The city of Guadalajara in Mexico is scheduled to host four World Cup matches next year, and labourers are working around the clock to revamp infrastructure in time for the tournament.

On account of frenzied construction, the city’s roads are presently a bona fide mess, constituting a perpetual headache for those who must transit them.

But Guadalajara has a much bigger problem than traffic. The metropolis is the capital of the western state of Jalisco, which happens to possess the highest number of disappeared people in all of Mexico.

The official tally of Jalisco’s disappeared is close to 16,000, out of a total of more than 130,000 countrywide. However, the frequent reluctance of family members to report missing persons for fear of retribution means the true toll is undoubtedly higher.

Now, with the World Cup fast approaching, Mexican authorities are also working overtime to sanitise Guadalajara’s image. For months, local officials have been threatening to remove the portraits and signs from the towering “roundabout of the disappeared” in the centre of the city, effectively re-disappearing them.

I recently spent five days in Guadalajara and paid a visit to the roundabout, a few kilometres’ walk from my accommodation. The closer I got to the site, the more posters proliferated across electrical poles and sidewalk planters featuring the faces and identifying information of the disappeared. Some of these posters also appeared plastered in larger form onto the monument itself.

There was, for example, 32-year-old Elda Adriana Valdez Montoya, last seen in Guadalajara on August 10,........

© Al Jazeera