Mexico’s Government Graves

by Chantel Castrejon ,Staff Reporter

SPENCER PLATT // The World

Over the years, Mexican newspapers have been reporting on mothers looking for their lost children and finding secret graves. Now, for the first time, the federal government has revealed the number of underground locations where those who have died in Mexico's raging narco-violence have been found.

"If you’re looking for a 17-year-old girl, you’ll end up with a match for a 43-year-old woman,” National School of Anthropology and History Yanet Juarez said.

In certain cases, the only information known on the missing is their names and ages, with no family DNA samples or other clues to help match them to remains. Just about 30 individuals were found after the state of Tamaulipas exhumed 265 cadavers and numerous boxes of bones from a public cemetery in 2018.

Since 2006, at least 40,000 inhabitants have vanished in Mexico. Officials claim the bulk of the victims were victims of organized crime. On the other hand, local or state officials may have been involved in many of these instances.

Some 80,000 Mexicans have since disappeared in the last 15 years and have never been found. Many are now thought to be in government custody, among the thousands of corpses that pass through morgues each year without ever being identified, ending up in common graves. More than 28,000 bodies have been cremated or buried in public cemeteries, and another 2,589 donated to medical schools. The rest were still in morgues or could not be located.

“For years, the state abdicated its responsibility, not only to guarantee the safety of the people, but to give ... families the right to search and find and return home with their relatives,” Top human rights official Alejandro Encinas said.

Until recently, the majority of the search had been carried out by victims' families, who banded together in groups to dig in desolate desert fields and on forested hills. They've been complaining for years that the government has failed to respond to their demands for assistance. Later when government officials unveiled a proposal in late 2019 to gather a team of national and foreign experts with the aim of recognizing all bodies and even bone fragments, human rights activists applauded. However, the initiative has come to a halt as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and the recognition that the forensic problems are much greater than anticipated.

“Few cemeteries — almost none — have a good registry of the location and quantity of people who are buried there,” founder of the Mexican Forensic Anthropology team said.

Any time a new corpse appears at a morgue, it is expected to be refrigerated so it can be autopsied and inventoried for scars, tattoos, cavities, and other identifiable features. Samples of DNA are expected to be retained in case they're needed later.

The remains of the missing have been discovered in a variety of locations, including secret graves. As crime has risen in recent years, state medical examiners' offices have been overflowing with bodies. Thousands of corpses are believed to have been dumped in mass graves without being identified, we can only hope that in the future something more will be done about this.