MEXICO CITY (Proceso): “Don’t play with our pain.” With this slogan, families of missing persons in Mexico City are preparing to protest at the opening of the FIFA World Cup, placing their demands on the country’s main international stage. While the government is accelerating construction projects, resources, and attention for the tournament, they continue searching for their children amidst stalled investigations, unfulfilled protocols, lost evidence, and a “crisis of disappearances and forensic identification” that, they denounced, is not being addressed with the same urgency.
The government led by Clara Brugada of the MORENA party is preparing to welcome tourists, cameras, and entertainment, while the city registered 711 reports of missing persons in the first three months of 2016, with 251 people still unaccounted for, according to the National Registry of Missing and Unlocated Persons (RNPDNO).
This means that this year, in Mexico City, an average of 8.3 disappearances were reported daily. Since records began in January 1952, Mexico City has accumulated a total of 6,016 missing persons.
These numbers represent real people. There is, for example, the case of Ana Ameli García Gámez, who disappeared on July 12th, 2025, at Pico del Águila in Ajusco, Tlalpan, when she was 19 years old.
Also the name of Olin Hernando Vargas Ojeda, kidnapped and disappeared on the night of November 26th, 2024, at only 24 years old, after being lured with deception to the Tezontle Valley, also in Ajusco, an area in the south of the city that is 15 kilometers from the Banorte Stadium, which on June 11th will become the only venue in the world to host the World Cup inauguration three times.
The Stories Behind the Protest
In an interview with Proceso, the families of the two young people, students at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), recounted their children’s disappearances and how the institutions reacted—or failed to react—to the crisis.
In the case of Ana Ameli García Gámez, her mother, Vanessa Gámez, told us that from the first hours of the disappearance, she faced an institutional response that, in her opinion, was slow and ineffective: “The response isn’t immediate, even though there’s an Alba Protocol for gender perspective because she was a 19-year-old student, a girl who just went hiking. That’s when you realize all the shortcomings that exist within the authorities.”
Furthermore, she considered the lines of investigation insufficient and exposed the cases to the irreparable loss of vital time in locating missing persons: “Although three, almost four intense weeks of searching were conducted, thinking it could have been an accident, time was lost acknowledging that Ajusco is a place where organized crime groups operate, from armed robbery and muggings to auto parts theft, and even organized crime involving illegal loggers and cartels.”
“After eight months, we still know nothing, nor do we have a solid lead to follow, because the initial lines of investigation haven’t been pursued or ruled out,” the mother added.
The case of Olin Hernando Vargas Ojeda is also a reflection of the authorities’ delayed response. His father, Fernando Vargas, described institutional abandonment from the very beginning: “From the first hours, we were in communication with the then-prosecutor Ulises Lara (currently the Special Prosecutor for the Investigation of Relevant Matters at the Attorney General’s Office, FGR), and he simply told us to file our complaint with the Public Prosecutor’s Office. The Public Prosecutor’s Office didn’t accept our complaint, nor did the police offer us any assistance.”
The searcher also denounced the loss of evidence, delays in its analysis, and a lack of follow-up on lines of investigation: “We hold the Secretariat of Citizen Security (SSC) responsible for our son’s life, precisely because of these errors committed from the outset, without following search or investigation protocols in these crimes of kidnapping and abuse.”
“I would say there is an institutional crisis affecting many authorities, many rules of procedure, the Attorney General’s offices, local prosecutors’ offices, the police, and none of them are producing results. This is also reflected in what has been written about the degree of impunity for the crime of enforced disappearance, which is almost 100%. In other words, impunity for this type of crime is absolute,” she added.
Both families arrived at this newsroom with printed copies of their children’s missing persons reports and a banner that read: “Don’t play with our pain! Six thousand disappeared in Mexico City.”
Vanessa Gámez was clear in her stance: “If Ameli liked soccer, she won’t be here to watch it today; if Hernando liked soccer, he won’t be here to watch the World Cup either, and that’s tragic, because there are empty chairs in our homes, there are dining tables that are still waiting for them. We don’t know if they’re eating, we don’t even know if they’re alive or what has been done to them. And that should hurt, that should cause pain.”
Displaced Disappearances
The protest, in that sense, represents the decision of the indirect victims to bring the disappearance crisis to the symbolic center of a global event.
“It’s about showing the world that there is indeed a disappearance crisis, that it’s not safe to come to Mexico, and that our president (Claudia Sheinbaum) and our authorities are only interested in the World Cup. That’s all they care about, but what we are suffering, the pain we are experiencing of not having our children with us, of our family members who have disappeared, who have been illegally deprived of their freedom, that doesn’t matter to them,” Gámez stated.
What the families seek, according to their own words, is not to disrupt the tournament or confront those who will attend the matches. They want to disrupt the official World Cup narrative with a reality that, they maintain, is being ignored.
Penny Ramírez, advocacy assistant for the Human Rights Program at the Ibero-American University (Ibero), described it this way: “Many times they feel institutionally abandoned, like they’re doing it all alone, and then suddenly an event of such magnitude comes along that all the attention shifts to this sporting event, and they’re left somewhat adrift once again.”
The specialist explained that the discontent is linked to outstanding commitments regarding search and forensic identification. “There’s a huge debt owed to the families in terms of infrastructure for the search for missing persons. (…) For months they’ve been promised that the Forensic Identification Center and the Temporary Shelter will be ready, and there’s no clarity on when they’ll be delivered. There’s a multi-million dollar investment in infrastructure for the World Cup, but not for the families.”
The specialist explained that the discontent is linked to unfulfilled commitments regarding search and forensic identification. It has been almost a year since Brugada presented the Search and Location Strategy for Missing Persons 2025-2030, on April 28th, 2025. The centers mentioned by Ramírez are part of the commitments made by the governor at that time, which remain pending.
Bringing the Crisis to the World Cup Stage
The parents of Ana Ameli García Gámez and Olin Hernando Vargas Ojeda announced that the mobilization is planned to take place at the entrances to Banorte Stadium during the World Cup opening ceremony.
It will include the participation of independent families searching for their missing loved ones and collectives from Mexico City, among them Una Luz en el Camino (A Light on the Path), Hasta Encontrarles (Until We Find Them), Mariposas (Butterflies), Armadillos (participating in solidarity), Buscando a Pamela Volante (Searching for Pamela Volante), and Familias Unidas por una Causa (Families United For One Cause).
The families plan to spread out across various entry points, including areas near the stadium, to raise awareness of the cases before attendees enter the event.
The central activity will involve wearing white t-shirts and carrying missing person posters with the faces and information of missing persons. To organize participation, they have prepared a registration system using a QR code that will allow those who wish to join to register, locate meeting points, and access posters to print or carry during the event.
The intention is for those attending the match to also participate in raising awareness, either by carrying the missing persons posters or displaying them during the event, so that the faces of missing persons are present both at the entrances and inside the stadium, taking advantage of the media exposure and international broadcast.
“Only those who can afford it will be able to attend this event, so let them do so, let them help us in this way, let them wear white, let them print a poster; if they could afford a ticket for more than 100,000 pesos, they could print a poster of a missing person and display it inside the stadium,” explained Vanessa Gámez.
In addition to the intervention in the stadium’s surroundings, the families have already begun taking their demands to the embassies of countries participating in the World Cup, where they seek to share statistics and warn about the crisis of disappearances in Mexico: “To tell them that if one of their citizens comes and disappears, they won’t find them, they won’t look for them because there are no resources.” Sandra Delia Ojeda Rivera, the mother of Olin Hernando Vargas Ojeda, made a symbolic calculation to illustrate the magnitude of the problem: “If we tried to give our disappeared one space at the Azteca Stadium during the World Cup, it wouldn’t be enough; we would need two stadiums to accommodate them.”
That is the city the families want to present to the World Cup: not the city of announcements, access points, operations, and infrastructure, but the city of empty seats, open cases, unfinished searches, mothers organizing to distribute flyers instead of receiving answers, and the children who are missing.
Original article by Ximena Arochi, Proceso, April 20th, 2026.
Translated by Schools for Chiapas.