Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco, August 18, 2026 – Puerto Vallarta’s official missing-person caseload now stands at 568, an increase of 32 since the close of 2025. However, a new assertion that five to ten local cases appear each day is not supported by the latest state database and should not be treated as an official daily rate.
The July 31 version of the Jalisco State Registry of Missing Persons lists 526 men and 42 women who remain missing after they were last seen in Puerto Vallarta. It also lists 727 people who have been located, including 683 found alive and 44 found dead.
Those figures make an important distinction. The 568 count is the active caseload accumulated across many years. It does not mean 568 people disappeared during 2025, nor does the rise since December mean every added record has a 2026 disappearance date. Older cases can enter the registry months or years later, while localizations, duplicate records and other closures can reduce the total.
Vallarta Daily downloaded the state’s open dataset on August 18 and reviewed every record listed under Puerto Vallarta as the municipality of disappearance. The file contains 1,318 local records. That total includes the 568 unresolved cases, 727 localizations, and 23 records closed due to reasons such as duplication or jurisdiction.
Only 57 records in that file carry a disappearance date between January and July 2026. Of those, 31 people remain missing, 24 have been located, and two records were closed. Sixty-five reports were filed during the same seven months, since eight involved disappearances dated before 2026.
The 57 recorded disappearance dates equal roughly one case every 3.7 days. A separate statewide series in the same registry counts 1,479 disappearances reported across Jalisco during those seven months, close to seven each day across the entire state.
That evidence does not support a rate of five to ten new disappearances each day in Puerto Vallarta alone.
The claim arose after Susana Muñoz, a member of Una Luz para los Desaparecidos de Puerto Vallarta, said that her collective learns of about five to ten cases daily and sees new search notices in its group. She also estimated that about 60 percent of affected families file a complaint with prosecutors.
Her account may describe the volume of information reaching a family collective, but the published interview did not provide a count of unique cases sorted by municipality, disappearance date, or official report status. Search notices can also be recirculated, refer to older cases, or involve people last seen elsewhere in the region.
The gap does not establish that every alert outside the registry is false. Some families contact search groups before approaching authorities, fear can discourage complaints, and a monthly database can lag behind current events. The registry is also revised as cases are added, located, corrected, or closed. Those limits matter, but they do not make an informal estimate equivalent to a verified local incidence rate.
The most recent figures also show why monthly snapshots need context. Vallarta Daily reported 559 unresolved cases through April. The total reached 568 by the June cutoff and remained there through July, while the number of localizations rose from 721 to 727. New entries and resolved cases can therefore offset each other even when the headline caseload does not move.
None of that diminishes the scale of 568 people still missing or the work families continue each week. The crisis remains visible in active search notices and in the missing-person displays families maintain at Plaza de Armas. Men comprise more than 92 percent of the city’s unresolved registry entries.
Families do not need to wait 72 hours after losing contact with someone. The Jalisco Special Prosecutor in Missing Persons says a report can be made immediately at 33 3030 6000 extension 16724. The regional Search Commission office is at Avenida de los Grandes Lagos 236, Building A, in Fluvial Vallarta, with weekday service from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. The commission also receives calls around the clock at 33 1514 5422.
