Statement on International Day of the Disappeared

On the International Day of the Disappeared, the People’s Movement for Peace and Justice, made up of more than one hundred organizations and groups of Afro-descendants, indigenous people, migrants and victims of armed violence from Mexico and the United States, we raise our voices to say Never Again.

The disappearance crisis  facing the region is not a marginal issue. Since the War on Drugs was declared in Mexico in 2012, violence has been at the center of our lives growing to become a regional pandemic with deadly consequences. In Mexico in 2023, official data records identified more than 110,000 disappearances. In the United States, the Justice Department’s missing persons database (NamUS), acknowledges that approximately 600,000 are reported missing each year. Many of them are found, but a high percentage do not return, as in the case of the more than 5,000 disappeared Indigenous women and girls.

This devastating reality does not impact everyone equally. The same registries from both countries identify the majority of the disappeared as low-income individuals, many of them in rural and Indigenous areas. Forced disappearance clearly has disproportionate race, ethnicity, and class impacts.

In Mexico, the authorities are at the center of this tragedy, as the case of the 43 students from Ayotzinapa, Guerrero and the 73 migrants in San Fernando, Tamaulipas have shown. In the United States, the lack of action and negligence of the authorities on formal documented complaints, , especially from people of African descent, LGBTQI+ and Indigenous People, is a deadly pattern.

Faced with this crisis, the governments of Mexico and the United States must use the efforts and funds they have allocated  to detain, criminalize and deport migrants to find our disappeared men and women. 

They should put the search for people at the center of the Bicentennial Agreement and any other binational security cooperation agreement. The US government must stop the export of weapons to corrupt police and military units and end arms trafficking. Mexico must declare a national emergency due to disappearances and involve all citizens in the search and location of people.

And in all cases, those responsible must be identified, punished to the fullest extent of the law, and all necessary measures must be taken to protect the victims and their families.

We thank all families and organizations dedicated to searching for the disappeared. We invite the public to demand justice and not allow any Government to ignore this crisis.

As long as one is missing, any of us can disappear.

Stop the silent war against the people in the region.

THE PEOPLE’S MOVEMENT FOR PEACE AND JUSTICE

Our Kick off statement:

We are the People’s Movement for Peace and Justice

Today, activists, community leaders, victims and survivors of violence, migrants, members of diverse ethnic groups, communities of color, and LGBTQIA+ communities from throughout Mexico, the United States and across the Americas, launched the People’s Movement for Peace and Justice (PMPJ).  The PMPJ calls on all people to stand up and organize against violence, injustice, xenophobia, racism, and exclusion everywhere.

Since the start of the War on Drugs in the United States in 1960 and then in Mexico in 2006, we have seen people throughout the Americas (especially women, the economically marginalized, Indigenous Peoples, youth, members of the LGBTQIA+ community, and communities of color)  be ignored, criminalized, attacked, displaced, deported, and subjected to violence as a result of failed these national security strategies. Both countries declared the end of the so-called drug wars, and yet the suffering and violence continues. State-sponsored wars persist and their impact on the region is getting worse.

The formation of the People’s Movement for Peace and Justice (PMPJ)  follows a series of nine preliminary forums in multiple countries and the 2023 Peace Summit in Mexico City, which brought together community representatives, grassroots organizations, and human rights defenders from multiple countries throughout the Americas. We agreed to  champion the voices of the marginalized and oppressed; of the families impacted by the forced disappearance of their loved ones, of the survivors of violence, of the unjustly persecuted, and of all those deemed to be “illegal.”

We will now begin to organize transnationally around our twelve demands for peace.

Presently, mainstream political parties in Mexico and the United States are preparing for upcoming national elections in 2024 but have had little to say, if anything, about the pressing needs and demands of the people. We know that humanity and the environment will continue to suffer as long as the rights of our communities are not prioritized. It is difficult to envision a better future while our communities are forced to migrate; while those who call out the injustices are violently suppressed; and while those that exploit and bring violence to our territories are given immunity.

We thus call on all sectors of society to organize in their neighborhoods, villages, towns, and cities and demand that the traditional and mainstream political parties address our issues and implement our twelve-point agenda.

We do this in the name of the more-than-110,000 victims of forced disappearance in Mexico, the 164,859 victims of firearm violence in just the last eight years, the more than 196,000 migrants deported last year, and the thousands that are subjected to criminalization, police brutality, and other forms of organized violence, as well as those that resist extractivist operations and commercial exploitation in their territories. We come together to demand justice and access to political participation and genuine representation. We come together to ensure that our voice is loudly heard.

June 2023