Raúl Servín, a waiter in Guadalajara, has watched Mexico’s preparations for the men’s World Cup this summer with frustration.
Servín spends several days a week searching for his son, who disappeared in 2018 aged 20 and never returned, becoming one of 134,000 people to have gone missing as Mexico grapples with its cartels’ rampant growth. Many families feel authorities have dedicated scant resources to finding their loved ones.
For this summer’s football tournament, however, Servín has seen Guadalajara pull out all the stops, refurbishing public squares and roads, obtaining expensive police drones and Cybertruck patrol cars, and even cancelling school classes on match days to ease traffic.