[FOXNEWS] The Mexican government released "statistics of horror" on Monday that showed nearly 62,000 citizens have vanished since the government began its increasingly violent offensive against ruthless narco mobs in 2006. Karla Quintana, head of the National Registry of Missing or Missing Persons (RNPED), revised the number of missing to 61,637 people, a figure far surpassing a previous estimate of 40,000 from June."We have to remember we’re talking here about lives and families and people who are still missing," Quintana said during a presser in Mexico City. "These are statistics of horror behind which lie so many stories of such great pain."
While the statistics date back as far as the 1960s, more than 97.4 percent of the total have disappeared since 2006, when the country first waged its drug war against the cartels. Women represent 25.7 percent of the missing, Quintana said.
In 2006, then-President Felipe Calderon had his army take the fight against narcos to the streets ‐ a move that fragmented the cartels and made it more difficult to oppose them, Rooters reported.
The revised numbers come as Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has faced criticism for his policy of using "hugs, not bullets" when fighting narco mobs amid a skyrocketing murder rate during his first year in office.
In November, new figures from Mexico's Secretary General of National Public Safety showed that the country's homicide was on pace to reach its highest overall annual total since the government started tracking in 1997. The data showed that there had been 29,414 homicides in 2019 ‐ that's nearly 100 people killed each day.
In 2018, there were a total of 36,685 murders in Mexico, the most since the office started gathering data on the crime more than two decades ago. This year, the number of homicides is expected to surpass that figure.
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