Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said on Sunday the state had in the past been the main violator of human rights in the country.

“As a president, and at the same time as commander of the country’s armed forces, I will never give the order to massacre, to repress the people of Mexico,” said Lopez Obrador at an event in which his government set out plans to end disappearances in Mexico. Neither would he back a policy of “an eye for an eye” that tried to tackle “violence with violence.”

Since late 2006, tens of thousands of people are registered as disappeared in Mexico, where fighting between drug cartels and their clashes with security forces have been blamed for more than 200,000 deaths. The violence has been punctuated by mass killings, some of which have drawn international condemnation of the Mexican past authorities. Most notorious was the 2014 disappearance of 43 student teachers in the southwestern city of Iguala.

The event on Sunday set out plans to increase coordination between authorities, relatives and emergency services under a “national search system” designed to track down the disappeared. Lopez Obrador said the government would spare no expense in its efforts to find the missing and to put names on some 26,000 unidentified bodies currently in storage.