The news that more than 100,000 people in Mexico are now officially registered as “disappeared” is a tragedy, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet has said.

A national database had listed all those reported missing in the country since 1964, and the tally continued to climb amid ongoing drug gang violence and a lack of effective investigations.

On Tuesday, UN rights office spokesperson Liz Throssell said that Ms Bachelet called for action to tackle the country’s long standing problem.

“To date, only 35 of the disappearances recorded since then have led to the conviction of the perpetrators, a staggering rate of impunity,” Ms Throssell said in a statement.

The UN human rights chief urged the authorities to continue implementing reforms and ensuring justice for the victims and their families.

According to Mexico’s database on disappeared individuals, about a quarter are women, and around a fifth were under 18 when they went missing.

The vast majority of cases where the date of disappearance was unknown – some 97 per cent – happened after December 2006, when Mexico transitioned to a militarised public security model.

Mexico’s efforts to tackle the issue of its disappeared citizens included the adoption of the General Law on Disappearances, the creation of search committees in all states and the Extraordinary Mechanism for Forensic Identification.

A National Centre for Human Identification had also opened, along with committees to examine serious human rights violations between 1965 and 1990, in addition to the 2014 disappearance of 43 students from a rural teachers’ college in Ayotzinapa.

In 2018, a UN rights office report into the incident said strong grounds to believe that the investigation was marred by torture and cover-ups.

In addition, there were “solid grounds” to conclude that at least 34 individuals were tortured, based on the judicial files, including medical records of multiple physical injuries, and on interviews with authorities, detainees and witnesses.

In 2020, Mexico recognised the competence of the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances (CED) to examine individual complaints.

In June 2021, Mexico’s Supreme Court also recognised the binding nature of the CED’s Urgent Actions, which supports the right of each person affected by a disappearance to justice.

In November 2021, Mexico became the first country to accept an official visit by the Committee on Enforced Disappearances; it went to 13 Mexican states and held more than 150 meetings with authorities, victims’ organisations and Non-Governmental Organisation (NGOs).

(NAN)