So the way you're laying this out makes it sound as if the government is just sitting on its hands here. Well,

it changed in the 2000s. So it started to recognize this was a problem. And in 2017, there was some big legislation passed that set up national search commissions, local search commissions, tidied up the register, gave a better definition of the crime. And so since then, more has been done. This year, there's been an amendment to that law that's setting up a National Human Identification Center. So a center focused on identifying dead bodies and a DNA database. So things are slowly getting better. But compared with the magnitude of the problem, there remains a lot to be done.

But given the scale of the problem, as you've laid it out here, and the fact that it is changing so slowly, that leaves a lot of people still stuck not knowing. Yeah,

I mean, hitherto, and until today, the lack of state support means that groups mainly made up of female relatives, often mothers of the missing, have done the work that the authorities fail to. They're known as colectivos, and some of them are simply support networks. Others actually do things like digging fields to look for hidden graves. So they also hold workshops, they investigate cases, they help draft laws. They're really the pressure on the government and work like the government should be doing to solve this problem. Maria, the mother we talked to earlier, leads one of those collectives. She said no one in the state did very much to help her. Some state governments are doing more, but, you know, the continued existence of the collective says a lot about the continued failings of the state. Thanks

very much for joining us, Sarah. Thanks,

Jason.