Thousands of people have held protests across Mexico to highlight the country’s many enforced disappearances and demand more action by officials to tackle them.

Relatives and friends of missing people, as well as human rights activists, marched through the streets of Mexico City, Guadalajara, Córdoba and other cities calling for justice and urged the government of President Claudia Sheinbaum to help find their missing loved ones.

More than 130,000 people have been reported as missing in Mexico. Almost all the disappearances have occurred since 2007, when then-President Felipe Calderón launched his “war on drugs”.

In many cases, those disappeared have been forcibly recruited into the drug cartels – or murdered for resisting.

While drug cartels and organised crime groups are the main perpetrators, security forces are also blamed for deaths and disappearances.

The wide spread of cities, states and municipalities where demonstrations were held illustrated the extent to which the problem of forced disappearances affects communities and families across Mexico.

From one end of the country to the other – from southern states like Oaxaca to northern ones like Sonora and Durango – activists and family members of disappeared people turned out in their thousands carrying placards with their relatives’ faces on them, to demand the authorities do more to address the issue.

In Mexico City, the march brought traffic in the capital to a standstill, as the protest moved down the main thoroughfare.

Many affected families have formed search teams, known as “buscadores”, who scour the countryside and the deserts of northern Mexico, following tip-offs, often from the cartels themselves, as to the whereabouts of mass graves.

The buscadores carry out the searches and their activism at great personal risk. Following the recent discovery in Jalisco state of an apparent narco-ranch by a search group, several of the buscadores involved were disappeared.

The State Attorney General’s office later concluded that there was no evidence of a crematorium at the site.

The United Nations has called it “a human tragedy of enormous proportions”.

Mexico is experiencing a level of disappearances that surpasses some of Latin America’s worst tolls.

Around 40,000 disappeared in Guatemala’s 36-year civil war, which ended in 1996. An estimated 30,000 disappeared in Argentina under its military rule between 1976 and 1983.