Mexican missing persons and rights violations in El Salvador

Families of an estimated 113,000 missing persons in Mexico are outraged by the actions of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s administration, which devotes time and resources to detecting “false” missing persons. It includes cases reported by political opponents to ridicule the government or people who return home after being kidnapped but do not notify the authorities. Meanwhile, the government is not looking for tens of thousands of people who are missing; it has not identified approximately 50,000 bodies collected in morgues and graves or bone fragments found in mass graves and makeshift crematoria.

According to Amnesty International, El Salvador is experiencing one of the worst human rights crises since the civil war of 1980–1992. It is the result of the war on gangs waged by the administration of President Nayib Bukele. So far, almost 74,000 people imprisoned as a result of the repression were ill-treated and subjected to “systematic torture”. Local human rights organisations also claim that 327 people have gone missing, and at least 190 people were killed as a result of the persecution.

Several former Paraguayan top military officials have been arrested in a cross-border law enforcement operation. It aimed to dismantle a smuggling network that brought firearms from Europe to South America. In the last three years, almost 43,000 firearms came to Paraguay that way, worth approximately $243 million, which were then distributed among Brazilian gangs. The US and Brazil were also involved in the investigation.