NUEVO LAREDO, Mexico (AP) — For investigators, the human foot — burned, but still with the fabric attached — to the pipe: Until recently, this dilapidated space was a place where bodies were torn and cremated, where the remains of some of Mexico’s missing crowds rested. were deleted.
How many have disappeared in this cartel “extermination site” on the outskirts of Nuevo Laredo, miles from the U. S. border?After six months of work, forensic technicians still dare to be offering a quote. the compacted and burned debris and debris were only about 2 feet deep.
Countless bone fragments have been scattered over 75,000 square feet of desert thickets. Twisted wires, allegedly used to tie up victims, are strewn across the undergrowth.
Every day, technicians place what – bones, buttons, earrings, scraps of garments – in paper bags classified with their contents: “Zone E, Point 53, Quadrant I. Fragments of bones exposed to fire. “
They are sent to the forensic laboratory of the state capital, Ciudad Victoria, where boxes of paper bags with others await their turn. They will wait a long time; there are enough resources and too many fragments, too many missing, too many dead.
On the Nuevo Laredo site, seen by the Associated Press this month, the inadequacy of investigations into Mexico’s nearly 100,000 disappearances is painfully apparent. There are 52,000 unidentified people in morgues and cemeteries, not counting places like this, where they were charred. the remains are only measured by weight.
And other people continue to disappear. And more remains are found.
“We are attending to one case and 10 more are coming,” said Oswaldo Salinas, chief identity officer of the Tamaulipas state attorney general’s office.
Meanwhile, there is no progress in bringing the culprits to justice. According to recent knowledge from Mexico’s Federal Audit Office, of the more than 1,600 investigations into disappearances through the government or cartels opened through the Attorney General’s Office, none reached the courts in 2020.
Still, work continues in Nuevo Laredo. If it is nothing else, there is hope of helping even a circle of relatives to locate the end, it could take years.
That’s why a forensic technician smiled amid the devastation a day ago: She had discovered an unburned tooth, a treasure trove that may be offering DNA to make identity possible.
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When Jorge Macias, head of the Tamaulipas State Commission of Inquiry, and his team first arrived at the Nuevo Laredo site, they had to clear transparent weeds and collect human remains in the last hundred meters just to succeed in space without destroying any evidence. He discovered a barrel lying in a trough, shovels and an awl with bloodlines. Gunfire echoed in the distance.
Nearly six months later, there are still more than 30,000 square feet of assets to catalog.
The space has been cleared, but there are still 4 blackened spaces that are used for cremation. As far as the bathroom is concerned, it took technicians 3 weeks to thoroughly excavate the compacted mass of human remains, concrete and melted tires, said Salinas, who directs the paintings. on site. Streaks of grease on the walls.
Macias discovered the Nuevo Laredo home last August while searching for more than 70 other people who had gone missing in the early part of the year on a stretch of highway linking Monterrey to Nuevo Laredo, the busiest advertising crossing with the United States.
The domain known as kilometer 26, a point on the road and the invisible front to the northeastern cartel kingdom, a split from the Zetas. There are small department stores with food and coffee. The men sell gasoline and stolen drugs. Foreigners are filmed with cell phones. phones. The force poles lining the northernmost road were destroyed with large-caliber weapons.
Most of the other people who disappeared here were truck drivers, taxi drivers, but also at least one circle of family members and U. S. citizens. A dozen were discovered alive.
Last July, Karla Quintana, head of the National Tracking Commission, said the disappearances gave the impression of being connected to a dispute between the Jalisco New Generation cartel, which sought to enter the area, and the Northeast cartel, which sought to save you from the entrance. It is not transparent whether the victims were drug traffickers or private traffickers, whether some were kidnapped by mistake or whether the goal was simply to sow terror.
The phenomenon of disappearances in Mexico exploded in 2006 when the government declared war on drug cartels. For years, the government turned a blind eye as violence escalated and the families of the disappeared were forced to be detectives.
It was not until 2018 – the end of the last administration – that a law was passed that laid the legal foundations for the government to create the National Commission of Inquiry. Then followed the local commissions in each state; protocols that separate studies from investigations, and a transitional and independent framework of national and foreign technical experts supported through the UN to address the backlog of unidentified remains.
The official total of shortages is 98,356. Even without the civil wars or military dictatorships that have affected other Latin American countries, Mexico’s shortcomings are overcome in the region only by the war in Colombia. Unlike other countries, Mexico’s challenge still has no end. The government and families are searching for those who disappeared in the 1960s and those who have disappeared today.
The government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador was the first to recognize the magnitude of the problem, to speak of “places of extermination” and to organize effective raids.
But he also promised in 2019 that the government would have all the mandatory resources. The national commission, which claimed to have 352 workers this year, still has only 89. And the Macías State Commission budgeted 22 positions, but only filled a dozen. The challenge here is not money; the difficulty is locating applicants who pass background checks.
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Disappearances are the best crime because without a frame there is no crime. And the cartels are experts at making sure there are no bodies.
“If a criminal organization completely controls an area, they do what we call ‘kitchens’ because they feel comfortable,” Macias said. “In spaces that are theirs and where the other aspect can see the smoke without problems, they dig graves. “
In 2009, at the other end of the border, a member of the Tijuana cartel confessed to “cooking” about three hundred victims in caustic clothing. Eight years later, a report by a public educational research outlet showed that what had officially been a crime on the border in the city of Piedras Negras was truly a Zetas Command Center and crematorium.
Perhaps the largest site of its kind is some other border town near the mouth of the Rio Grande called “la mazmorra,” in territory controlled through the Gulf cartel. Reminiscence removes Macías. , skulls, femurs, all the lies out there and I said to myself: ‘This is not possible'”.
Authorities have recovered more than 1,100 pounds of bones from the site.
According to the forensic service of the state of Tamaulipas, about fifteen “places of extermination” have been located. There are also burial sites: in 2010, graves with 191 bodies were located on one of the main migratory routes through Tamaulipas to the border. . In 2014, 43 schoolchildren disappeared in the southern state of Guerrero. Only 3 have been known from fragments of burned bones.
Most of the extermination sites were discovered through a circle of family members who cling to the clues with or without the cover of the authorities. Such research teams exist in almost each and every state.
For families, the discoveries motivate hope and pain.
“A lot of emotions combine,” said one woman who had been with her husband since 2014 and her two brothers who later disappeared. Like thousands of family members across Mexico, she has searched for her loved ones in her life. It’s great to locate (a site), but right now you see things as they are, you’re sticking your nose in. “
The woman, who requested anonymity for security reasons, anticipates the discovery of two sites last year. When he entered the Nuevo Laredo facility with Macias, he may just cry.
A few months earlier he had discovered in the middle of Tamaulipas where he believes his relatives are. That day, accompanied by the state study commission and escorted by the National Guard, they went into the undergrowth in search of a drug trafficking camp.
“I’m fine psychologically after that,” he said, pointing to photos of the deep pits where the burned remains were buried, some wrapped in barbed wire. They recovered about a thousand teeth, he said.
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On a recent day in Nuevo Laredo, gloved hands sifted the earth, separating pieces of bone: a piece of jaw, a fragment of skull, a vertebra.
The paintings are hard. Forensic technicians brush transparently and then dig. Some days the temperature fluctuates around zero, others above one hundred degrees. They wear white protective suits from head to toe and are monitored.
Security is a concern, so the government has separated the search service from investigations: cartels seem less involved with those who only look for bones, anything they find can eventually become evidence in a trial. Every day before nightfall, they are escorted to safety and only leave to return to the site the next day.
When cartel violence erupted in Tamaulipas in 2010, the capital’s morgue had room for six bodies. In a singles bloodbath that year, a cartel killed migrants. At that time, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights denounced gross negligence in the forensic cadres of Tamaulipas.
Pedro Sosa, director of the state’s forensic services, said the way it functioned had changed drastically in 2018 with the creation of the identity team. But that’s not enough. ” A statewide single forensic anthropologist is not compatible with all this work. . “
It can take 4 months for the remains of Nuevo Laredo to be cleaned, processed and reach the genetics laboratory. It would possibly take longer if something urgent emerges like in January last year, when nearly 20 other people, mostly migrants, were incinerated in an attack near the border.
Even if they manage to extract the DNA, the identity is not secure because the profile will only be cross-referenced with a state database. A federal DNA database does not yet exist.
It may take years before even non-genetic data is added to one of the national databases. In 2020, the federal auditor said that this formula had 7600 recorded faults and 6500 registered deaths.
Although federal law requires a formula in which databases can interact, it does not exist, said Marlene Herbig of the International Committee of the Red Cross. Every state or federal database of fingerprints or DNA profiles is like an island, despite calls for bridges to link them.
No one can estimate how much money it is or how many years it will take to see significant effects on Mexico’s efforts to locate and identify the missing.
Herbig gave a clue: a fixed effort on the island of Cyprus took 10 years to identify two hundred missing in the confrontation between Greece and Turkey today of the last century. And there are several thousand more missing in Mexico than in Cyprus.
“This is a monster,” Macias said.
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AP Alfredo Peña of Ciudad Victoria contributed to this report.