Finding some of the approximately 110,000 reported missing people in the country could now be just a few clicks away. This is the premise and hope behind Angelus 2.0, a computational program that is being developed by a government institution in Mexico that was established four years ago.
Angelus works in that office, while groups of families and mothers of missing people have had to perfect methods of digging the ground across the country to see if they can find traces or the remains of their loved ones. It was designed to digest thousands of documents and databases to find connections and patterns that elude the human eye, which it then presents in a visual set of links.
And with that, the algorithms may be able to reveal someone’s whereabouts or refine where to dig. “We’re producing relevant clues for the location of tens of thousands of missing people,” says historian Javier Yankelevich, a 34-year-old academic who is a member of the National Search Commission, the state agency dedicated to clarifying the whereabouts of those who have not been located.
Angelus is currently focused on reviewing what is known about people who were forcibly disappeared between 1964 and 1985, part of a particularly dark period in recent Mexican history—nicknamed the “Dirty War” or “counterinsurgency”—in which authorities and groups linked to the government of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) suppressed and systematically persecuted those they considered “disruptors” or insurgents with violence.