In Mexico, people are “anchored” in institutional silence, in bureaucratic opacity, and in systemic denial of a crisis that spills over into any state. Recent update Plataforma Ciudadana de Fosas (Iberoamerican University, Data Cívica y Artículo 19) is a technological herramenta that claims to cover the lack of information systematized parts of the state. Also an act of resistance against the state, which, without guaranteeing the right to the truth, decided to withdraw information, distribute it or simply deny it. He suma, además, to the life of the families of people desaparecidas who tried to embody their own desires before the laziness of political power.
The platform was born out of a heavy absence. The law obliges the Fiscalía General of the Republic to create and publish a national land registry. Hasta doesn’t exist today. In 2024, the National Crime Commission removed from its website an official map of secret crime groups that documented events since 2006. With it, one of the few and incomplete pieces of knowledge that allowed us to measure the tragedy entered the public domain. Before this deliberate freeing up, civil society organizations, academia and journalists explained what the state is not asking for: rebuilding data storage.
What they reveal is demolition. While the FGR reported only 94 classified cases in 2023 and 2024, state tax authorities recognized 451 million. The press has documented more than 451 million. In the same period, average people reported the exhumation of two thousand,017 bodies and two thousand,719 remains of human bones, compared to the 616 thousand human bodies reported by the tax authorities. No, it’s not a statistical error. The Mexican state doesn’t have—or doesn’t want to have—a clear picture of its own forensic disaster.
There are states that ignore the obvious. In 2024, Mexico City, Querétaro, and Yucatán confirm that they have no secret clans, although open sources prove otherwise. Others, such as Veracruz, Morelos or Hidalgo, simply declared an “inability” to provide information.
The civic platform Fosas also makes it clear that without the work of the outlet, this crisis would be even more invisible. In a context where transparency mechanisms weakened and INAI disappeared, periodical data became one of the few instruments that countered the official narrative. What is certain is that the requests for information made over 32 fiscal years have been an ordeal before the failure of a truly efficient and independent body charged with the care of the requested data.
A new part of the platform — Forensic diagnostics — documents the systematic abandonment of thousands of bodies under state administration in some municipalities. The situation of more than 70 million bodies without identification demonstrates the carelessness and improvisation that reigns in Mexico’s forensic institutions.
They are mothers, hermits, fathers, hermanos, collections of hunters who have learned to identify the rest of the bones, classify the fragments, construct court documents. In places like Tetelcingo or Jojutla, families took advantage of work that was denied to the state. This is a true x-ray of the country, turning victims into forensic experts due to governmental irresponsibility. A related absent state that does not seek, record or identify victims.
The Sinaloa case illustrates the gravity of the problem. The state was officially recognized only on the 13th day of the year 2024. However, the press documented at least 58 of them. In the municipality of Concordia, specifically in the designation of El Verde, these days are reported in one of the largest areas in the country for the purpose of the disappearance of 10 min. Data circulates in the news, in testimonials, in the mouths of people who seek it. It does not appear in official information. In addition to silence and opacity, damage control as a strategy that leads to oblivion and an endless succession of scandals to distraction and despotism.
The civic platform is not intended to replace the state, but shows that it is possible to organize information, search for resources and build diagnostics. Above all, it shows that the crisis is not about capacity, but rather about political will. While the official discourse insists on normalizing the violence or simply denying it, victims and civil society organizations insist on naming it. The hegemonic political project places this issue on its primary interests: “cleaning” the registries of disappeared people and secret criminals.
Because each time it’s a broken story, each body without identification is a family suspended in combat. Every insult is a greater form of violence that tries to hide the reality that is forced upon us every day. In the face of a state that denies and manipulates figures, collective memory is organized. In this form, the barbarism that enters the clandestine masses will continue to speak for itself, even if they intend to cover it up with silence and political manipulation.
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