Photo: PBI-Mexico accompanies the Cerezo Committee as members hold banners with the images of Gabriel Alberto Cruz Sánchez and Edmundo Reyes Amaya. Photo by Comité de Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos “Hasta Encontrarlos”.
El Economista reports: “Collectives of searching mothers and relatives of disappeared persons marched on May 10 in Mexico City during the XIV March of National Dignity ‘Mothers Searching for their Sons, Daughters, Truth and Justice’, to demand from the Mexican State results in the searches, justice and attention to the crisis of disappearances in the country. In this context of the mobilization, the Office in Mexico of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights recognized the work of the searching mothers and pointed out that disappearances continue to be one of the main challenges in terms of human rights in Mexico.”
The Guardian now reports: “State actors are involved in disappearances in Mexico at an ‘alarming’ rate, according to a report from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR). The sweeping investigation, to which the Guardian was given exclusive access, presents a dire picture of the crisis of disappearances in Mexico, where more than 130,000 people have gone missing, mostly in the last 20 years since the government declared its war on drug cartels.”
The article adds: “Forced disappearance – where a person is detained, extrajudicially killed by the state and their body then destroyed or hidden – has a long history in Mexico, going back to the country’s so-called dirty war of the 1960s and 70s where dissidents were even thrown out of planes and into the Pacific Ocean.”
The Cerezo Committee has previously explained: “On May 25, 2007, in the city of Oaxaca, Edmundo Reyes Amaya and Gabriel Alberto Cruz Sánchez, members of the Popular Democratic Revolutionary Party-Popular Revolutionary Army (PDR) were arrested and disappeared by various police and military groups.”
Twelve years after their disappearance, Proceso reported: “On May 6, 2019, the Fourth District Court of Amparo in Criminal Matters in Mexico City issued a sentence that recognized ‘the serious violation of human rights’ against Popular Revolutionary Army members ‘by agents of the Mexican State’.”
That decision was appealed by the Attorney General’s Office (FGR) and the Secretariat of National Defence (Sedena), but the First Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation upheld the decision on August 10, 2022.
Photo: PBI-Mexico at the August 10, 2022, ruling.
A Special Search Commission was established on November 3, 2022.
On April 21, 2026, Nadin Reyes Maldonado, daughter of Edmundo Reyes Amaya, met with the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk in Mexico City.
Proceso reports: “Reyes said that the ominous delays in investigations of cases of the so-called ‘dirty war’ were discussed… The defender added that the objective of the collectives was for the High Commissioner ‘to understand the dimension of the problem of forced disappearances in the country and the lack of political will that the Mexican State as a whole has to, first, recognize the problem.’”
Accompaniment
Peace Brigades International began to accompany the Cerezo Committee in 2002.
PBI-Mexico advocacy coordinator Manuel Jabonero and PBI-Canada coordinator Brent Patterson met with Francisco Cerezo Contreras of the Cerezo Committee in Mexico City in February 2026.
