The strategy of militarizing public security by the current government and the war against drug trafficking, initiated by Felipe Calderón and continued by Enrique Peña Nieto, have left 493 American citizens missing and not located in Mexican territory.
According to the National Registry of Missing and Unlocated Persons (RNPDNO), of that number, 245 disappearances of American citizens were recorded only during the government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, which represents 49.7 percent. Among them is the disappearance of three Hispanic-American women, who, according to the FBI, from the border town of Peñitas, on the outskirts of McAllen, traveled by car to Mexico on February 24 to sell at a market in Montemorelos, Nuevo León. However, this case has not received the same media attention as that of March 6, when the FBI offered a $50,000 reward for information on the whereabouts of four American citizens who were missing after a group of armed men kidnapped them in Matamoros, Tamaulipas. The next day, Mexican authorities announced that they had found the four individuals – missing since Friday, March 3 – two of them dead, another injured, and a fourth unharmed.
It is worth noting that, according to the RNPDNO of the Ministry of the Interior, between March 15, 1964, and November 30, 2006, there were only five registered missing Americans, so the highest number of cases has been recorded from 2006 to the present.
Thus, since 1964, a total of 498 Americans have disappeared in Mexican territory, of which 331 are men and 167 are women.
According to the National Program for the Search for Missing and Unlocated Persons, published this same month, a group in a particularly vulnerable situation regarding the issue of disappearance are migrants, due to the conditions of violence, insecurity, and precarization they are exposed to in their transit through Mexico.
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