More than 61,000 people have been forcibly disappeared in Mexico in recent years, government officials announced on Monday, a drastic increase of an earlier estimate of the toll of the country’s endemic drug-related violence and cartel warfare. “These are data of horror,” Karla Quintana, head of Mexico’s National Search Commission which leads the efforts to find the missing country wide, said in a news conference. Behind the numbers, “there are many painful stories from families both in Mexico and of migrants,” she said. The new figures showed a sharp increase from a prior official estimate of 40,000 disappearances from early 2018, and Ms. Quintana said it comes from updated and carefully revised information from the offices of local prosecutors. The official tally is now 61,637 people who have disappeared since 1964, Ms. Quintana said, the vast majority since 2006, the year the crackdown on drug cartels was launched by then-president Felipe Calderón.

Source: New York Times January 07, 2020 00:45 UTC