The city of Guadalajara in Mexico is scheduled to host four World Cup matches next year, and labourers are working around the clock to revamp infrastructure in time for the tournament.

On account of frenzied construction, the city’s roads are presently a bona fide mess, constituting a perpetual headache for those who must transit them.

But Guadalajara has a much bigger problem than traffic. The metropolis is the capital of the western state of Jalisco, which happens to possess the highest number of disappeared people in all of Mexico.

The official tally of Jalisco’s disappeared is close to 16,000, out of a total of more than 130,000 countrywide. However, the frequent reluctance of family members to report missing persons for fear of retribution means the true toll is undoubtedly higher.

Now, with the World Cup fast approaching, Mexican authorities are also working overtime to sanitise Guadalajara’s image. For months, local officials have been threatening to remove the portraits and signs from the towering “roundabout of the disappeared” in the centre of the city, effectively re-disappearing them.

I recently spent five days in Guadalajara and paid a visit to the roundabout, a few kilometres’ walk from my accommodation. The closer I got to the site, the more posters proliferated across electrical poles and sidewalk planters featuring the faces and identifying information of the disappeared. Some of these posters also appeared plastered in larger form onto the monument itself.

There was, for example, 32-year-old Elda Adriana Valdez Montoya, last seen in Guadalajara on August 10, 2020. And 19-year-old Jordy Alejandro Cardenas Flores, last seen on May 19, 2022, in the nearby city of Tlaquepaque. There was 16-year-old Cristofer Aaron Leobardo Ramirez Camarena, last seen in the Jalisco municipality of Tlajomulco de Zuniga on April 21, 2024. And 67-year-old Martha Leticia Diaz Lopez, last seen in Guadalajara on June 27, 2025.

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In the case of Cardenas Flores, the poster specified that the young man had been “taken” on May 19 by agents from the state prosecutor’s office, from which appointment he never returned.

While there is a tendency to blame Mexico’s astronomical disappearance rates on violent drug cartels, including the notorious Jalisco New Generation Cartel, the government is thoroughly implicated in the phenomenon, as well – whether by direct action, collaboration with criminal outfits, or simply in terms of safeguarding the panorama of near-total impunity that permits such crimes to flourish.

It bears underscoring, too, that the vast majority of disappearances took place following the launch in 2006 of Mexico’s so-called “war on drugs”, which not only failed to resolve the drug issue but also set the stage for more than 460,000 homicides in the country. The war effort was backed by – who else? – the United States, which rarely misses out on an opportunity for blood-soaked hemispheric meddling.

But heaven forbid World Cup spectators be subjected to such a morbid reality – although it is becoming rather difficult to cover up the discovery of mass clandestine graves and hundreds of bags containing human remains in the vicinity of the Guadalajara football stadium.

While in Guadalajara, I spoke with Maribel Cedeno, a representative of the Guerreros Buscadores de Jalisco (Warrior Searchers of Jalisco), one of various collectives dedicated to the search for the missing in the face of willful government inaction. Her brother, Jose Gil Cedeno Rosales, was disappeared on September 21, 2021, in Tlajomulco de Zuniga.

As Cedeno commented to me, “absolutely nothing has changed” during the presidency of Claudia Sheinbaum, who assumed office last year after promising a more sympathetic approach to the issue of Mexico’s disappeared. Once in power, Sheinbaum apparently forgot her own pledge, effectively condemning countless Mexicans whose loved ones are missing to a state of continuous psychological torment.

Remarking on the expansive measures the government is pursuing to provide security for the World Cup, Cedeno demanded: “But where is our security? Where is the security for our family members, or for those of us whose lives are at risk because we are searching for the missing?”

They are good questions. And yet they are not ones that are keeping the authorities up at night.

In March, the Guerreros Buscadores de Jalisco discovered a clandestine crematorium on a ranch outside the town of Teuchitlan, an hour from Guadalajara, which was reportedly utilised by the Jalisco New Generation Cartel as a recruitment and training centre in addition to an extermination site.

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Curiously, Mexican authorities had seized the ranch months earlier, but hadn’t managed to notice any of the human bone fragments or the hundreds of shoes littering the place.

On my final day in Guadalajara, I took an Uber out to the ranch, which appeared on the Uber app as “Campo de adiestramiento y exterminio” – training and extermination camp.

Thinking better of it, I put the Teuchitlan town centre as my destination, and while en route proposed to the driver that I pay him in cash to swing by the ranch, as well. He made the sign of the cross, but agreed.

A gregarious middle-aged man from eastern Jalisco, the driver had spent 11 years as an undocumented worker in California and Oregon; his son was studying engineering at a university in Michigan. He had personally known several people, including two sisters, who had been disappeared from his hometown, and lamented that the only time the Mexican authorities seemed inspired to seek justice for homicides was when the victims themselves had been members of the security forces.

And although a die-hard football fan, the driver said he could not justify the state’s decision to pour massive quantities of money into a World Cup spectacle that would not remotely benefit the average Mexican.

In Teuchitlan, we took a brief stroll around the town’s colourful central plaza and bought a few beers, then programmed our destination to “Campo de adiestramiento y exterminio”, which led us down a dusty and isolated road patrolled by an ominous black vehicle. When we found the camp blocked by the Mexican National Guard – an outfit with which I have had my fair share of unpleasant run-ins – we returned to battle the traffic of Guadalajara.

To be sure, it is in the distinct interest of the Mexican government to retroactively cover up whatever it can about Teuchitlan, which has already caused enough damage due to the uncharacteristically wide international media coverage the case received.

But at the end of the day, Mexico is itself one big mass grave. And while efforts to bury that grave for the World Cup may be a first-half goal for organised crime and complicit politicians alike, the score could still be settled in the second half – by the people who refuse to let their disappeared loved ones be definitively disappeared.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.