Their faces stare from banners on street corners, in trendy neighborhoods and rough districts. Their eyes watch from gas stations and toll booths. On Mexico City’s central Paseo de la Reforma, an entire roundabout has been taken over by relatives pleading for help in finding their missing loved ones. In cities from Monterrey to Mérida, the number of missing is high, a constant, ever-present reminder of a crisis that has gripped the country.
More than 100,000 people have disappeared in Mexico, a staggering human rights catastrophe. A combination of escalating cartel violence and government impunity has left tens of thousands missing, many dead and buried in unmarked graves, others kidnapped and forced to work for organized crime.
Even though they are no longer there, they can be found everywhere in cities across the country, changing the urban fabric as family members and activists call for help through murals, posters, statues, blockades and tent camps when the government is inactive.
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The phenomenon is perhaps most palpable in Mexico City, the seat of the country’s political power. In recent years, the statues of great heroes from Mexico’s past along the Paseo de la Reforma have been joined by a new series of public monuments created by an underground collective of artists, activists, engineers and architects to draw attention to the extraordinary violence plaguing the country.
The first such anti-monument, as they are called, was erected in 2015 and marks what remains Mexico’s most devastating case of disappearance: the forced disappearance of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College by a criminal group collaborating with local and federal authorities. The anti-monument of a giant red number 43 remains a painful reminder of violence and impunity in Mexico, especially given that the case remains unsolved.
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This week marks the 10th anniversary of the mass disappearance that has become a thorn in the side of Andrés Manuél López Obrador. The president, who is leaving office at the end of the month, had promised to solve the case and even created a special truth commission to investigate the students’ disappearance, but little significant progress has been made in solving one of Mexico’s most heinous crimes.
According to one of the activists behind the anti-monument, who gave only his code name, Juan, the idea for the monument was not just to draw government attention to the 43 missing students but also to the tens of thousands of other missing people in Mexico — hence the addition of a plus sign next to the number. And unlike a speech or a rally, he said, an anti-monument is built to last — until justice is served.
“With a poster, with a slogan, with a banner, it’s very easy to make them fade away,” Juan said. “But by representing that absence as a three-dimensional object, it can’t fade away, it’s not something ephemeral.”
On the 26th of each month, parents of the missing students march through Mexico City to mark the anniversary of the mass disappearance. Along the way, they stop at the anti-monument to read out the names of their missing sons, marking another month without their children.
The anti-monument “is so that the government doesn’t forget,” said Cristina Bautista, whose son Benjamín was among the 43 people who disappeared that night. “We can never forget our children. For us as mothers, they are always present.”
According to Valentina Rozas-Krause, assistant professor of architecture and design at Adolfo Ibáñez University in Chile, these types of anti-monuments are a powerful tool for citizens to reclaim public space and resist official trends.
“If the state has kept these deaths quiet or the disappearances have not been investigated, you can say: no, they have not been forgotten, this is not closed, we will not rest until they come back or until we know what happened.”
A few hundred metres from the 43rd statue on Paseo de la Reforma, relatives and activists have pasted the faces of their missing loved ones on a series of posts, creating yet another anti-monument to the disappeared.
One of the faces is that of a young man, Jhonatan Guadalupe Romero Gil, a lawyer, who was 25 when he was abducted by police in 2018 along with a friend in the city of Acapulco. His friend’s body was found the next day, but Jhonatan has not been seen since. His mother, Socorro, has spent the past six years searching and pleading for help from police and prosecutors, but has received no answers.
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“It was hell,” she said. “There were days I didn’t sleep, I would stay inside all day crying. I wanted to die.”
Like many mothers in Mexico, Socorro took matters into her own hands and even went out into the field to look for her son’s body: in 2023, she found a grave with 17 bodies. None of them were her sons. Now she travels the country and even the world with her little posters, which she hangs everywhere from Mexico City to Venice.
“I’d like to think that one day he’ll see one of the posters,” she said through her tears. “Or that the people who took him will see a poster, feel sorry for him, and tell me where he is.”
Reporting for this story was supported by the Alicia Patterson Foundation
