In 2021, Hector Daniel Flores Hernández was reported missing. Two years later, his father, Héctor Flores, saw his son’s image speak to him again. In a video generated by artificial intelligence technology that digitally animates still images and provides synthesized voices, Héctor Daniel Flores Hernández is seen telling the story of how he disappeared from his home in Guadalajara at the age of 19, and demanding that authorities find him alive. From then on, his father began searching for a way to live.
“I couldn’t finish watching it at first,” Hector Flores said in an interview when the video was first made. “It took a while to process it. It’s heartbreaking to see them say what they know from the investigation with the last picture you have.”
The video was part of an initiative launched in 2023 to give voice to missing person reports related to relatives in the western state of Jalisco by Luz de Esperanza and Alas de Libertad, associations of relatives of missing persons who organize to carry out search operations, raise awareness and demand justice. Flores, co-founder of Luz de Esperanza, said the effort continues and is “a great tool not only for search, but also for raising awareness and creating empathy.”
Disappearances are so common in Mexico that the country has recorded more than 132,000 missing persons since the Ministry of the Interior’s National Register of Disappeared and Missing Persons began recording in 1964. Human Rights Watch reports that the government has not taken sufficient steps to prevent disappearances or punish those responsible.
President Claudia Sheinbaum has acknowledged that most disappearances are linked to organized crime, and Amnesty International says the problem can be traced to general violence and insecurity. Complete official data on the specific causes of all disappearances do not exist. The National Register contains data on past disappearances committed by authorities against left-wing groups and guerrillas, but the numbers mostly date from recent years, when the fight against criminal organizations intensified.
In March 2025, the Sheinbaum government announced a series of new initiatives to respond more quickly to disappearances, treat them as seriously as known kidnappings, make statistics more available, and improve support for victims.
Meanwhile, this video effort is part of a new generation of projects that are turning to AI and machine learning to solve the crisis. Universities, search groups, other organizations, and government authorities have developed and implemented AI to investigate missing persons using techniques such as database analysis, forensic identification, or age progression prediction.
“The goal is that these tools will be useful for the organizations that make up the national investigative system, such as the public prosecutor’s office, commissions and semefo (forensic services), to support and facilitate the work of people,” said Andrea Horcasitas, head of the human rights program at the Ibero-American University in Mexico City. This program is part of the Consortium on the Ethical Use of AI in the Search for Disappeared Persons, which was established in October 2025 to discuss the use of technology in the search for missing persons in Mexico and to think about the responsible use of AI in this field.
The Lab-Co (Lab-Co), a Mexico-based non-governmental organization, works to find new solutions to security, violence, and access to justice issues in Latin America. The institute has developed three projects that incorporate artificial intelligence in searching for missing persons.
The first is IdentIA, a tool that uses AI to identify and classify photos of tattoos on unidentified bodies, explained Lab-Co Executive Director Thomas Favennec.
Users can search for files by text using the words within the tattoo or a verbal description of the tattoo, or through an image-based search that directly compares photos to a historical database of tattoos belonging to unidentified people.
“It doesn’t matter the quality or angle of the tattoo. The system works using vector search and does not require the internet. No sensitive content is uploaded to the internet, so no one’s information is compromised,” said Angel Serrano, Data and Technology Coordinator at Lab-Co.
Serrano demonstrated how IdentIA can perform tattoo searches in seconds and cross-reference them with missing person reports.
The system was incorporated into Jalisco’s missing persons database system this week and is being implemented in forensic services in Quintana Roo and Zacatecas.
Favennec said the institute’s other tool is ContextIA, which can process multiple unstructured documents from research files and extract clear data. ContextIA can answer specific queries using direct quotes and page references. Extract specific data such as phone numbers, license plates, and coordinates. And, as the name suggests, it cross-references cases in the context of different databases.
The third tool allows names to be analyzed in a structured and more powerful way, allowing users to find matches in different databases where names are written in different ways. So far, Fabenek said, the system has been applied to deaths whose identities have not been confirmed.
“The situation is complicated because families don’t know this is happening and there are problems with databases that don’t intersect,” he said. “Finding families is difficult, so what we have developed is something that allows comparative analysis between missing person situations and forensic service records from different states across the country.”
The work is part of a project called Building an Alliance for the Search and Human Identification of Missing Persons, funded by the European Union and the British Embassy through the Frontier Tech Hub Initiative.
Horcasitas, of the University of Iberoamericana, noted that some prosecutors’ offices are already using a tool called ImageBox that cleans up facial images of people found in morgues, forensic medical services, and specialized forensic laboratories in Mexico City to help identify individuals.
“This will ensure that people are not forced to look at heartbreaking photographs, which has an obvious psychosocial impact on those who have to go through mortuary inventories,” she said.
The Mexico City Prosecutor’s Office used a “healing” technique that uses artificial intelligence to fill in, restore, or delete selected parts of an image, allowing damaged areas to be added or repaired with realistic results. Following this, authorities will conduct a reverse search and issue a bulletin to locate the person’s family.
CNN contacted the Metropolitan Prosecutor’s Office for more details, but has not yet received a response.
The Regresa project, developed by researchers at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), aims to create images of what children who went missing years ago look like today to help families find them.
When a person goes missing, the standard search protocol is based on the most recent photographs available. If children and adolescents are not detected quickly, they may go unrecognized in the medium to long term because their faces and bodies change and grow rapidly.
The initiative, led by Ana Itzel Juárez Martín, PhD in anthropology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), is still a pilot program, but it combines AI tools with knowledge and techniques from physical and social anthropology.
The program’s algorithms are designed to perform an age progression using photos of missing children and determine what those children will look like when they are 5, 15, or 30 years old. It can also be used to show what current adults looked like as children.
According to official statistics, more than 118,000 minors under the age of 17 were reported missing from 1964 to September 2025. A 2022 report from the Mexican Children’s Rights Network notes that when minors go missing, recruitment networks can integrate them into organized crime or draw them into sexual exploitation and human trafficking.
Juárez Martín explained that the goal of the Regresa project is to train an algorithm that learns the natural biological growth of the face, based on facial shapes and growth patterns that are particularly common in Mexican people.
“There are already several image banks for research, but none that are focused solely on Mexicans,” she says. “This algorithm is therefore the first of its kind and will be trained to identify the diversity that exists among Mexicans, for example in nose type, lip thickness, eye and eyebrow shape.”
Work together faster
In a country where 41 people go missing every day, according to the Causa en Común group, it is important to have tools to support and facilitate searches for missing people across the country.
The next thing to do is to keep looking for gaps and holes where certain processes need to be made more efficient. “We are waiting to see how these artificial intelligence tools work, whether they work, what improvements are needed, and to understand what the workflows are within the organizations that make up the national search system,” Horkasitas said.
Fabenec noted that the introduction of AI in the search and location process has been well received by organizations and authorities, but added that people need to know that the technology is “not magic, but helps us process information faster and better.” In a crisis where so many things are mixed together in so many ways, what is needed is collaboration.
