AFP was exceptionally able to enter two morgues in the state of Guerrero, one of the epicenters of the “human tragedy” of some 108,000 missing in Mexico, and 52,000 unidentified bodies.
Before this grueling trip, Nuvia Maestro recounted her exhausting daily life at the heart of the forensic medicine crisis in Mexico City.
In her thirties, the young woman loves Clémentina – her pussy and her “ray of light” -, cycling, brightly colored jackets, evenings with friends and sparkling wines. In short, everything that can allow him to distract himself from his work as an anthropologist at the Forensic Institute (Incifo) in Mexico City.
“The dead keep coming and people keep disappearing,” sighs Nuvia, 36, nine of whom are at the bedside of mutilated, decomposed, dismembered bodies.
“We are very tired,” adds the young woman. “Looks like it’s never going to end.”
She and her fellow anthropologists bought induction hot plates out of their own pockets. For the coffee break? Not at all: to boil human remains, and separate the organic tissues from the bones, which makes it possible to determine the age of the deceased.
The criminals “know which parts of the body we favor (note: for the identification of corpses, such as the hips and the pulp of the fingers) and they destroy them. It’s terrible!”, She explains.
Macabre precision: the most mistreated corpses are those of women.
Most of those who have disappeared in recent years are victims of the war between members of organized crime, starting with drug cartels, according to the government. Gangs that make the bodies disappear: no evidence, no crime.
Impatient families
275 km from Mexico City, in the capital of Guerrero, Chilpancingo, an employee glances at a handwritten sheet that lists the steady stream of the arrival of human remains.
She shrugs when asked why this procedure is not computerized. Lack of means.
Employees light sticks of incense whose scent fails to dissipate the smell of rotting bodies.
Overwhelmed, harassed, tested, forensic experts come up once morest the impatience of families who want to begin their mourning, failing to find proof of life of their missing loved one.
“Investigations to cross-check (the DNA samples) can take months. During this time, the bodies are in our refrigerators. The families come and say: + they do not want to return them to us +. This generates frustration” , sighs the coordinator of the Chilpancingo morgue, Alfonso Ramirez.
“Many people think that we do nothing, but we work hard”, resumes René Andraca, from the morgue of Acapulco, the famous seaside resort of Guerrero.
In the state of Jalisco (north), Guadalupe Camarena, 62, lives in the hope of finding at least the remains of her five missing children.
A domestic worker, this woman has lost track of her daughter Lucero since June 6, 2016, who disappeared while taking a taxi in Guadalajara, the country’s second city.
On December 19, 2019, she also lost track of her four sons.
The grieving mother visits the Guadalajara morgue weekly to examine, for hours, photographs of the dead, a routine she overcomes by taking antidepressants.
“52,000 unidentified”
According to the UN Committee once morest Enforced Disappearances, Mexico would need, under current conditions, 120 years to identify them all.
“The Mexican State, lamentably, and the States (which make up the country) in particular, do not have the institutional capacities to deal with the delay of more than 52,000 still unidentified bodies”, recognized at the end of October the deputy human rights secretary Alejandro Encinas.
The workforce has certainly increased by 4% between 2019 and 2020 (10,119 employees), according to the National Institute of Statistics (Inegi). The budget for forensic medicine has increased from 110 million dollars in 2015 to 122 in 2022. But over the same period the average of homicides has increased from 17.16 to 28.3 per 100,000 people (35,625 in total in 2021) .
The government is trying to provide answers with the creation of two identification centers and four temporary conservation centres.
He also intends to develop a genetics laboratory that the United States will support to the tune of four million dollars.
And the prosecution still has to create a forensic medicine data bank provided for in a law on missing persons.
Meanwhile, in Mexico, Nuvia Maestro archives small pieces of bone in envelopes. A meager victory over oblivion.