When a country hosts the World Cup, the world sees the stadiums, the flags, the goals. What it doesn’t always see are the people displaced, detained, or disappeared in the process of making all that spectacle possible.

A network of Mexican civil society organizations is trying to change that. The Red Nacional de Organismos Civiles de Derechos Humanos, known as Red TDT, has established a dedicated human rights observatory to track potential abuses tied to the 2026 FIFA World Cup. The observatory launched around June 6, with presentations held in Guadalajara on June 10-11.

What the observatory actually does

The observatory is designed to monitor threats facing populations that tend to get squeezed when a mega-event rolls into town: LGBT+ communities, migrants, homeless individuals, and street vendors.

Mexico’s situation carries its own weight. Amnesty International has reported over 134,000 missing persons in the country as of 2026. Families of the disappeared have been staging ongoing protests, and a security deployment involving up to 100,000 personnel for the tournament raises obvious questions about how that force will be directed, and against whom.

The observatory provides a structured framework for documenting incidents in real time across host cities. Rather than relying on after-the-fact reports, the idea is to create a contemporaneous record that holds both FIFA and the Mexican government accountable while the world is still watching.

The broader coalition behind the effort

Red TDT isn’t operating in isolation. The observatory sits within a larger advocacy ecosystem that includes Dignity 2026, a coalition of more than 13 organizations spanning the US, Canada, and Mexico. Dignity 2026 has been lobbying FIFA and host governments for enhanced human rights protections since the 2018-2024 planning phase of the tournament.

The tri-national structure of Dignity 2026 also matters. The 2026 World Cup is co-hosted by the US, Canada, and Mexico, making it the first tournament spread across three countries. That means three different legal frameworks, three different security apparatuses, and three different sets of vulnerabilities for at-risk populations.

Why mega-events keep producing the same problems

FIFA has, on paper, adopted human rights policies. The organization committed to respecting human rights in its statutes back in 2016. But the gap between policy language and on-the-ground reality has been a recurring theme at every major tournament since.

For the 134,000-plus families already searching for disappeared loved ones in Mexico, the World Cup represents both a risk and an opportunity. The risk is that heightened security operations lead to more abuses. The opportunity is that global media attention creates a window where those abuses can’t be easily ignored.

The deployment of up to 100,000 security personnel across Mexico’s host cities is not a small number. How that force interacts with marginalized communities during the tournament will be one of the real tests of whether FIFA’s human rights commitments amount to anything more than ink on paper.