THOUSANDS joined protests across Mexico on Saturday to demand more action to deal with the many enforced disappearances in the country.

Relatives and friends of many of the missing were joined by human rights activists on marches through Mexico City, Guadalajara, Cordoba and many other cities demanding more action by the government of President Claudia Sheinbaum to help find their family members.

More than 130,000 people have been reported missing in Mexico. Most of the disappearance took place after 2007 when the then President Felipe Calderon launched his so-called “war on drugs.”

Many are thought to have been killed or forced to work for Mexico’s powerful drug cartels.

Families have formed their own teams, known as “buscadores,” who scour the countryside and deserts in search of mass graves.

The searches by the buscadores are carried out at great personal risk. After the recent discovery of an apparent narco-ranch, several of the buscadores involved in the search were themselves disappeared.

During the demonstrations protesters carried placards with their relatives’ faces on them.

The march brought traffic in Mexico City to a standstill, as the protest moved through the city’s main roads.

The United Nations has described the disappearances as a “human tragedy of enormous proportions.”

In March of this year Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum signed a decree to strengthen the commission responsible for helping to search for missing persons.

The president also sent new reforms to the Mexican Congress that makes it easier to identify missing persons, organise information about them and their cases, and make numbers of missing people more transparent.

She said it would no longer be necessary to wait 72 hours to start investigating a disappearance and there would be a clear distinction between kidnappings and missing persons cases.