The revelation that as many as 27,000 people may have gone missing in Mexico in recent years renews attention to the huge human toll left by the war on crime that former President Felipe Calderon waged during his six years in office, McClatchy Newspapers report. Combined with the 70,000 dead acknowledged by the administration of President Enrique Pena Nieto, who succeeded Calderon on Dec. 1, the number of the disappeared makes the Calderon tenure the bloodiest period in Mexican history since the Mexican Revolution of the early 20th century.

Human rights campaigners said the numbers place Mexico far above some of the better-known Latin American human catastrophes of decades past, including the rule of military regimes in Argentina, Chile and Brazil and civil wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador. Lia Limon, Mexico’s deputy interior secretary for human rights and legal affairs, acknowledged that the government had compiled a list of 27,000 missing people after meeting with representatives of the New York-based advocacy group Human Rights Watch. Mexican Interior Secretary Miguel Angel Osorio Chong promised to “look for all of them.” He said: “We start from a fundamental fact: little information, little evidence and no rules.”