Where did Mexico’s disappear? Many were in government graves all the time

After Guadalupe Aragón Sosa heard that her 44-year-old son had been killed in downtown Tijuana, he searched for him.

She gave police a sample of her DNA, but they said they found no hits when they checked it in a database of unidentified bodies.

She spent hours at the local morgue flipping through black-and-white photos of unclaimed bodies, but her Carlos was not one of them.

She searched fields and rubbish dumps on the outskirts of the city where it was known that local thugs were burying their victims and searching the land with a metal bar in search of a meat of rotten meat. She dug up about a dozen corpses, but not her son.

Nearly a year passed before she finally found out his fate at the end of 2018: he was in a government grave the whole time.

About 80,000 Mexicans have disappeared in the past 15 years and have never been found. Many are now thought to be in government custody – among the thousands of bodies that pass through mortuaries each year without ever being identified and ending up in ordinary graves.

The country’s leading human rights officer, Alejandro Encinas, called the problem a ‘humanitarian crisis and forensic emergency’.

“The state has for years relinquished its responsibility, not only to guarantee the safety of the people, but also to … give families the right to search and find and return with their families, he said last year.

A recent investigation by the news team Quinto Elemento Lab revealed through public records requests that there are nearly 39,000 unknown bodies ruling from 2006.

More than 28,000 of them were cremated or buried in public cemeteries. Another 2,589 were donated to medical schools. Most of the rest were still in morgues or could not be traced.

Government officials received praise from human rights advocates when they announced in late 2019 a plan to put together a team of national and international experts with the aim of identifying all the corpses and even bone fragments.

But the effort stalled amid the COVID-19 pandemic and the realization that the forensic challenges are more discouraging than expected.

“There are almost no cemeteries that have a good record of the location and number of people buried there,” said Roxana Enríquez Farias, a founder of the Mexican Forensic Anthropology Team, a non-profit organization that helped with state-level excavation plans.

Decomposing corpses are often stacked on top of each other, sometimes just in plastic bags, and the mixing of genetic materials makes it difficult to find useful samples.

“If you’re looking for a 17-year-old girl, you’ll have a match for a 43-year-old woman,” said Yanet Juarez, a researcher at the National School of Anthropology and History.

In many cases, the reports of the missing consist of nothing but names and ages without family DNA samples or other clues that could help match them with remains. When the state of Tamaulipas excavated 265 corpses and various coffins from a public cemetery in 2018, officials could only identify about 30 people.

Finding the body of a missing family member often amounts to a combination of happiness and perseverance.

“The first time I went to the morgue, they told me there were no unknown bodies, just one boy already identified,” said Gladys Quiroz Longoria, who remembers exactly what her 27-year-old son was doing. day he went missing and described the clothes to the authorities.

“They always told me there was nothing there … until the day they called to show me pictures.”

Her son, Eugenio Alexander Molina Quiroz, has been in the morgue in Tamaulipas for the past eight months.

In theory, every time a new body arrives at a mortuary, it should be placed in the refrigerator until it can be killed and traced for scars, tattoos, cavities and other features that can help identify it. DNA samples are supposed to be stored if needed later.

But in practice, many medical examiners simply cannot keep up with the body image.

The problem made headlines in 2018 when medical investigators in the state of Jalisco ran out of space and trapped more than 300 unknown bodies in two tractor trailers encircling the suburbs of Guadalajara until residents complained about the smell.

A similar scandal erupted that year in Tijuana, where the morgue was so trapped that officials began dumping several corpses in each narrow cold room and stacking corpses on the floor when the storage rooms had to be cleaned.

In a single day, three dozen corpses could turn up, almost all victims of shots. The morgue’s record for most autopsies performed in one day was 28, but its chief medical examiner at the time said he was actually only manned to perform about 10.

“We are living in a civil war,” medical examiner Jesús Ramón Escajadillo said in an interview in May.

The problem persists. Of the 4,132 bodies that entered Tijuana’s morgue last year, a quarter – 1,042 – ended up in government graves, almost all without being identified.

The violence that gripped Mexico began about 15 years ago when the government released soldiers on the streets to fight drug cartels. The past few years have been the bloodiest so far, with a record 34,648 murders recorded in 2019 and 34,515 last year.

At the same time, the ranks of the missing are still growing, with nearly 7,000 people reported missing last year.

The issue attracted international attention after the disappearance of 43 students from a teacher training college in the state of Guerrero in 2014, possibly after experiencing drug dealing.

The case encouraged massive street protests and made visible other families with missing loved ones, many of whom formed local collectives to search for and dig up surplus on their own.

Under increasing public pressure, the government of then-President Enrique Peña Nieto passed the Compulsory Disappearance General Act, which ordered the establishment of federal and state commissions of inquiry and a series of databases that would help identify unidentified human remains and missing persons. , to match.

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who won in 2018 as a landslide in part by promising these days to reduce the country’s violence and listen to its victims, met with families of the missing and promised to help.

Last year, commissions of inquiry were set up in each state and the government opened its first regional center for human identification in the northern state of Coahuila.

But Encinas, the secretary of human rights in Mexico, acknowledged that progress was likely to be slow.

In some cases, local governments deliberately kept bad records to cover up crimes, burying corpses they had not even examined, and they did not assign identification numbers and deliberately excluded them from the official counts of bodies in custody.

“We have tried to gather clear information so that we can leave the inconveniences and fraudsters behind in cases of forced disappearances that enable the previous authorities to ignore and avoid the scale of the problem,” Encinas said last year. “The fact is, the data is devastating.”

The latest setback was COVID-19, which officially killed 200,000 people in Mexico.

“The general expectation was that the issue of disappearance and identification would be one of the top priorities of the federal government,” said Humberto Guerrero Rosales, a member of a civic advisory council, on the matter formed in 2018. ‘came a global pandemic. ”

Meanwhile, many families continue to search for themselves.

After weeks of fielding for her son, Aragon went to the federal government.

In 2018, during a public event in Tijuana, she brought in the man who would soon be named by the country’s leading public security officer by López Obrador. The next day, someone called the state prosecutor and told her he was over the case.

Investigators said within days that there was a possible genetic link. Then they showed her photos taken of her son’s body at the crime scene. They explained that he died of a blow to the head and chest and that he was buried shortly after his autopsy.

In December, she paid a funeral home of nearly $ 1,600 to exhume his body from the government cemetery.

When a gravedigger removes bags containing the remains of the 13 people buried on top of her son, she thinks of the other families she knew and was looking for their loved ones.

“I realized that each bag was a different person,” she said.

She buried Carlos next to his father in the knowledge that she would never know for sure who killed him or why.

A few months later, she returns to the fields around Tijuana. She also wanted to help other families find their children.

Averbuch is a special correspondent. Linthicum is a staff writer. This story was reported in part with the support of the International Women’s Media Foundation.