A leading regional political women’s network is sounding the alarm over the escalating crisis of gender-based violence and unexplained disappearances of women and girls across Latin America and the Caribbean, calling on national governments to ramp up coordinated action to address the public safety and human rights emergency. The Women’s Mechanism of the Permanent Conference of Political Parties of Latin America and the Caribbean (COPPPAL) has issued an urgent statement highlighting the unrelenting rise in missing female cases across the region, which organizers say has reached crisis levels that can no longer be ignored.
Dalmira Martínez Juárez, president of COPPPAL Women, laid out the staggering scale of the crisis during the announcement, pointing to Mexico as one of the hardest-hit nations. Official figures from the country show total missing persons have surpassed 135,000, with more than 35,000 of those unaccounted for being women and girls. Juárez emphasized that adolescent girls between the ages of 15 and 19 make up one of the most at-risk groups, facing disproportionate vulnerability to kidnapping, trafficking, and other forms of gender-motivated harm.
In her address, Juárez underscored that national governments across the region hold a non-negotiable legal and ethical responsibility to expand and improve search operations for missing people, advance thorough and unbiased investigations into each case, and guarantee meaningful access to justice for victims and their families. Too many cases have remained stagnant or uninvestigated for years, Juárez said, leaving loved ones without answers and perpetuating a culture of impunity for those who perpetrate violence against women.
To confront the gap in data, coordination, and advocacy, the organization has unveiled a landmark new initiative: the Latin American and Caribbean Observatory of Disappeared Women. The new monitoring body will operate across all 30 countries where COPPPAL maintains a formal presence, bringing together civil society groups, political stakeholders, and family advocates to consolidate data, amplify awareness, and drive systemic change.
Organizers outline four core goals for the observatory: to raise greater public and political visibility around the scale of the missing women crisis, provide direct tangible support to families of victims who have long been left without resources or answers, design and promote evidence-based prevention strategies to stop disappearances before they occur, and strengthen enforcement of women’s fundamental human rights across every corner of the region. The launch marks one of the most coordinated regional efforts to date to address a crisis that has impacted thousands of communities and left tens of thousands of families searching for closure.