According to Mexico’s Secretary’s Office of Exterior Relations (SRE), each year over 5,000 Mexican emigrants are reported missing by their families, as they made their way to the United States or once they crossed the border. The announcement was made during the week-long Third Training Seminar on Consular Protection, held in Dallas, Texas in early November.

Upon reporting this dramatic fact, Mexico’s Assistant Secretary, Department of Foreign Affairs, Geronimo Gutierrez Fernandez, clarified that he’s dealing with “5,000 requests from people, indicating that a relative may have gone to the United States, and then they ask us to look for them.” He commented that, year after year, the Chancellery, which is responsible for the protection of co-nationals abroad, receives so many petitions through the dozens of SRE offices scattered around country, that the government makes the effort to locate the missing persons. The search initiatives are conducted by the Mexican consulates located in major U.S. cities.

Gutierrez Fernandez recognized that of the 5,000 annual requests “we only identify or locate around 1,000 to 1,050 people.” Once the missing people are found, he said, “we simply pass the information on to the families.”

Gutierrez Fernandez, who oversees Mexican police activity in the United States, did not explain the criteria used to decide if a person has “disappeared,” nor did he explain the circumstances in which the 20 percent of the persons located are found – are the approximate 1,000 persons found in situations of neglect by their families, in prison, ill or homeless? Presenting this information without any explanations caused concern in the listeners, who wondered if the unaccounted 80 percent had died while crossing the desert into the United States.

Beyond the statistics, in the regions where traditionally community members travel to the United States looking for work, there are many families who have never heard again from relatives who have migrated. Most often, the migration phenomenon is characterized by people making their way north, without proper documentation, through the most inhospitable zones near the border.

Despite the generality of the report, Gutierrez Fernandez commented that the search and identification process carried out by consulate personnel is practically manual. He anticipated, in the next few months, that the SRE will put into place a data base which can be accessed through the Internet, “permitting the cross-referencing of data with the information that we have in the consulates, in order to make a more effective search or identification.” In short, he concluded that with the new system he aims to modernize the consulates’ protection system.

Ninety representatives from the 45 Mexican consulates in the United States attended the event, where options to improve the protection of immigrant rights, in human, civil, migratory, and labor matters, were discussed.

SRE support services include helping minors, family maintenance, legal advice for prisoners, transfer of corpses back to Mexico, and help to locate disappeared Mexican nationals.