In 2011, thousands of charred human remains were discovered in a vast plot of land in Nuevo León, northern Mexico. Since then, more human remains have been found at the Las Abejas ejido, less than three hours from the US-Mexico border. In 2024, exhumations resumed after families demanded a thorough forensic search, as they say the place was “left adrift” for over a decade. “It wasn’t given the importance it deserved,” says Elva Rivas, founder of Colectivo Renacer, a collective of families of the disappeared in Nuevo León. “Many remains were lost to scavengers.”
With over 132,000 people still disappeared and thousands of mass graves, Mexico faces a massive forensic crisis — one that is worsening as disappearances continue. Since the early 2010s, forced disappearances have evolved in the wake of the drug war and the ensuing fragmentation and expansion of criminal organizations. Cartel members — often aided by the complicity or negligence of the state — forcibly recruit youth, extort businesses, traffic women for sexual exploitation, and displace communities in territories crucial for their operations. They kill those who refuse to follow their orders, fail to pay extortion fees, or are seen as expendable. In most cases, the bodies are hidden.
While fear of retaliation and corruption prevents many from reporting these crimes, those who do speak out face a lack of political will and significant bureaucratic hurdles. With an impunity rate exceeding 90%, the vast majority of disappearances go unpunished.
The crisis has continued to accelerate across the country. In the beginning of 2026, in Mexicali, Baja California, at least 32 bodies were recovered from 15 clandestine graves. In Sinaloa, the bodies of seven out of ten missing mining workers were recently found in a mass grave.
While disappearances and the discovery of clandestine graves have become part of everyday life in Mexico, the issue is often absent from US-Mexico security talks. US President Donald Trump has pressured Mexico to curb fentanyl flows, arguing that it endangers lives and communities across the United States. Instead of being viewed as a critical consequence of the same crisis, Mexico’s disappearances remain largely sidelined from the security agenda, despite being central to sustaining the infrastructure that moves fentanyl across the border.
Enforced disappearance is a primary tool for both forcibly recruiting youth into criminal organizations and controlling communities in strategic corridors. Treating them as separate issues is akin to addressing the problem just by targeting its products, rather than focusing on dismantling the networks maintained through violence against the local population. Acknowledging a shared responsibility between both countries would demand accountability for the loss of lives at both ends of the supply chain.
David Shirk, the director of the Justice in Mexico program at the University of San Diego, explains that from the US perspective, the primary justification for the “war on drugs” is the protection of domestic public health. However, he notes that “it’s rather obvious that Trump is trying to use the war on drugs and his demands as a bargaining chip to pressure Mexico.”
In his first year back in office, President Trump has swiftly pivoted from a public health approach to a heavily militarized strategy. His administration has designated drug cartels as terrorists and classified fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction. Alongside the deployment of National Guard troops to US cities and the US-Mexico border, and naval strikes against alleged drug trafficking boats in the Caribbean, the administration’s strategy includes the imposition of tariffs on Mexico to force action against drug cartels.
The Mexican government has leaned heavily on the rhetoric of sovereignty to respond. However, this sentiment is not easily embraced by everyone, especially those conducting their own searches for missing loved ones. Juan Gonzalo Moreno Márquez, whose son Kevin disappeared in Mexicali in 2022, argues that the government is pushing a “false nationalism,” whereas he views US pressure as having a positive impact. “There have been major arrests and extraditions of organized crime bosses, and Baja California is no exception. We have direct accusations of our own political actors being linked to organized crime,” he added.
Earlier this year, the Baja California State Attorney General’s Office announced the arrest of three municipal police officers for the alleged enforced disappearance of four men in Tijuana in July 2022. On March 2, the State Attorney General stated that at least 32 police officers have been arrested in total for crimes such as enforced disappearances, feminicides, and links to drug trafficking.
Last year, the US visas of Baja California Governor Marina del Pilar Ávila and her husband, Carlos Torres, were revoked as the Trump administration pushed Mexico to investigate politicians with alleged links to organized crime. Although no official reasons for the revocation were disclosed, del Pilar divorced months later. In January, she confirmed that Torres — the state’s First Gentleman and a former congressman — was being investigated by Mexico’s Attorney General’s Office for firearms and drug trafficking, as well as money laundering.
While Mexico has increased the arrests and transfer of high-ranking organized crime figures and heightened its seizures of drugs and US-made firearms, the tangible impact of these security operations on public safety has come under heavy criticism. In Sinaloa, rival factions have been locked in a conflict for the past year and a half, following the alleged kidnapping of Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada — co-founder of the Sinaloa Cartel — by one of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán’s sons. According to the Sinaloa State Attorney General’s Office, the state ended 2025 with 1,656 homicides, a 67% increase over the previous year. This year, in January alone, 106 people were killed.
Marlene León, of the nongovernmental organization Iniciativa Sinaloa, explains that the conflict has taken a heavy toll on civilians, including minors and families caught in the crossfire of shootouts between rival cartels, or between criminal groups and the military. “What we as citizens have seen is that these haven’t really been surgical operations or strategies targeting only one objective, but rather confrontations in broad daylight where there are collateral victims, as the state and federal governments have unfortunately and irresponsibly labeled them,” she added.
The Mexican government often frames disappearances as the result of infighting between rival groups or as collateral damage. Last year, the United Nations Committee on Enforced Disappearances (CED) invoked Article 34 of the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance for the first time, a mechanism used to urge a state to comply with international human rights standards.
In its statement, the Committee explained that this article is invoked when there are “well-founded indications that enforced disappearance is being practiced on a widespread or systematic basis.” Mexico’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs rejected the CED’s scrutiny, arguing that “enforced disappearance in Mexico is primarily linked to organized crime.”
Mexico’s legal framework distinguishes between enforced disappearances and disappearances committed by individuals. The latter, considering the lack of capacity and will to conduct thorough investigations, can often be used to mask state responsibility, as the definition of “enforced disappearance” under Article 2 of the Convention requires the “authorization, support or acquiescence of the State.” The Committee emphasized that the information gathered indicates that organized crime groups often operate with such state authorization, support or acquiescence, thereby meeting the criteria for enforced disappearance.
Shirk explains that the real objective of US-Mexico cooperation is often to establish trust protocols between the two countries, rather than to achieve specific public security or health goals. One example is the Mérida Initiative, a $3 billion security partnership between the US and Mexico that ran from 2007 to 2021 and was designed to combat drug trafficking and organized crime.
“The objectives and how they would be measured were never clearly defined from the outset. The goal [for Mexico] was to reduce homicides and the crime rate. For the Americans, it was to reduce drug trafficking,” he adds. “In a sense, neither of those objectives was achieved, partly because concrete goals were never set.”
Civil society organizations heavily criticized the program for increasing the militarization of public security in Mexico and contributing to the rise in forced disappearances, even though the US Congress conditioned aid on respect for human rights. In 2015, the families of 43 Ayotzinapa students, whose case became a global symbol of Mexico’s disappearance crisis, demanded in front of the White House that the initiative be terminated.
A key focus of the initiative was law enforcement capacity building, spanning forensic lab assessments to anti-kidnapping units. Yet, despite $406 million in US support for Mexico’s judicial transition, families still encounter negligence and a lack of resources.
“We saw flaws in the chain of custody and a lack of method,” explains Moreno. “There were tons of files — some agents had up to 60 files — and we realized that if we didn’t take responsibility for the search ourselves, we would never find our son, Kevin.”
Although the Bicentennial Framework, which replaced Mérida, also pledged forensic and victim support, the situation has only worsened.
In 2023, Moreno and his wife, Soraya, took things into their own hands and founded the Célula de Búsqueda e Investigación, an independent citizen group specializing in the forensic search for missing persons. To date, Moreno says they have located 80 remains. However, beyond the challenge of searching, families face an agonizing wait for identification. Mexico currently faces a forensic backlog of over 70,000 unidentified bodies, according to human rights organizations.
Rivas explains that following the 2011 exhumations at Las Abejas, at least 37,000 bone fragments were left unanalyzed. “Authorities said they were too small and badly burned [to test],” she says. However, in 2024, the Renacer collective demanded they be processed, and so far, at least 11 DNA profiles have been obtained. The Nuevo León Attorney General’s Office did not respond to requests for information.
Despite President Sheinbaum’s promise to address disappearances and support victims, families continue to lead the searches themselves, and new collectives keep emerging. León explains that in Sinaloa, the political strategy appears to prioritize protecting the state’s image by minimizing the severity of the situation and remaining opaque with data regarding how the problem has steadily worsened.
Faced with these government responses, Moreno warns of the urgency to evolve and optimize search efforts with greater resources and technology, while also demanding justice and accountability. “We know that the goal of many search groups is specifically to locate missing persons, and they often state they are not looking for culprits. But we are looking for culprits; we want justice for Kevin and for the young men who disappeared at the hands of organized crime,” he added. “We are going to find where they are and bring them back and we will demand justice from the state,” he said.
While hundreds of family collectives search for their loved ones and demand thorough investigations, the Mexican government insists on downplaying the crisis. Earlier in March, during her morning press conference, President Sheinbaum argued that current cases differ from those of the 1970s Dirty War, when the State directly carried out disappearances. She repeated that today’s cases are the work of organized crime or even stem from “passionate” cases.
Bringing this issue into the international dialogue would require the Mexican government to recognize the ongoing role of state actors and its own acquiescence. For the mothers who continue to search, this denial is often repeated in a protest slogan: “The State does not search because if it searched it would find itself.”
