Thousands of people have held protests across Mexico to highlight the country's many enforced disappearances and demand more action by officials to tackle them.
Relatives and friends of missing people, as well as human rights activists, marched through the streets of Mexico City, Guadalajara, Córdoba, and other cities calling for justice and urged the government of President Claudia Sheinbaum to help find their missing loved ones.
More than 130,000 people have been reported as missing in Mexico. Almost all the disappearances have occurred since 2007, when then-President Felipe Calderón launched his 'war on drugs'.
In many cases, those disappeared have been forcibly recruited into the drug cartels – or murdered for resisting.
While drug cartels and organized crime groups are the main perpetrators, security forces are also blamed for deaths and disappearances.
The widespread nature of the protests across cities, states, and municipalities illustrated the extent to which the problem of forced disappearances affects communities and families throughout Mexico.
From one end of the country to the other – from southern states like Oaxaca to northern ones like Sonora and Durango – activists and family members of disappeared people turned out in their thousands carrying placards with their relatives' faces on them, demanding authorities to take more action on the issue.
In Mexico City, the march brought traffic in the capital to a standstill as protesters moved down the main thoroughfare.
Many affected families have formed search teams, known as 'buscadores', who scour the countryside and deserts following tips, often from the cartels, regarding the whereabouts of mass graves.
The buscadores carry out searches and their activism at great personal risk. Following a recent discovery in Jalisco state of an apparent narco-ranch by a search group, several buscadores involved were disappeared.
The United Nations has called it 'a human tragedy of enormous proportions', highlighting Mexico's troubling number of disappearances which surpasses some of Latin America's worst historical cases.
