In 2021, Héctor Daniel Flores Hernández was reported missing. Two years later, his father, Héctor Flores, noticed his son’s picture communicate once more. In a video generated by way of synthetic intelligence know-how, which digitally animated a nonetheless picture and gave it a synthesized voice, the determine of Héctor Daniel Flores Hernández narrated the story of his disappearance — when he was 19 years outdated from his residence in Guadalajara — and demanded that the authorities discover him alive. Since then, his father has made the search for a lifestyle.
“I couldn’t finish watching it the first time,” Héctor Flores said in an interview when the video was first produced. “It took me a while to process it. Seeing them with the last photo you have, saying what you know from investigations, is heartbreaking.”
The video was a part of an initiative launched in 2023 by the collectives Luz de Esperanza and Alas de Libertad — teams of family members of missing individuals who arrange to hold out searches, increase consciousness of instances and demand justice — in the western state of Jalisco, to provide a voice to the missing-persons notices about their family members. Flores, a co-founder of Luz de Esperanza, mentioned that the initiative continues and that “it is a perfect tool not only for the search but also to raise awareness and try to create empathy.”
Disappearances are all too frequent in Mexico, a rustic that has recorded greater than 132,000 missing individuals since the National Registry of Disappeared and Unlocated Persons of the Secretariat of the Interior started preserving observe in 1964. Human Rights Watch stories that the authorities has not taken ample measures to forestall disappearances or punish these accountable.
President Claudia Sheinbaum has acknowledged that the majority disappearances are linked to organized crime, and Amnesty International notes that the drawback can be attributed to general violence and insecurity. There is not any full official knowledge set on the particular causes of all disappearances; the nationwide registry contains knowledge on previous disappearances dedicated by the authorities in opposition to leftist teams and guerrillas, however the figures are principally from current years, when the battle in opposition to felony organizations intensified.
In March 2025, Sheinbaum’s authorities introduced an array of recent initiatives to reply extra rapidly to disappearances, to deal with disappearances as severely as identified kidnappings, to make statistics extra obtainable and to enhance help to victims.
The video initiative, in the meantime, is a part of a brand new era of initiatives which have turned to AI or machine studying for assist with the disaster. Universities, search collectives, different organizations and authorities authorities have developed and carried out AI to research missing individuals, utilizing strategies together with database evaluation, forensic identification or age-progression projections.
“The goal is that these tools be useful for entities that make up the national search system, such as prosecutors’ offices, commissions, and the Semefo (Forensic Medical Services), to assist and facilitate the work of the people,” mentioned Andrea Horcasitas, head of the Human Rights Program at Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City. The program is a part of the Consortium for the Ethical Use of AI in the Search for Disappeared Persons, which was created in October 2025 with the goal of discussing the use of strategies for looking out missing individuals in Mexico and reflecting on the accountable use of AI in this space.
The Public Policy Collaborative Solutions Laboratory (Lab-Co), a non-governmental group primarily based in Mexico, works on discovering new options to issues of safety, violence and entry to justice in Latin America. The laboratory has developed three initiatives that incorporate synthetic intelligence in the search for disappeared individuals.
The first is IdentIA, a software that makes use of AI to determine and classify pictures of tattoos on unidentified our bodies, defined Thomas Favennec, the government director of Lab-Co.
Users can search the information with textual content, utilizing the phrases in a tattoo or a verbal description of 1, or by way of image-based searches that examine pictures immediately in opposition to a historic database of tattoos belonging to unidentified individuals.
“It doesn’t matter the quality of the tattoo or the angle. This system works using a vector search and does not require the internet; no sensitive content is uploaded to the internet, which ensures that no one’s information is compromised,” Ángel Serrano, Lab-Co’s knowledge and know-how coordinator, mentioned.
Serrano demonstrated how IdentIA conducts a tattoo search in a matter of seconds and permits cross-referencing with stories of missing individuals.
This system was integrated this week into missing-persons database programs in the state of Jalisco and is in the technique of being carried out in the forensic companies of Quintana Roo and Zacatecas.
Another of the lab’s instruments, Favennec mentioned, is ContextIA, which makes it potential to course of a number of unstructured paperwork from investigation information and extract clear knowledge. ContextIA is able to answering particular queries with direct quotes and web page references; extracting specific knowledge corresponding to telephone numbers, license plates and coordinates; and, as its identify suggests, cross-referencing instances in the context of various databases.
The third software permits for the evaluation of names in a structured and extra highly effective method, permitting customers to seek out matches in totally different databases the place names could also be written in alternative ways. Favennec mentioned that, to this point, it has been utilized to recognized deceased individuals who haven’t been claimed.
“Families don’t know this happens, and it is complicated because there is an issue with databases that do not intersect,” he mentioned. “There’s a challenge in finding the family. So what we have developed is something that allows for these comparative analyses between the situation of missing persons and the records of forensic services in different states across the country.”
The initiatives are a part of a venture referred to as “Building Alliances for the Search for Disappeared Persons and Human Identification,” funded by the European Union and the British Embassy by way of the Frontier Tech Hub initiative.
Horcasitas, from the Universidad Iberoamericana, factors out that some prosecutors’ places of work are already utilizing a software referred to as ImageBox, which cleans up the photographs of the faces of individuals discovered in the morgue or the Forensic Medical Service and the Institute of Expert and Forensic Sciences of Mexico City, to assist in the identification of people.
“This prevents people from being forced to look at heartbreaking photographs, which obviously have psychosocial impacts on anyone who has to go through morgue catalogs,” she mentioned.
The Mexico City Prosecutor’s Office has used the “inpainting” method, which makes use of synthetic intelligence to fill in, restore or take away chosen components of a picture, permitting broken areas to be added or repaired with practical outcomes. With this, authorities perform reverse searches, issuing a bulletin to seek out the individual’s household.
NCS contacted the capital’s Prosecutor’s Office for extra particulars, however to date has not acquired a response.
The Regresa Project, developed by researchers from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), seeks to generate a picture of how a toddler who disappeared years in the past would look immediately, to assist their households discover them.
When an individual disappears, the normal search protocol relies on the most up-to-date photograph obtainable. Children and adolescents who should not rapidly situated might not be acknowledged in the medium and long run, resulting from the velocity at which their faces and our bodies change and mature.
Led by Ana Itzel Juárez Martín, PhD in anthropology from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), the initiative, which continues to be a pilot program, combines AI instruments with data and strategies from bodily and social anthropology.
The program’s algorithm is designed to hold out age development utilizing images of missing kids to find out what they’d seem like at age 5, 15 or 30. It may be used to indicate what a present grownup seemed like in childhood.
Official figures count more than 118,000 minors aged 17 and underneath reported missing between 1964 and September 2025. A 2022 report from the Network for Children’s Rights in Mexico factors out that in the case of missing minors, recruitment networks might combine them into organized crime or draw them into sexual exploitation and trafficking.
Juárez Martín explained that the aim of the Regresa Project is to coach the algorithm to be taught the pure organic progress of the face, particularly guided by facial shapes and progress patterns generally discovered amongst individuals in Mexico.
“Although there are already some image banks for research use, there are none solely of the Mexican population,” she mentioned. “So this algorithm would be the first of its kind and would be trained to identify the variability that exists among Mexicans, for example, the type of nose, thickness of lips, shape of eyes and eyebrows.”
Cooperating and working sooner
In a rustic the place, based on the group Causa en Común, 41 individuals disappear each day, you will need to have instruments that help and facilitate the search for missing individuals all through the nation.
What’s subsequent is to maintain wanting for gaps or holes the place sure processes have to be made extra environment friendly. “We are waiting to see how these artificial intelligence tools operate, to see if they work, the improvements that need to be made, and also to understand what the workflow is within the organizations that make up the National Search System,” mentioned Horcasitas.
Favennec identified that the implementation of AI in search and location processes has been effectively acquired by teams and authorities, however added that it’s essential to know that the know-how “is not magic, it helps to process information faster and better…In a crisis where so many things are mixed in so many different ways, what is needed is collaboration.”