Finding Answers About Mexico’s Disappeared

People carry images of people who were disappeared, during a Mother’s Day march in Mexico City, Friday, May 10, 2019. Mothers and other relatives of persons gone missing in the fight against drug cartels and organized crime are demanding that authorities locate their loved ones.
People carry images of people who were disappeared, during a Mother's Day march in Mexico City, Friday, May 10, 2019. Mothers and other relatives of persons gone missing in the fight against drug cartels and organized crime are demanding that authorities locate their loved ones. Eduardo Verdugo / AP Photo
People carry images of people who were disappeared, during a Mother’s Day march in Mexico City, Friday, May 10, 2019. Mothers and other relatives of persons gone missing in the fight against drug cartels and organized crime are demanding that authorities locate their loved ones.
People carry images of people who were disappeared, during a Mother's Day march in Mexico City, Friday, May 10, 2019. Mothers and other relatives of persons gone missing in the fight against drug cartels and organized crime are demanding that authorities locate their loved ones. Eduardo Verdugo / AP Photo

Finding Answers About Mexico’s Disappeared

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Since Mexico launched its war on drug cartels in 2006, the number of “disappeared” people in the country has risen to above 40,000. Cartels are directly implicated in many of these disappearances, which sometimes turn out to have been killings, though the state is also implicated in unsolved cases like that of the missing 43 student activists in the state of Guerrero in 2014. Rosalva Aida Hernandez is a feminist activist, researcher and journalist aiming to address these and other human rights abuses in Mexico. As a journalist with the Central American Press Agency, where she worked for over 20 years, and as a professor and researcher at the Center for Research and Advanced Studies in Social Anthropology in Mexico City, she has worked with the families of disappeared persons and with indigenous communities in several Mexican states to shed light on unsolved crimes and to advocate for women’s and indigenous peoples’ issues. On Tuesday night, Rosalva spoke about gender violence, the occupation of indigenous territories, the impact of the war on drugs and disappeared persons in militarized regions at the Social Justice International Women’s Speakers’ Series, hosted by the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Social Justice Initiative. She joins the show today to discuss disappearances, political violence and her own forensic and advocacy work.