The International Organization for Migration (IOM) released its data on disappearances and deaths of emigrants in Central America so far in 2022.
Data from the agency, a United Nations (UN) agency, indicates that between January and August 2021, 462 migrants disappeared or died, while 618 did so in the same period in 2022.
Last year, the IOM reported a total of 1,242 disappearances or deaths, the maximum since this registry began in 2014.
It was also reported that 6,569 migrants have died or disappeared on their journey through the region since 2014, 61% of them en route to the southern border of the United States, crossing Mexico and Central America. Other sources are on the route from the Dominican Republic to Puerto Rico (3.7%) and from Venezuela to the Caribbean (2.8%).
Beyond migrants, dozens of people disappear daily in Latin America and the Caribbean and there is still no progress in many historical cases, usually linked to dictatorships, the Red Cross said in a recently released report.
In Colombia, the Red Cross registered 61 disappearances in the first six months of 2022, related to armed conflicts and violence. It reports a total of 959 cases since the entry into force of the peace agreement in 2016.
In Mexico there are 104,450 people missing from the 1960s until mid-August 2022, most of them people between 15 and 34 years old, the institution said.
In Guatemala, 45,000 people disappeared during the armed conflict (1960-1996), some 8,000 bodies were found and only 3,500 were identified. In El Salvador, 4,900 people disappeared between 1980 and 1992, according to the UN, a figure that a local commission increased to between 8,000 and 10,000.
In Honduras there is no registry of disappeared persons. The magnitude of the problem is unknown.
