Mexico City, March 20th – The strategy of militarization of public security by the current government and the war against drug trafficking, initiated by Felipe Calderón and continued by Enrique Peña Nieto, have left 493 U.S. citizens missing and unaccounted for in Mexican territory.
Of that number, according to the National Registry of Disappeared and Missing Persons (RNPDNO), 245 disappearances of U.S. citizens were registered during the administration of President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador alone, representing 49.7 percent of the total, according to a report on El Financiero.
Among them is the disappearance of three American women of Hispanic origin, who, according to the FBI, from the border town of Peñitas, outside McAllen, traveled by vehicle to Mexico on February 24 to sell in a market in Montemorelos, Nuevo León.
This case, however, has not received the same media attention as that of March 6, when the FBI offered a 50,000 dollar reward for information on the whereabouts of four U.S. citizens who were missing after a group of armed men kidnapped them in Matamoros, Tamaulipas.
It should be noted that, according to the RNPDNO of the Ministry of the Interior, between March 15, 1964 and November 30, 2006, only five U.S. citizens have been reported missing, which means that the highest number of cases has been registered from 2006 to date.
This brings the total number of Americans who have disappeared in Mexican territory since 1964 to 498, of which 331 are men and 167 are women.
According to the National Search Program for Missing and Unaccounted for Persons, published this month, migrants are a particularly vulnerable group to the problem of disappearance, due to the conditions of violence, insecurity and precariousness to which they are exposed in their transit through Mexico.
San Miguel Times
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