In Mexico, tens of thousands of families are searching for missing relatives, and many of them are children. Two university teams are developing tools based on artificial intelligence (AI - programs that learn from data and make predictions) to make these searches easier.
One such mother is 52-year-old Veronica Rosas. Her son Diego disappeared at age 16 in September 2015 in the city of Ecatepec, when he left home to meet friends. The prosecutor's office said a criminal group kidnapped him, but did not establish which one, why, or whether he is alive. "Eleven years have passed, and I still do not know where Diego is. There is no line of investigation," Rosas said at a protest in Mexico City.
To help in such cases, the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) developed the Regresa ("Come Back") tool. It uses anthropometry - measurements of the human body - to create an image of how the faces of missing children may have changed over the years since their disappearance. Families often ask for photographs to be updated, since investigations last for years.
In the United States, India and China, facial recognition and aging programs are already used to search for kidnapped children. In Mexico, some prosecutor's offices also use such technologies, but most programs rely on open photo databases that do not reflect typical Mexican features. The developers of Regresa took a different path: they created their own image bank from hundreds of photographs and data from 75 Mexican volunteers so that the portraits would be closer to local appearances.
Anthropologist Ana Juarez, one of the founders of the project, explained that Regresa applies a different approach to aging: many programs work only with the contours or textures of the face or add filters that imitate wrinkles, while here they strive for a scientific method showing how a person grows craniofacially (that is, how the craniofacial area develops).
Another tool is being developed by anthropologist Emiliano Solla of the private Ibero-American University. He is compiling a map of the missing by sex, age and circumstances of disappearance so that families can refine their search. Among the observations based on data from the State of Mexico (the most populous in the country): many of the missing are young women who disappear on the way to school or work or on the way back.
Rosas, upon learning about Regresa, called the initiative important. She set up a homemade mailbox with a photograph of 16-year-old Diego on Mexico City's main avenue to receive information about his whereabouts or birthday greetings. Karla Lechuga created a search collective after the disappearance of her 19-year-old son Jeshua in 2025. Such groups install "peace boxes" in churches across the country to collect information, put up photographs of the missing and call on criminal groups to send anonymous messages. "We found some alive, unfortunately others not," Lechuga says.
The new AI tools are still developments rather than finished products, and their effectiveness remains to be assessed. But they give families hope for more accurate images and systematized data.