Lorenza Cano seized by gunmen in Guanajuato state after her husband and son shot dead in attack

A Mexican woman who spent five years looking for her disappeared brother has herself been abducted in an attack in which her husband and son were shot dead.

Lorenza Cano, one of Mexico’s many volunteer searchers trying to find the country’s 114,000 desaparecidos, was seized late on Monday by a group of gunmen who burst into her home in the northern city of Salamanca.

Farmers in Texcaltitlán in central Mexico, tired of being extorted, chased down gang members and killed 10 earlier this month

A drug cartel in central Mexico has kidnapped 14 local residents, including four children, in apparent retaliation for an uprising by angry farmers earlier this month that killed 10 cartel gunmen, officials said.

Farmers in the village of Texcaltitlán and a neighboring hamlet had apparently grown tired of cartel extortions. Armed only with sickles and hunting rifles, they chased down suspected gang members amid bursts of automatic gunfire on 8 December, hacking, shooting and burning them. Four villagers also died in the clash.

Activists say the review of 113,000 missing people in Mexico is a ploy to reduce the number ahead of the presidential election

When the Mexican government announced it would review the official register of “disappeared” people, it was presented as an effort to eliminate false entries. But with little transparency over how it was being done, activists suspected a ploy to reduce the number ahead of the 2024 election.

The government has now announced it was able to confirm just 12,377 of the more than 113,000 cases of disappeared people.