Guadalajara, Mexico.
faces of Mexico disappeared. Paint the streets of Mexico’s second-largest city.
Thousands of fliers reading, “We miss you,” “Have you seen him?” and “We’re looking for you” line buildings, monuments, lamp posts, parking meters, tree pots and bus stops.
Workers flock to them in the centre of Guadalajara. Men play basketball on a fenced court. And a steady flow of cars passes them every day.
Flyers are woven into daily life in the centre of Mexico’s forced disappearance crisis: the state of Jalisco.
Violence erupted in the state on Sunday after the murder of Mexico’s most powerful cartel leader, known as “El Mencho”. With 12,500 documented cases, it is one of the countries with the highest number of disappeared people.
Now families who post fliers to search for their lost loved ones say they are running against government efforts to erase faces. Leading up to the FIFA World Cup Where Guadalajara will be a host city in June. Whereas clashes between cartels and Mexican forces As efforts to search for missing people in Jalisco have been halted, several local lawmakers are pushing a proposal that would make it easier to remove the signs.
“They don’t want people coming to the World Cup, people coming from abroad, to see this,” said Carmen Lopez, a woman searching for her brother and nephew who were missing in two separate incidents. “It is not in their interest because it will get their hands dirty. It will tarnish the government’s image before the entire world.”
About 131,000 people are missing in Mexico, enough to fill a small city. Enforced disappearances have long been a tactic used by cartels to consolidate control through terror, as well as conceal murder numbers.
For many, the crisis of enforced disappearances symbolises the lack of justice and deep levels of corruption that plague Mexico, especially in states like Jalisco.
Families like Lopez’s often take matters into their own hands, organising searches for bodies and hanging flyers in an effort to continue their efforts and put pressure on local authorities.
“Little by little it kills a part of your soul. They not only make your loved one disappear but also make you disappear with them as a father or a mother,” said Hector Flores, leader of Luz de Esperanza, or Light of Hope, one of Jalisco’s many search groups.
Flores began hanging flyers in Guadalajara after her 19-year-old son was forcibly disappeared by agents from the Jalisco state prosecutor’s office. The phenomenon of enforced disappearance was later recognised by a Mexican court in 2021, prompting Flores to form a group of 500 families investigating the disappearance of relatives.
His group takes to the streets of Jalisco’s capital and hangs between 2,000 and 5,000 flyers every weekend. The signs show the smiling faces of everyone from teenage girls to middle-aged men and provide identifying details such as tattoos as well as the date and location of where they went missing.
Search teams are hanging up signs almost constantly, as posters are regularly removed.
“This is an act of discovery in real time, with the hope that people who see these ID cards can provide us with information that will help us locate our families,” Flores said. “It’s also a function of visibility.”
Families now worry they will face more obstacles in the wake of cartel violence this week, which has raised security concerns ahead of this summer’s World Cup.
In December, lawmakers proposed amendments to a bill originally intended to protect the fliers from being removed. Local politicians attempted to modify the law in such a way that families feared that posting posters would be banned from public places.
Carmen Lopez, Flores and other relatives say the local government is trying to sweep the disappearances under the rug ahead of a global sporting event. He says it is the result of years of efforts by authorities to reduce the depth of Mexico’s extinction crisis.
“We know the city doesn’t look pretty because of the search IDs, but they’re not useless,” said Lopez, who wore a shirt with the faces of her two missing family members. “But what should we do? We’re doing everything in our power to find them.”
The amendment was put forward by state legislator Norma Lopez, who is a member of President Claudia Sheinbaum’s Morena Party, and many other MLAs.
The state lawmaker denied the allegation in an interview with The Associated Press on Thursday, saying it was a “poor interpretation” of the proposal by search groups and that she wanted to defend families searching for their lost loved ones. He said that one of his relatives has also gone missing.
He said that if passed, the legislation would allow posters to be removed without penalty at public universities, the state legislature, the Supreme Court, museums, churches and elsewhere. He said they were already given permission at other places.
“My proposal is not a basis for imposing sanctions on them,” he said. “We are all concerned about what is happening in Jalisco. The disappearances also pain me.”
Mexican officials are grappling with an investigation into Guadalajara’s ability to host World Cup matches.
Sheinbaum vowed there would be “no risk” to visitors this week, but on Thursday the Diving World Cup The event, scheduled to be held in a Guadalajara suburb in March, was cancelled due to security concerns. Earlier in the week the Portuguese Football Federation had said that “Keeping a close eye on the delicate situation” Before a friendly match against the Mexico national team in Mexico City.
Meanwhile, some search groups in Jalisco say they have had to postpone investigations of possible secret grave sites because Mexico’s federal government has told them that security forces providing security to the teams cannot temporarily help because of the violence.
Mexico’s National Search Commission for the Disappeared did not respond to a request for comment.
Flores’ group and others have reported that they have already had to cancel search operations at grave sites around Guadalajara, leaving many feeling that justice is even more out of reach than before.
The number of missing people is increasing every hour. City residents don’t look twice as they pass by the signs on their daily commute.
“Now, it’s absolutely normal,” Jacinto Gonzalez, 47, said Wednesday as he looked at the hundreds of signs posted on the wall.
After a few minutes of conversation, he casually mentioned that his sister-in-law had gone missing six years ago.
