The Oaxaca State Commission for the Search for Missing Persons has posted on social media:
“With the aim of establishing coordination mechanisms for search operations, Michel Julián López, head of the Oaxaca State Commission for the Search for Missing Persons, accompanied by her team, held a meeting today with staff from Peace Brigades International (PBI), an international organisation dedicated to supporting human rights defenders.
The aim of this dialogue was to exchange experiences and perspectives on the work carried out by both organisations in the search for and location of missing persons, highlighting the joint participation of victims as well as the application of human rights-based, differentiated, specialised and gender-sensitive approaches.
These meetings strengthen inter-institutional collaboration and enable the development of joint actions for the search for missing persons and the protection of those working to defend human rights in Oaxaca.
#Search Oaxaca”
The dangers to searchers
In October 2024, Amnesty International noted: “Disappearance drives families, loved ones, and communities to search for their loved ones. Relatives searching for disappeared and missing people faced serious risks, including enforced disappearance, killing, repression and threats. In the report Searching Without Fear: International Standards for protecting women searchers in the Americas, Amnesty International draws on international human rights law to make the case that searching for forcibly disappeared persons is a right. Given that most searchers in the Americas are women, the report also details states’ international obligations to protect against the unique risks, threats, and attacks that, as women, they face.”
More than 130,000 people disappeared in Mexico
Last month, The Guardian reported: “More than 130,000 people are considered missing or disappeared in Mexico, an ongoing crisis that has devastated tens of thousands of families across the country. While disappearances began to surge in the early 2000s as the Mexican government sought to take on the country’s cartels, a new report by the public policy analysis firm México Evalúa found that, in the last 10 years, disappearances have increased more than 200%.”
An estimated 3,629 missing in Oaxaca
Corriente Alterna UNAM, the Journalistic Research Unit of the Coordination of Cultural Dissemination of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, has noted: “According to the National Registry of Disappeared and Missing People, 3,629 people have been reported disappeared or missing in the state of Oaxaca since 1964, with 90% of cases occurring during the last 10 years under the governments of Gabino Cué Monteagudo (2010-2016) and Alejandro Murat Hinojosa (2016-2022).”
Sandra Domínguez
The Associated Press has reported: “Sandra Estefana Domínguez Martínez and her husband were last seen October 4, 2024, in the town of María Lombardo de Caso, in eastern Oaxaca on the border with Veracruz. The prominent feminist activist and defender of the Mixe Indigenous peoples, native to Oaxaca’s eastern highlands, is herself of Mixe descent.”
That article adds: “Joaquín Galvan, a Oaxacan activist and close friend of Domínguez … believes that Domínguez’s work and persistent complaints against state officials are related to her disappearance. …Galvan encouraged Domínguez to request protection under a federal protection program for human rights defenders and journalists known as ‘the mechanism’. He is enrolled, but he said Domínguez was not at the time of her disappearance.”
We continue to follow this.
