San Juan, Puerto Rico — Although more than 1,000 people are reported missing each year, according to Puerto Rico Police Bureau statistics, the agency did not make data from all those cases available to the Centro de Periodismo Investigativo, prompting CPI to file a writ of mandamus against the Police on Monday in the San Juan Superior Court.
Last November, CPI journalists Jeniffer Wiscovitch Padilla and Omaya Sosa Pascual asked the Police for a list of people reported missing in Puerto Rico from 2014 through 2025, including each person’s name, municipality of residence, the last place they were seen, the date, sex and age. Two months after the initial request, the Missing Persons Division told the journalists it could not produce a list or database because the information was not organized or archived in that format, and that its response would be limited to some of the missing-person notices it sends to the press.
“This is a case involving a matter of enormous public interest for which the government has not made the information it produces available: missing persons. How can we analyze where people are disappearing most often, whether they are male or female, under what circumstances they disappear, or how many are found if we do not have access to the data?” said CPI Executive Director Carla Minet.
Out of the roughly 10,000 missing persons the agency itself projects were reported during that period, the Police have provided the CPI with only 732 of those notices — information on less than 10% of the people reported missing during those years. Although the journalists followed up by email, text messages, phone calls and visits to Police Headquarters, the agency has not turned over the full information requested and maintains that this is all it has available.
“Given the large number of people who go missing in Puerto Rico — and the fact that the circumstances of many of those cases, the status of the investigations, and how many are resolved are often unknown — we requested the information from the Police. But after months of efforts, they have turned over very little,” Wiscovitch Padilla said. “This case is yet another example of the lack of transparency and the situations journalists face when the government obstructs our work. But rather than discouraging us, it pushes us to keep moving forward and doing our job,” she added.
The mandamus petition states that “the parties against whom this action is brought have a ministerial duty to deliver the requested information.” It also stipulates that the information sought by the journalists “is not protected in any way by any privilege or claim of confidentiality, nor is it covered by any of the exceptions to the right of access to information.”
The lawsuit came as the only remaining way to obtain the data after the news organization exhausted all administrative remedies.
The legal action was filed by attorneys Steven P. Lausell Recurt, Luis José Torres Asencio and Judith W. Berkan Barnett, along with clinical law student Alexis Jiménez of the Access to Information Project at the Inter American University of Puerto Rico School of Law.
