MEXICO CITY, May 15, 2026 (BSS/AFP) - Families of migrants who have gone missing in Mexico gathered in the capital's Zocalo plaza on Thursday to urge the government to help them find their loved ones.

Mexico is facing a crisis of disappearances tied to drug war violence -- one that has also affected migrants traveling through the country.

The gathering was organized by a group of Hondurans, Cubans, Colombians, and Ecuadorians who traveled to Mexico to search for those who went missing while in the southern border state of Chiapas and in Mexico City.

In April, a UN report deemed the disappearance crisis so grave that it labeled it a "crime against humanity."

On Monday, a report by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights denounced a potential undercount in the number of disappeared people.

Officially, the Mexican government has recognized 130,000 disappeared people since 2006.

"I seriously doubt just that," Alicia Santos Torres, a Cuban whose son Jorge Alejandro Lozada Santos went missing in Chiapas in 2024, told the crowd, referring to the count.

"If (Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum) really cared about what the mothers of Latin America had to say, she would listen and know that all of us here have children who disappeared in Mexico," Santos Torres said. "The southern border has become a corridor of death for many migrants."

Many of their family members had gone missing on a boat that departed from Chiapas carrying more than 40 migrants headed north on December 21, 2024, never to be seen again.

The families say local residents are afraid to give police tips about the missing, fearing they could be targeted by criminal gangs.

"We've realized that the population feels afraid... for fear of reprisal," Oscar Enrique Hernandez, a Honduran searching for his brother Ricardo Hernandez Barahona, who disappeared on the boat, told AFP.

"What we don't understand as families is the uselessness of prosecutors -- they turn a deaf ear, they don't want to act and investigate," he said.

The worst thing, Hernandez said, "would be to return to my country with my hands empty."