The tragedy that the National Guard summarized in a report on criminal incidence in the first two years of Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s six-year term, served as a warning of how his government would end. Dated at the end of 2020, the document on criminal behavior in Jalisco had a section on forced disappearances, considered since the previous six-year term the main problem in the state that made it a national reference. From December 1, 2018 to September 30, 2020, the report says, 605 bodies were located in clandestine graves, which placed the state in first place nationally in burial of corpses. Until that date, no body had been identified due to the lack of forensic science reports. In October 2020 alone, three graves were located in the municipalities of El Salto, Ixtlahuacán de los Membrillos and San Pedro Tlaquepaque, where a total of 100 bones were found, of which only 13 were identified.
The trend in Jalisco did not stop, 2021 was the year with the highest number of cases recorded with 2,112. Until July 31, 2024, according to data from the Information System on Victims of Disappearances, in Jalisco there were 15,103 missing people, which keeps it in first place nationally. The tragedy and humanitarian crisis were fueled by the apathy of the authorities of the state government headed by Enrique Alfaro, and the vacuum of the federal government after the operational dismantling of the National Search Commission (CNB) and the absence of the Attorney General’s Office (FGR) and the local prosecutor’s office.
In recent weeks, the streets of Guadalajara have been the scene of more protests in the so-called roundabout of the disappeared, now due to the disappearance of young students who worked in money exchange offices. The return of two of them with their families was a slight respite from the daily tragedy. However, the searching mothers announced that they will no longer only dig in vacant lots and land next to abandoned houses, they will now also search canals and rivers, this after an anonymous call they received led them to find a skeleton in the San Juan de Dios River, in the Santa Helena de la Cruz neighborhood of Guadalajara.
August 30 is the International Day of the Victims of Forced Disappearances, and in the country hundreds of groups and thousands of people believe that the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador will go down in history marked by the tragedy behind each disappearance, and the drama of the clandestine graves that have multiplied by thousands throughout the national territory. If he were to look out from the balcony of the National Palace to observe the Zócalo square in the capital, the president could see next to the flagpole the camp of mothers of the disappeared who remind him of the debt that his government will leave in the form of a humanitarian crisis. None of the women who have been sleeping there for several weeks know about “politicking” or seem to be “manipulated” to “attack the government,” as he claimed in some of his “morning” speeches. Their presence is the dose of reality that drives the demagogue crazy.
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