Since then-President Felipe Calderón launched his “war on drugs” in 2006, more than 130,000 people have gone missing in Mexico — the victims of the country’s long-running “invisible” war. “In many cases, those disappeared have been forcibly recruited into the drug cartels or murdered for resisting,” said the BBC. But while “drug cartels and organized crime groups are the main perpetrators, security forces are also blamed for deaths and disappearances.”
Cases of people reported missing or snatched from the street at gunpoint never to be seen again were “once rare in Mexico,” said The Washington Post. That began to change 15 years ago, when huge numbers of disappearances “began to flare into global news, with the discovery of mass graves filled with putrefying bodies.”
By 2023, more than 5,600 mass graves had been recorded in Mexico, according to A Dónde Van los Desaparecidos, a collective of families and journalists. In March, a cartel training and extermination camp was discovered on a ranch in Jalisco state, complete with burned human remains and 200 pairs of shoes.
The “official narrative” is that Mexico’s violence is “entirely the fault of drug cartels, period,” said author Belén Fernández at Al Jazeera. “This rationalization 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.”
That track record is perhaps why the authorities have been hesitant to acknowledge the scope and scale of the crisis. As Mexico’s “invisible war rages on,” said Fernández, “disappearance may have already become normalized.” | 
