The interactive map is a result of merging UBPD data of accumulated numbers of reported missing individuals by Colombian municipalities (1921-2016) and DANE sources of geographical data (latitudes, longitudes and geometries of said circumscriptions). The combination was possible thanks to the common variable referring to unique and standardized municipal DANE codes in Colombia. This is an attempt to reproduce a UBPD visualization.
Main takeaways:
In total, there are 111,640 uniquely identified missing persons in Colombia, - by personal information and by registered data of the place of the disappearance or “last seen” (last update: 2022-11-15) (UBPD, 2024).
The number of cases with information about the place of disappearance, at a municipal level, is 85,376.
UBPD (2024) offers data of missing persons distributed across 1,034 unique municipalities (~94% of the country). The final map below shows 84,768 missing persons in total across 1,028 territories. This change is due to the removal of certain observations (rows) in the combined database without concrete spatial locations (cases with geographic references labeled as ‘undetermined’ and/or ‘without information’).
Overall, Medellín is the municipality with the highest number of reported cases with 3,113, followed by Bogotá, D.C. with 1,710.