Mexico turns to artificial intelligence to track missing persons amid 110,000 disappearances

The United States of Mexico is turning to a new artificial intelligence (AI) program it hopes will help solve missing persons cases. The program, known as Angelus 2.0 is a computer software program that began development four years ago with the aim of helping Mexican authorities track some of the 110,000 missing persons who have disappeared, according to a recent report by Noticias Telemundo.

While the loved ones of many missing Mexicans have lost hope amid cartel violence rocking their homeland, Angelus 2.0 is conducting searches in a government office not far from Mexico City. The software cross references and filtering through multiple databases and scores of documents to find subtle links.

“We are producing relevant evidence for the location of tens of thousands of disappeared people,” said historian Javier Yankelevich, a soft-spoken 34-year-old who at times got emotional during his interview with Noticias Telemundo. 

“This is the type of response that is needed,” said Yankelevich, who has been working with the software for about three years with both the National Council of Science and Technology and Mexico’s National Search Commission together with academics.

According to reports, the AI program is targeting a date range between 1964 and 1985 because that’s when a high number of people were purportedly kidnapped

Angelus is currently focused on reviewing facts about people who disappeared between 1964 and 1985 since it was a period when disappearances reportedly surged.

The AI software collects basic facts about the missing person such their last known location, the identities of potential witnesses or the name of co-residents and even cellmates if they were ever imprisoned.

Meanwhile, those facts are pooled together and presented to a special team of archivists, computer scientists, historians, and those specializing in genetic links to offer possible places the person could be.

Yankelevich told Noticias Telemundo that Mexican prosecutors have shown an interest as to whether the AI software could help locate missing persons who are subjects or witnesses in their criminal investigations.

The program creates charts to demonstrate what connections there are between different missing persons to see if there’s a link with various suspected perpetrators in different locations, allowing investigators to get a visual as to what places may have higher frequencies of disappearances and which incidents may be more than coincidence.

While the AI software can be used to locate people who may have been victimized by ongoing cartel violence, it could also be used to locate people who were forcibly kidnapped by authoritarian regimes throughout Central and South America.

“To the extent that you find the victims of forced disappearance, you will find information that can be used to do justice. And to the extent that you do justice, you will find useful information to find the victims,” Yankelevich said. 

According to the report, only one agent has been held accountable for a forced disappearance, an incident which dates back decades to the days of the Mexican counterinsurgency.