Overview
- Patricia Negrete Tafoya, a member of the search collective Una Promesa por Cumplir, was shot dead while leaving her job at the Hospital Regional de Pénjamo on June 23, 2026, according to statements from colectivos and rights groups.
- The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and Mexican NGOs have demanded that investigators treat her role as a buscadora as a central line of inquiry and apply a gender perspective to the probe.
- More than 140 search colectivos and civil-society groups have publicly asked Governor Libia Dennise García Muñoz Ledo and Attorney General Gerardo Vázquez Alatriste to release a public report on investigations, strengthen protection measures for searchers, and stop criminalizing families of the disappeared.
- Human-rights monitors place this killing in a wider pattern of attacks on searchers: Artículo 19 records 43 lethal aggressions against buscadores since 2010 and ONU-DH has documented five human-rights defenders killed in 2026, three of them searchers in Guanajuato.
- The case raises immediate accountability questions for state authorities and could trigger demands for transparent investigative results, expanded protective measures for searchers and their families, and official attention to structural drivers such as criminal control, forced recruitment and possible corruption links.