Cancún, Playa del Carmen and Chetumal Account for 81% of Quintana Roo’s Disappearances

Cancún, Quintana Roo — Three municipalities in Quintana Roo rank among the 100 Mexican municipalities with the most disappeared people, and together they account for 81% of every case recorded in the state, according to a report by the Red Lupa monitoring network of the Mexican Institute for Human Rights and Democracy.

The three are Benito Juárez, home to Cancún; Othón P. Blanco, where the state capital Chetumal is located; and Solidaridad, which includes Playa del Carmen. The findings are based on data from the National Registry of Disappeared and Unlocated Persons (RNPDNO).

Cancún ranks 35th nationwide

Benito Juárez places 35th nationally with 758 disappeared people — 576 men and 182 women — for an accumulated rate of 8 cases per 100,000 residents. Cancún’s tally rose sharply year over year, climbing from 494 to 680, according to figures registered as of May 2025.

Othón P. Blanco ranks 69th nationally with 387 records, 310 of them men and 77 women. Though its total is smaller than Cancún’s, the southern municipality posts the highest accumulated rate in the state: 17 disappeared people per 100,000 residents.

Playa del Carmen sits at 78th nationally with 364 cases, 216 men and 148 women, and a rate of 11 per 100,000 — roughly the state average.

A gender gap, and alarm in tourist hubs

The report documents a clear gender imbalance. In Cancún and Othón P. Blanco, men make up more than 75% of registered cases, with 576 and 310 male victims respectively.

In tourist destinations, the disappearance of women and teenage girls has been rising. Cancún counts 182 disappeared women, while Playa del Carmen records 148. In Playa del Carmen, women represent 41% of all cases, placing the resort town among the municipalities nationwide that exceed the national average of 22% for female disappearances.

Cases surged after 2019

Disappearances in Quintana Roo began climbing sharply in 2019. The year 2025 set a peak, with 393 people still missing, above the 360 active cases recorded in 2024. The state’s accumulated total rose from 1,213 people in May 2024 to 1,552 in May 2025 — a steady increase.

As elsewhere in Mexico, families have taken on the work of searching the countryside themselves, citing slow institutions and the absence of comprehensive search legislation in the Quintana Roo Congress.

Romana Rivera Ramírez, founder of the Verdad, Memoria y Justicia collective in Quintana Roo, is looking for her daughter, Diana García Rivera, who was taken at age 20 on February 22, 2020, as she left a Cancún nightclub. Rivera Ramírez said authorities launch operations too late, carrying out searches that are “not for the living.”

The collective currently holds 176 active search files and has accompanied nearly 300 people, combing scrubland, swamps and the fringes of tourist areas in temperatures reaching 40 degrees Celsius and with local wildlife a constant risk.

131,800 missing nationwide

The Red Lupa report illustrates how concentrated the problem is nationally. The 100 municipalities it analyzed hold 56% of all disappeared people in Mexico and are spread across 24 states. The national registry totals more than 131,800 disappeared and unlocated people, with an average of 40 people vanishing each day, most of them between the ages of 15 and 19.

Tijuana, in Baja California, has the highest caseload in the country with more than 3,300 records, while Tultitlán, in the State of Mexico, occupies the 100th spot with 292 cases.

Across the 100 municipalities in the ranking, the average accumulated rate is 27 disappeared people per 100,000 residents.