer organisations have been forced to take matters into their own hands – and have often faced state wrath for doing so.
For example, former Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) – who last year handed the national reigns off to his ally Claudia Sheinbaum – once took it upon himself to accuse Mexicans involved in the search for the missing of a “delirium of necrophilia”. According to Mexico’s National Register of Missing and Disappeared Persons, a record 10,064 people disappeared during a single year of AMLO’s term – between May 2022 and May 2023 – which averaged out to 27.6 per day, or more than one person per hour.
And while Sheinbaum has been more vocally sympathetic than her predecessor to the plight of families of the disappeared, particularly in the aftermath of the shocking news out of Jalisco, a bit of sympathy here and there ultimately does nothing to disappear the panorama of institutionalised impunity. Amnesty International now cites 30 disappearances per day in Mexico. Less than a week after the Jalisco discovery, cremation ovens and human remains were found in the northern Mexican state of Tamaulipas. And this, unfortunately, is just the tip of the iceberg.
Certain cases of mass enforced disappearance in Mexico have garnered international attention, namely the September 2014 disappearance of 43 students enrolled at a teacher-training college in the town of Ayotzinapa in Guerrero state. After promising justice, AMLO worked to obstruct the investigation into the episode, which was carried out with the full complicity of Mexican military and police forces operating in cahoots with organised crime. Eleven years later, prospects for meaningful justice have all but disappeared.
I currently reside part-time in the coastal village of Zipolite in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, where on March 1 reports began to circulate that various young visitors from the state of Tlaxcala had been disappeared from the village the previous day. One desperate mother took to social media to plead for assistance in locating her 23-year-old daughter, Jacqueline Meza, a mother of two young children, who had allegedly been abducted along with her boyfriend by a group of men.
When nine bodies were subsequently found in and around an abandoned vehicle hours away from Zipolite on the border between the states of Oaxaca and Puebla, one was identified as belonging to Meza. Several local officials have now been detained in connection with the massacre. A March 10 article in the El País newspaper detailed the current “horror on the coast of Oaxaca”, where a total of 16 people had been disappeared from the area in just two months.
Among residents here in Zipolite – where police officers can regularly be seen in amiable conversation, in full public view, with the dons of the local underworld – the prevailing version of events appears to be that Meza and the others were in fact delinquents who had come to Oaxaca for the purpose of robbing establishments along the coast. They were “up to no good”, so the gossip goes, and were therefore targeted by the neighbourhood narcos, who make a point of maintaining a monopoly on crime in the area and punishing outsiders who don’t play by the rules. In this version, the detained officials were simply bowing to narco orders.
As a de facto justification for enforced disappearance and killing, the “up to no good” reasoning is supremely troubling. And yet it’s also a logical defence mechanism, perhaps, in a country where disappearance has become a way of life.
In other words, telling oneself that only folks who step on the toes of organised crime are eligible for the fate that befell Jacqueline Meza and company may create an illusion of personal safety. In the end, though, that illusion can be deadly.
Over the past months, I have travelled to several Mexican cities, including the capital of Mexico City as well as Culiacan in the state of Sinaloa – home of the eponymous cartel – and Ciudad Juarez in the state of Chihuahua, which lies across the border from El Paso, Texas. In each place, I have seen poster after poster featuring the faces of Mexico’s disappeared – displayed in plazas, plastered onto electrical poles, hung from trees in front of churches.
During a recent visit to the Oaxacan capital of Oaxaca City, I saw a poster reporting the disappearance of a 90-year-old woman.
The majority of the disappeared date from 2006 to the present, although some hail from an earlier era of US-endorsed state oppression – the good old Cold War days of wanton human rights abuses throughout Latin America, all in the name of fighting communism.
The traumatic societal effects of mass enforced disappearance cannot be understated, as countless families of missing people are condemned to what amounts to indefinite emotional torture, unable to grieve their loved ones without knowing what happened to them or where their bodies are.
But as Mexico’s invisible war rages on, disappearance may have already become normalised.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.