Breathe
By Sonia Serrano Íñiguez
For several years Jalisco has been in first place nationally in the number of missing persons, first place nationally in bodies recovered from clandestine graves and one of the first places in the number of clandestine graves. In addition, during the six-year term of Enrique Alfaro Ramírez , which ended in December of last year, a serious forensic crisis was generated, with more than 6,000 unidentified bodies and human segments, according to documented collectives.
This means thatthe discovery of the Izaguirre ranch in the municipality of Teuchitlán is only one piece of a puzzle full of horror and pain. The people of Jalisco have been shouting for several years about what is happening in the state, but no one listened.
On February 11, 2022 in the National Registry of Missing and Unaccounted for Persons, Jalisco surpassed 16,000 missing persons. From that point on, a strategy emerged from the state government to erase the missing from the figures. The first action was an alleged "updating" of the data, under the pretext of eliminating the located persons.
The most significant decision was to keep its own registry of disappearances and stop sending the information to the national registry.
Academics from the University of Guadalajara who make up the University Committee for the Analysis of Disappearance of Persons alerted about the sensitivity of this handling. "It is a serious omission that the government of Jalisco has not reported since March the number of missing persons in the National Registry, and that it does not publish on time the monthly number of missing persons in the state registry," they stated in a communiqué.
Faced with the crisis of disappearances, the municipalities hid in their institutional fragility, the state government argued that the disappearances were related to federal crimes and the Federation, being a state governed by an adversary political party, simply looked the other way.
Thus, the population was left vulnerable to violence and insecurity and Jalisco became fertile ground for the Jalisco Cartel - New Generation, the strongest in the world today, according to some analyses.
It was from academia and civil society that the crisis began to be analyzed and, above all, to act. The collectives took on the tasks that the authorities were not doing to search, document and investigate. Some became specialized: Familias Unidas por Nuestros Desaparecidos (Families United for Our Disappeared) became experts in procedures before the Forensic Service and even installed a module; Luz de Esperanza (Light of Hope) filled public spaces with search cards to socialize the problem and promote the search for the living, while Guerreros Buscadores (Searching Warriors) went out to look for clandestine graves.
From the University Committee for the Analysis of Disappearances of Persons, coordinated by Carmen Chinas, a project headed by sociologist Jorge Ramirez was created with the participation of data experts and journalists to analyze the unexplained crisis of disappearances, using official data.
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