MEXICO CITY – Volunteer searchers said they found a clandestine crematorium in Mexico City, although it is unknown whether the evidence found at the site would support these claims.
It is the first time in recent memory that someone claims to have found that type of mortuary in the capital. In northern Mexico, drug cartels often use barrels filled with diesel or caustic substances to incinerate or dissolve human remains, but so far there has been little evidence of this in Mexico City.
Ceci Flores, the leader of one of the collectives of search mothers in northern Mexico, announced on social media on Tuesday that her team had found skeletal remains around a charred well in a rural area south of the city.
He added that the team found skeletal remains, clandestine graves and identity cards at the site.
Ulises Lara, head of the Mexico City prosecutor’s office, later noted that the police went to the addresses that appear on the identifications and “the search was carried out and both people, both the minor and the female, were found alive and in a normal, healthy situation.”
Lara said one of these people, a woman, reported that about a year ago her identification and cell phone had been stolen when thieves snatched the items from her hands while she was stuck in traffic.
While this completely ruled out the possibility that the woman’s body was dumped there, it also suggests that criminals have used the area to dispose of evidence.
Lara indicated that experts are carrying out investigations to determine the nature of the remains found, and whether they are human remains. She added that elements of the prosecution are reviewing security camera images and looking for possible witnesses.
“Drug cartels”
The discovery, if confirmed, would be embarrassing for the ruling party, which has run Mexico City for decades and claims the capital has been spared much of the drug cartel violence that afflicts other parts of the country.
This is due in large part to the city’s dense population concentration, its notoriously slow traffic, its extensive network of security cameras and its bloated police force, which arguably makes it difficult for criminals to act in the same way they do in the city. rest of the country.
But although the city has 9 million inhabitants and the metropolitan area has around 20 million, much of the southern sector of the city is still a combination of farms, forests and mountains. In these areas, it is not unheard of for criminals to dispose of the bodies of kidnapped people, but they rarely burn or bury them.
Volunteer searchers like Flores often conduct their own investigations, sometimes based on tips from former criminals, because the government has been unable to help. Searchers have been angered by a government campaign to “find” missing people by checking their most recent known address, to see if perhaps they returned home without notifying authorities.
Activists maintain that this is nothing more than an attempt to reduce the number of missing people, which is politically embarrassing.
The searchers, mostly mothers of the missing, generally do not try to bring anyone to justice. They say they just want to find the remains of their loved ones.
“Non-existent” search teams
The Mexican government has invested little in searching for the missing. The volunteers play the role of the non-existent official teams, searching for clandestine graves where the cartels hide their victims. The government has not funded or implemented a genetic database that could help identify the remains found.
Relatives of victims often rely on anonymous tips, sometimes from former hitmen, to find possible mass graves. They usually insert long metal rods into the ground to detect the smell of decomposing bodies.
If they find something, the most the authorities do is send police and a forensic team to extract the remains, which in most cases are never identified. But these types of systematic searches have been unusual in Mexico City.
At least seven activists searching for some of the more than 100,000 missing people in Mexico have been murdered since 2021.
Source: AP
