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I presented at the Latin American Studies Association congress in Paris in May on a panel titled “Mexico in Global Competition.” LASA is the largest scholarly association in the world for the study of Latin America, with over 13,000 members and an annual congress running to several hundred sessions across disciplines working on the region. This was the first time I had attended a LASA Congress, though it was not my first conference, and the conference was exactly the mix I had hoped for: historians, political scientists, and practitioners, several career stages in the same panel slots, all genuinely curious about each other’s work rather than waiting their turn to speak.

Jess Gosling at LASA 2026

I had been planning for this moment for a while, So, rather than writing chapters in isolation and looking for conferences afterwards, I tried to align each chapter of my thesis with a conference, where I could test out the thesis of each chapter properly, in front of people who knew the region itself, rather than just the theory alone. My Mexico chapter is the first empirical chapter of my thesis, assembled from fieldwork completed at the British Embassy in Mexico City in July 2025. Paris was the first time I had presented a full empirical chapter, rather than a conceptual paper, outside that of my own seminar room.

My PhD chapter argues that UK soft power in Mexico operates through individuals and relationships rather than being driven by state projection: drawing on interviews with both British officials working in Mexico and locally employed Mexican staff from the embassy. A panel the day before mine had spent an hour on nineteenth-century postal diplomacy and contemporary trade negotiations with a level of regional expertise that sharpened my sense of what a rigorous account of Mexico would require. The questions after my own paper pushed in the same direction: people wanted to know more about how the Mexican staff I interviewed experienced these dynamics, and where the line sits between genuine co-production and something more asymmetric. Those are exactly the type of questions I wanted my chapter to be answering well and hearing them from people who study Latin America for a living informed me precisely where my argument still needed more weight.

What struck me the most was how supportive that scrutiny felt. Nobody was trying to catch me out. They treated a PhD chapter with just the same careful attention and worthiness as anyone’s else’s paper, with several people, among the audience being academics from Mexico, Argentina, and Spain, who all stayed afterwards to talk through specific points with me, and asked about the comparative chapters still to come on South Korea and Poland. I left with a growing list of people whose work I now wish to follow, contacts who feel less like networking and more like the start of an actual research community.

Jess Gosling Presenting at LASA

My paper itself was in English (as was my presentation), but the corridor conversations afterwards were not always, and that felt like its own small milestone, one I am still a little proud of. When I started the PhD, I could barely hold a conversation in Spanish. Talking through my own ideas in Spanish with some Portuguese with people I had met, even haltingly, mattered more to me than I expected.

The other community came from somewhere I had not planned for at all. I fell in, almost by accident, with a group of Brazilian PhD students on the first afternoon, and they adopted me for the rest of the week, talking me through the conference over dinner and breakfasts some mornings. Most of them were historians working on questions far from mine, but this did not matter.

Jess with PhD Students she met at LASA

I went on my own, out of curiosity. During gaps in my schedule, to panels on Brazil’s foreign policy and on Global South diplomacy, and one on Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay that ranged from feminist foreign policy to the social backgrounds of foreign ministers. There were a lot of Early Career Researchers (ECRs) , often putting arguments in front of people for the first time, and there was a real solidarity in that, regardless of which region or discipline any of us worked in.

If any of this is useful to other PhD students presenting an empirical chapter for the first time, here are a few things which might be useful to think about.

Firstly, align your chapters with conferences rather than the other way round. I chose LASA because it matched my Mexico chapter and the timeline, which meant I arrived with something ready for scrutiny with the right people to present it to.

Secondly, go to panels in the days before you need to present your own paper at your panel. Try to attend other panels in subfields which you do not work in. Some of the biggest insights and reflections on my own argument came from a session I attended the day before, out of curiosity, and the friendships that carried me through the week came from panels on Brazil that had nothing to do with my research.

Thirdly, let the gaps in your evidence stay visible in the Q&A rather than being managed away. I had written a line into my paper anticipating the obvious limitation, and answering the questions honestly told me more about where the chapter needed to go, than what a smoother performance would have taught me.

Finally, don’t be afraid to go out of your comfort zone, even when that means going it alone. I went to LASA without knowing a single person there and ended up befriending people who work in different fields entirely. The Brazilian cohort I fell in with made the week feel like a shared experience rather than something to get through alone.

The challenge was real. So was the welcome.

The post What Presenting My First Empirical Chapter Taught Me appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

A mobile clinic supported by the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) in South Africa. The U.S. announced it would cut off funding for HIV projects in the country. Credit: Instagram

By Ed Holt
BRATISLAVA, Jul 2 2026 (IPS)

A U.S. decision to cut off funding for HIV projects in South Africa has been condemned amid warnings it could be “catastrophic” for efforts to control the disease in the country.

At the start of last year, the White House had announced massive cuts to U.S. foreign aid, including to South Africa, significantly impacting some HIV projects in the country.

But last month (June 2026), U.S. officials confirmed plans to begin a drawdown of what remaining financial support it was providing through the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), saying the money was no longer needed given South Africa’s wealth but also seemingly linking the move to the government’s failure to meet specific U.S. political demands.

HIV experts and activists have warned the abrupt ending to the funding – all financing is expected to end by early next year and funding for most projects is planned to be cut by the end of September this year, according to the U.S. State Department – could drive increased spread of the disease and many avoidable deaths in a country which already has the world’s highest HIV burden.

“The phased withdrawal of U.S. HIV funding from South Africa is likely to have significant implications for HIV prevention, treatment, and community health systems. The withdrawal of funding threatens a wide range of services, including community outreach programmes, HIV testing services, mobile clinics, data and monitoring systems, PrEP delivery, and targeted interventions for populations at highest risk of HIV acquisition,” Bruce Tushabe, an HIV activist and consultant with the South African Litigation Centre-SALC, told IPS.

For more than two decades, PEPFAR funding has been crucial to South Africa’s response to HIV and tuberculosis, providing around USD 8 billion since 2003 to civil society organisations, community health programmes, clinics, researchers, health worker salaries, and government institutions.

Data from PEPFAR itself shows that almost three quarters of people living with HIV in the country are on treatment with some form of support from the organisation.

PEPFAR’s funding is thought to have helped save millions of lives by strengthening and expanding access to prevention, treatment, care, and support services in South Africa.

While over the years HIV treatment has increasingly been covered by state funding – today the state procures 90% of Antiretrovirals (ARVs) using government funds, with the remaining 10% coming from the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria – PEPFAR money has remained essential for financing much prevention.

Activists say that the withdrawal of funding now, without a proper transition plan in place, could be devastating, especially given how hard prevention services have already been hit by the funding cuts announced in early 2025.

According to media reports in South Africa, thousands of jobs, including at frontline healthcare partners, have been lost because of those cuts.

Meanwhile, the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), a South African HIV NGO, says community-led monitoring has shown that since the 2025 cuts, 82% of facility managers have reported staffing shortages, 15% of public healthcare users surveyed said waiting times were longer than usual, 30% of public healthcare users surveyed reported not being offered HIV testing when attending a health facility, and 28% of people said it took longer to collect ARVs.

“The withdrawal of this funding at this critical juncture, without an adequate transition plan, threatens to reverse hard-won gains in the fight against HIV and TB,” TAC said in a statement.

“These cuts are not abstract budget decisions. They have real consequences for people living with HIV, particularly adolescent girls and young women; sex workers; people who use drugs (PWUDs); transgender people; gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men (GBMSM); migrants; and people living in poverty. Reduced access to testing, prevention, treatment adherence support, and community outreach will inevitably lead to increased HIV transmission, treatment interruptions, preventable illness, and avoidable deaths,” the group said.

Some studies have estimated a complete, unmanaged withdrawal of U.S. funding for HIV programmes could lead to as many as 296,000 additional HIV infections and up to 65,000 extra deaths by 2028.

Tushabe said there was particular concern over the impact of the funding withdrawal on key and vulnerable populations who often depend on community-led and network-based services that operate outside conventional healthcare facilities.

“Many of these services provide stigma-free, accessible, and trusted points of care that are not easily replaced within mainstream health systems,” he said.

The South African Department of Health has tried to play down the potential impact of the withdrawal of funding.

In a statement, it said that while the government had not officially been informed by the U.S. about the end of the funding, the move was not a surprise and  that the Health Ministry has been working on a “self-reliance plan” to minimise the impact of funding withdrawal since the cuts to U.S. foreign aid last year.

“Thus, there is no need for the public to panic because the transition plan has long been developed, and the implementation has been ongoing,” the Department of Health said.

It added that while PEPFAR had supported the Department of Health in 27 HIV/AIDS ‘high burden’ districts out of 52 districts in the country in eight provinces, public health facilities remain accessible for clients, including those who used to receive health services from PEPFAR funded clinics.

But HIV experts say despite the government’s statements, the HIV response is going to inevitably suffer.

“This is serious,” Linda-Gail Bekker, Director of the Desmond Tutu HIV Centre, told IPS.

“Although the health ministry has publicly stated that we should be fine and it is business as usual, [the funding that is being withdrawn] was a large amount of money that supported some very key components of our HIV/TB response, especially primary prevention. Losing this must have significant impact. It may not directly impact the general treatment program, but I have no doubt it is having an immediate impact on many aspects of the HIV response,” she added.

HIV activists have called on the U.S. to rethink its decision.

Speaking ahead of the high-level UN conference on HIV/AIDS on June 22, Winnie Byanyima, Executive Director of UNAIDS, said, “Taking [the funding] away is taking away life-saving support ​from the most vulnerable people. So, that is sad. And I would ask the United States to reconsider their position.”

Other groups, such as TAC, called on the White House to “engage with affected governments, communities, and civil society organisations to mitigate the devastating consequences of the funding withdrawal”.

But amid the calls for a rethink on the move, there is also a deep anger among many activists over the reasons given for the decision.

Reports of the funding stop carried in U.S. media cited a U.S. State Department official saying the funding stop had come “following South Africa’s failure to make demonstrable progress on policy requests by the administration” and that South Africa “is a middle-income country and is more than capable ​of supporting its own health programs.”

The policy requests included that it pare back its partnership with Iran, end Black Economic Empowerment policies, and condemn race-based incitement to violence, including singing of “Kill the Boer”, an anti-apartheid liberation song. Some have interpreted the latter as a call for violence against Afrikaners.

This has left many activists incensed.

“This is a clear and unambiguous reflection of the U.S. government’s irrational foreign policy conflict with a sovereign country that it is seeking to bully but cannot. It makes a mockery of claims made by the U.S. embassy in South Africa that it is concerned about South Africans living with HIV, when really, this shows it is not,” Fatima Hassan of the Health Justice Initiative (HJI) told IPS.

“The U.S. State Department is claiming that because South Africa is a middle-income country, it should be able to pay for its own HIV response. South Africa is actually an upper-middle-income country, but South Africa pays more to its HIV response than any other non-OECD company, and the epidemiology [situation with HIV in South Africa] indicates that because South Africa’s HIV burden is so astronomically higher than any other country that [financial] solidarity is required,” Asia Russell, Executive Director of HIV advocacy group Health Gap, told IPS.

She said the other political reasons reportedly linked to the decision were indefensible and driven by anti-South African political policies based on utterly unfounded claims of, among other things, “the fiction of a white genocide in south Africa” being pushed by some people in the White House.

Meanwhile, those at the frontline of helping people with HIV and stopping the disease spreading say that politics must not get in the way of saving lives and that regardless of what happens with international funding, essential HIV services in South Africa must be ensured.

“The government must immediately assess the impact of funding losses, mobilise domestic resources where necessary, and ensure that no person is denied access to lifesaving healthcare because of donor withdrawal. The HIV epidemic has taught us a painful lesson: when political decisions undermine access to healthcare, people die. South Africa cannot afford a return to the devastating losses of the past, where we buried comrades every weekend. The gains achieved through decades of activism, scientific progress, and public investment must not be sacrificed,” TAC said.

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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By Isabel Mestres
GENEVA, Jul 2 2026 (IPS)

Anyone whose life has been touched by cancer knows that care is highly complex.

From first symptoms through diagnosis and treatment, patients may need multiple diagnostic tests, combinations of surgery, systemic therapy and radiotherapy, and input from several specialists, alongside support services such as financial counselling, psychological support and palliative care.

Such a complex chain is inherently vulnerable, with one weak link meaning that a vital referral is missed, test results not delivered, or a patient is lost in the system while awaiting follow-up.

As a chronic disease, cancer tests the full breadth of health systems like few other illnesses, exposing system-wide gaps that affect us all.

In low- and-middle income countries (LMICs), where more people are experiencing and dying from cancer, and resources are limited, the infrastructure that connects the elements of cancer care is often missing.

Health systems in cities offer a unique entry-point for building this connective tissue – for people with cancer and, ultimately, all others. Cities are close enough to patients to reveal the failures in care, and large enough to bring together the institutions, workforce, data and governance needed to fix it.

Cities are ground zero for closing the gap between cancer care policy and delivery in LMICs, which are projected to see cancer incidence rise 142 per cent by 2040 and represent more than half of new cancer cases and two-thirds of deaths by 2050.

Cities can offer the full range of health services that a patient needs: from primary care appointments to discuss initial symptoms to laboratory tests, imaging, surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy. These services are connected by a city governance architecture ensuring patients are referred from one institution to another, treatment is uninterrupted and services are financially accessible.

Cities also serve as referral and treatment hubs for surrounding areas, and even for neighbouring countries, meaning that developing stronger urban systems will undoubtedly create stronger national pathways of care, provided equity is designed in from the start.

This makes the city the most strategic starting point for closing the gap between cancer policy and delivery.

National cancer plans are essential, but they do not deliver care. Patient outcomes will only improve when these are actually implemented. And this requires policies being translated into time-bound, costed, funded programmes, and health authorities being given the governance structure, funding and authority to act earlier and more seamlessly to support better treatment and survival rates.

To transform this and turn policy into practice, governments and funders need to make at least two fundamental shifts.

First, they must move beyond externally designed interventions and invest in locally owned systems that can diagnose their own gaps, set priorities and sustain improvements over time.

Second, governments and funders need to stop treating national policy as proof of delivery and invest in the implementation mechanisms that make delivery possible and strengthen the systems at large.This means sustained investment in robust governance systems, defined referral pathways, sustainable financing and a trained and empowered health workforce.

At City Cancer Challenge (C/Can), we know this approach can work. We have seen how locally-led healthcare reform can ensure the fundamental processes and networks are in place to deliver long-lasting sustainable cancer care.

In Asunción, Paraguay, this approach showed what strengthening health systems means in practice. Improved diagnostic processes meant that women with suspected cancer were diagnosed earlier, started treatment sooner, and ultimately had better survival chances. It also meant that fewer women got lost along the pathway.

Asunción’s success came from coordinated action, not a single intervention. Laboratory quality improved, workforces were trained and empowered, protocols upgraded to international standards, and sample traceability strengthened across hospital services. Because these changes were locally owned and co-developed, they hold. This is what distinguishes real health system improvement from equipment that sits in a locked room, or protocols that disappear the moment external support does.

The value of this locally-owned model lies in its sustainability and scalability. Learnings from Asuncion can be used by other cities to identify bottlenecks in their own healthcare delivery, align institutions and build the local systems needed for better cancer care.

Cities have always been where health systems evolve, integrate and scale. And the impetus for strengthening LMIC health systems, starting in cities, is even greater to address the growing cancer crisis.

Where you live and who you are should not determine the quality of care you receive. Governments and funders should stop looking only at national cancer plans, protocols or new equipment. Instead, they should also ask whether local health systems can deliver timely, coordinated and equitable care, and invest accordingly.

Isabel Mestres, CEO, City Cancer Challenge (C/Can)

IPS UN Bureau

 

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Die Spitzen von Union und SPD haben sich auf ein Reformpaket für wirtschaftliches Wachstum und soziale Sicherheit verständigt. Es folgt eine Einordnung von Marcel Fratzscher, Präsident des Deutschen Instituts für Wirtschaftsforschung (DIW Berlin):

Die Einigung auf das Reformpaket beendet eine lange Hängepartie in der Bundesregierung. Sein Beitrag zur Lösung der strukturellen Probleme Deutschlands dürfte jedoch begrenzt bleiben. Das Paket enthält eine Reihe von guten und sinnvollen Elementen. Vor allem der Abbau von Bürokratie, die Ziele beim Wohnungsbau und die steuerliche Entlastung bis in die Mitte hinein sind positive Aspekte. Es ist aber nicht der große Wurf, sondern eher ein Symbolpaket. Es wird der deutschen Wirtschaft nicht den gewünschten Impuls für Wachstum und Wettbewerbsfähigkeit geben. Es handelt sich um einen politischen Kompromiss mit begrenzten Ambitionen, der die großen Differenzen innerhalb der Bundesregierung zeigt und drei Botschaften enthalten soll: die Entlastung der Mitte, die Flexibilisierung für Unternehmen und eine härtere Linie beim Sozialstaat.

Zudem mangelt es in dem Vorstoß an Gerechtigkeit. Es hat eine soziale Schieflage, da der Fokus auf der Entlastung von Unternehmen liegt, zum Teil zulasten der Beschäftigten. Die Ausweitung der sachgrundlosen Befristung und die teilweise Aufweichung des Kündigungsschutzes als großen Wurf zu verkaufen, ist nicht seriös. Auch durch die geplanten Reformen bei Rente, Gesundheit und Pflege werden vor allem Menschen mit wenig Einkommen und Ersparnissen harte Einschnitte erfahren. Die Begrenzung der Westbalkan-Regelung auf 25.000 Personen pro Jahr kann den Arbeitsmarkt in Engpassbranchen zusätzlich belasten. Unter dem Strich bedeutet das Reformpaket Einschnitte vor allem für Menschen mit geringen, aber auch mit mittleren Einkommen.

Die Steuerreform ist unambitioniert, nicht ausfinanziert und entlastet zwar auch Familien und mittlere Einkommen, aber in absoluten Euro-Beträgen profitieren vor allem höhere Erwerbseinkommen unterhalb der Reichensteuer-Schwelle. Eine echte Entlastung kleiner und mittlerer Einkommen müsste stärker bei Sozialabgaben, Transfers oder Erwerbstätigenzuschüssen ansetzen - dies fehlt jedoch größtenteils. Bei der Steuerreform hat sich die Union durchgesetzt, da die Erhöhung des Reichensteuersatzes ab 250.000 Euro Jahreseinkommen eher symbolisch ist und dem Staat nur geringe zusätzliche Einnahmen verschaffen wird. Der Steuerreform fehlt Ehrlichkeit, denn es gibt faktisch keine annähernd ausreichende Gegenfinanzierung. Dass der bayerische Ministerpräsident Söder die Verhinderung einer Kürzung des Dienstwagenprivilegs als großen Erfolg verkauft, spricht für sich.

The proposal adopted on Thursday will allow faster permitting for electricity grids and renewables projects, to help cut energy prices through the domestic supply of clean energy.
Committee on Industry, Research and Energy

Source : © European Union, 2026 - EP

By CIVICUS
Jul 2 2026 (IPS)

 
CIVICUS discusses Mexico’s enforced disappearance crisis with Angélica Orozco, a member of Fuerzas Unidas por Nuestros Desaparecidos en Nuevo León (FUNDENL), a collective of relatives of disappeared people and people who support them. Since 2012, FUNDENL has been searching for the disappeared and documenting the human rights crisis.

Angélica Orozco

As the 2026 World Cup kicked off in Mexico, thousands of families of the disappeared marched under the slogan ‘The ball is coming home – but when will our missing loved ones?’. The United Nations (UN) Committee on Enforced Disappearances has concluded that enforced disappearances in Mexico are a systematic and widespread practice that could constitute crimes against humanity. The state downplays the crisis and denies responsibility. For the families of the disappeared, the World Cup is an opportunity to raise awareness of their struggle.

What are your demands?

There are over 133,000 people missing in Mexico. To put this into perspective, the disappeared would fill the stadium where four World Cup matches are being played in Monterrey almost two and a half times over. You could put together over 5,100 football teams, and it would take 107 World Cups to see them all play. The UN warns that only about two in 10 of these crimes are reported, so the actual figure could be much higher.

We have been searching by every means possible for nearly 15 years, with almost no support, using our own resources. We have written books, occupied public squares, organised protests and taken part in conferences. The World Cup is yet another opportunity to raise global awareness of the humanitarian crisis caused by enforced disappearances. As the world’s attention is now focused on Canada, Mexico and the USA, we want everyone to know about our struggle.

We are not against football. We are simply asking that the authorities search for our loved ones, bring them home and ensure that no one else is disappeared. For this to happen, prevention is key. When FUNDENL detects recurring cases in an area, we issue alerts to the public. It’s a simple step that the authorities, who have first-hand information, should be taking but are not. They should also enforce the laws and protocols we already have, thanks to the struggle of families and campaign groups. The law mandates a national register of missing persons, but the existing one is incomplete, with misspelt names and duplicate entries. The law also requires search and investigation plans to be drawn up, yet these do not exist.

We simply want the government to do its job. Instead, it’s investing millions in the World Cup to give the impression that everything is fine, while the search for the disappeared continues to receive neither the attention nor the necessary resources. It should work to find the disappeared with the same dedication it has put into organising this tournament.

To this end, we are holding various protests in the host cities. We have translated our slogan, ‘Where are they?’, into 10 languages: the eight languages of the countries visiting Monterrey, plus English and Chinese. Using AI, we have dressed 21 missing people in the Mexican national team’s shirt and called them ‘Mexico’s national team’, because that’s the team the authorities don’t want to see. We’ve also played street football matches in solidarity and put up over 150 photographs of missing people outside the stadium in Monterrey.

How have authorities responded?

The response has been deplorable. Instead of addressing our demands, the state criminalises and stigmatises victims. In Mexico City, there was a heavy police presence to contain the marches. The Secretary of the Interior cast doubt on the funding for the families’ journey from Jalisco to the capital and announced she would investigate the source of the funds. It was an absurd insinuation. We have always organised ourselves using our own resources, precisely because the state has never supported us.

President Claudia Sheinbaum also played down the significance of the protests. She even went so far as to say, amidst laughter, that there were more staff from the search commissions and victim support services than protesters. For us, it’s not about numbers, but about our 133,000 loved ones who are no longer with us. These are people with families, homes and lives that were snatched away from them.

We’d hoped that this government, which prided itself on being progressive, would be different. It wasn’t to be. The first sign was clear. In her inaugural speech, President Sheinbaum made no mention of the disappeared or their families. She’s said so herself: what’s not named doesn’t exist. She’s never met with the families. Like previous governments, it seems she prefers to ignore this humanitarian crisis.

The determination to conceal this reality is evident. Here in Nuevo León, the governor put up tarpaulins in poor neighbourhoods to hide the poverty. He placed giant planters in front of the Square of the Disappeared, which we occupied in 2014, so the faces of our loved ones couldn’t be seen from the street. We protested and stuck their photographs on the planters, and the next day we got the government to remove them.

On that square, we had written a sign on the pavement that read ‘130,000 disappeared’. Against the backdrop of the World Cup, we went back to refresh the paint and update the figure to include a further 3,000 who have gone missing since. The effect was immediate. Some people from Sweden who were visiting the city came over to ask us for more information.

What makes these enforced disappearances?

For a disappearance to be considered enforced, there must be state involvement, whether direct or indirect. And such involvement exists, even if Sheinbaum wishes to deny it.

There isn’t always a video proving it was a public official who took a person away, but there are omissions that prove it. An official who fails to request call records in time, for example, becomes an accomplice, because that information is key to the search, but it’s only kept for two years, and if it isn’t requested before the deadline, it’s lost forever.

In many cases, there’s direct involvement. There have been instances where men wearing municipal police vests have taken people away and cases where traffic police intervened in a road accident and the people involved subsequently disappeared. The constant is that the evidence implicating them always vanishes.

Added to this is the state’s refusal to acknowledge the crisis. It’s like with illnesses. If you don’t recognise you have one, you can’t cure it. That also makes them responsible.

We are not the only ones saying this. The UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances has recognised the gravity of the situation and referred the case to the General Assembly.

Who are the victims and who is responsible?

Anyone can be made to disappear, in everyday circumstances. Some people have disappeared on their way home, or while popping out for a soft drink, or following a road accident.

Nuevo León is the state with the fifth-highest number of missing persons in Mexico, with over 7,000. Between January and May this year, a further 433 people went missing – an average of three a day – and around 70 per cent have still not been found.

If we are disappeared, it’s because the conditions for this to happen exist. The main one is impunity. Out of over 133,000 missing people, only 3,869 have an investigation file open, according to government figures. That’s almost absolute impunity.

Nor are there any consequences for officials who fail to investigate. They are simply moved to a different post. The official who currently heads the Local Search Commission spent three decades in the public prosecutor’s office and is repeating the same practices in her new role. The current mayor of Monterrey was the state attorney-general during the most violent years. Instead of being punished for their failure to act, they appear to have been rewarded. The same applies to criminals. We have come across people responsible for crimes in 2010 and 2011 who are still at large and committing the same crimes years later.

As the state fails to take responsibility, we have taken it upon ourselves to search for our missing loved ones, and what we have found is appalling. In Nuevo León, we have reported the existence of 10 extermination camps. In one of them, Las Abejas, we found over 250,000 fragments of human remains and more than 100 DNA profiles. This means 100 people haven’t returned home. There are also over 3,000 unidentified bodies and remains in mass graves in Nuevo León and over 70,000 across Mexico. Figures like these cannot be reached without a system set up to make people disappear with the complicity of the authorities.

What are you asking of the international community?

We ask our international visitors to turn their attention to this crisis, learn about our missing loved ones, show solidarity and help us search for them, because we don’t know whether any of them have been taken out of the country. We also ask them to take this demand to their governments, so they can add to the pressure on the Mexican authorities.

Pressure matters. That’s why we welcome the decision of the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances. When it was made public, the Mexican state rejected it and treated it as an attack, rather than engaging with it.

Enforced disappearance is a crime against humanity. When someone is disappeared, they are torn away from their family and their entire community. That’s why we appeal to humanity: no person, anywhere in the world, should be made to disappear. As long as disappearances continue, we will not live in complete peace or democracy.

CIVICUS interviews a wide range of civil society activists, experts and leaders to gather diverse perspectives on civil society action and current issues for publication on its CIVICUS Lens platform. The views expressed in interviews are the interviewees’ and do not necessarily reflect those of CIVICUS. Publication does not imply endorsement of interviewees or the organisations they represent.

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SEE ALSO
Solidarity World Cup CIVICUS
World Cup: ‘FIFA has placed itself on the side of the polluters, not the rest of the planet’ CIVICUS Lens | Interview with Frank Huisingh 15.Jun.2026
The disappeared: Mexico’s industrial-scale human rights crisis CIVICUS Lens 22.Apr.2025

 

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