Mexico’s World Cup haunted by 130,000 ‘disappeared’ people
Families accuse authorities of minimising the crisis while spending heavily on football showpiece
Ciara Nugent in Guadalajara
© Quetzalli Nicte-Ha/ReutersRaúl Servín, a waiter in Guadalajara, has watched Mexico’s preparations for the men’s World Cup this summer with frustration.
Servín spends several days a week searching for his son, who disappeared in 2018 aged 20 and never returned, becoming one of 134,000 people to have gone missing as Mexico grapples with its cartels’ rampant growth.
Many families feel authorities have dedicated scant resources to finding their loved ones.
For this summer’s football tournament, however, Servín has seen Guadalajara pull out all the stops, refurbishing public squares and roads, obtaining expensive police drones and Cybertruck patrol cars, and even cancelling school classes on match days to ease traffic.
“It’s a matter of priorities,” said Servín.
“They’re fixing everything up so it looks pretty for foreigners . . . while we search for our loved ones in the hot sun.”
Servín’s collective of families trying to find lost relatives has discovered what they believe to be “extermination camps” as well as clandestine graves containing dozens of people’s remains, within 20km of Guadalajara’s World Cup stadium.
The city is the capital of Jalisco, which has the most disappearances of Mexico’s 32 states.
“The governor only cares about the economic windfall from the World Cup, but we’re living through something else,” Servín said.
“Politicians will never care about the disappeared or their families, because they don’t feel this pain.
They just can’t understand it.”
Jalisco’s state government did not respond to a request for comment.
Mexico’s government said this month that finding the disappeared was “a national priority”.
Relatives of missing persons demonstrate on Mothers’ Day in Mexico City this month © Isaac Esquivel/EPA/ShutterstockTensions between the families of the disappeared and the government have flared ahead of Mexico’s World Cup, co-hosted with the US and Canada, which will also have games in Mexico City and Monterrey.
The millions of expected visitors will cap a decade of rapid growth in Mexico’s tourism industry, and excitement is mounting in the football-loving country ahead of the first match on June 11.
President Claudia Sheinbaum has declared it “a moment to show the world who we are”.
But families of the disappeared hope to use the tournament to put a spotlight on Mexico’s security crisis, which has spiralled in the past decade.
Annual disappearances have more than tripled since 2015, as increasingly powerful cartels abduct swaths of young people as recruits, murder enemies and hide their remains.
Official figures show almost 12,400 people were reported disappeared last year.
The figures have stunned experts.
“I have never heard of another country with a phenomenon like Mexico’s in 20 years of work on this topic,” said Eduardo Guerrero, director of security analysis group Lantia Intelligence.
“It baffles international researchers that organised crime, normally so discreet, has reached such scandalous proportions in Mexico.”
Activists in the capital have plastered posters of disappeared people over World Cup-related billboards, while others are planning to draw attention via street football matches and marches in the host cities.
“There is a big conflict of narratives between civil society, who want to highlight the security situation, and the Mexican government, who will do everything in its power to show another vision of reality,” said Armando Vargas, head of the security programme at think-tank México Evalúa.
Mexico’s government recently drew ire from families after announcing the results of a year-long review of its national register of missing people.
In March, officials said almost a third of the entries — about 40,000 cases — appeared to match people who government records showed had done things such as file taxes or change their address after the date of their disappearance, indicating they may be alive and findable.
Another roughly 47,000 entries, they said, lacked basic information, such as the location of disappearances or family contact details, making investigations impossible.
Security experts acknowledge the database contains errors and duplicate entries but warn some families may avoid giving complete information out of fear of retaliation from cartels.
Days later, the government lashed out at a resolution by the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances, which said Mexico’s disappearances might constitute crimes against humanity and recommended the UN General Assembly take measures to help the country combat them.
Mexico’s foreign ministry called the report “biased and partial”, noting it was mainly based on events prior to 2017 and failed to consider institutional improvements made by Sheinbaum, including 2025 reforms to strengthen the state’s investigative capabilities.
Collectives, which had welcomed the UN’s attention and were already frustrated by the government focusing on problems with the data, were dismayed.
“It is shameful” for the government to “use bombastic terms to try to minimise the issue”, said José Andrés Méndez Ñeco, an activist in Reynosa, a city next to the Texas border, whose sister disappeared in 2013.
In Jalisco, advocates say a tiny number of people have been arrested in relation to the state’s 16,000 disappearances, which have surged as the Jalisco New Generation Cartel evolved into one of Mexico’s most powerful criminal organisations.
“The government listens to us, we move forward but then organised crime exerts pressure, and everything gets stalled,” said Anuar García, a criminal lawyer who runs the Jalisco branch of civil society group México SOS.
“No one does anything for the disappeared.”
Annual reported disappearances nationwide almost doubled from 2022 to 2024 to about 12,500 and barely fell in 2025.
Security analysts blame the jump on the hands-off “hugs not bullets” crime policy of former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Sheinbaum’s mentor, which often allowed cartels to expand with little impediment from the state.
Sheinbaum has increased cartel arrests since taking office in late 2024, under stiff pressure from US President Donald Trump to fight drug trafficking.
She touts preliminary figures showing a 45 per cent drop in the daily homicide rate in the first quarter of this year compared to 2024.
Disappearances, however, have remained sky-high, and some local authorities might be classifying more murders as disappearances or even striking pacts with cartels to kill victims out of sight, experts said.
“The murder rate has fallen, though not as much as the government suggests,” said Guerrero of Lantia Intelligence.
Hector Flores, a member of another Jalisco searchers’ collective, had harsher words as he launched a protest football match in Mexico City in April.
“Crimes against humanity are committed every day in Mexico [but] governments are more interested in diminishing the crisis politically through figures,” he said.
“The World Cup will be an international showcase to demonstrate to the entire community what really goes on.”
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