Told in five stories, it identifies a crisis of mass disappearances on the Mexico-Guatemala border amid the silence and inaction of the authorities.
Between September and December 2024, at the height of the migration crisis, at least 83 migrants disappeared on the coast of Chiapas, on the Mexico-Guatemala border. For months, no Mexican authority did anything to search for them, or even to count them. From humble families in Cuba, Ecuador, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, El Salvador, and Jordan, they vanished after boarding boats bound for Oaxaca. They were never heard from again. The clues recovered since then point to a human trafficking network.
EL PAÍS first learned of the case of the 40 people who disappeared on December 21, 2024. After publishing the story in June 2025, the newspaper received messages from Ecuadorian and Dominican families reporting that their children and sisters had disappeared along the same route, but a few months earlier, on September 5, 2024. This group of 23 people left behind a final video: they all appear before vanishing. Like a domino effect, this second publication reached the family of Cindy Bueso, a Honduran woman who had disappeared along with her two young children in the same location on October 21, 2024. In total, the families reported 83 missing persons.
Over the course of a year, this newspaper has managed to identify and contact Kevin, who is, so far, the only survivor of the disappearances. And this week, accompanying the families in their brigade in Mexico, the first real search in 16 months.
Source: elpais
