Guadalajara (Mexico), Apr 14 (EFE).- Families of disappeared Mexicans promote a database of mass graves with the clues they have found in cemeteries to find their loved ones and put together the puzzle of the problem in the country, which adds more than 112,000 cases.
Accompanied by the National Search Commission (CNB) of the federal government, families from Jalisco, the western state of the country with the highest number of disappearances, inspect records of burials in cemeteries to form the database of the Mass Graves Module.
There they have verified the conditions in which unidentified bodies are buried, and access documents from each cemetery to rescue dates and places in which they found a corpse, in what condition it was, characteristics and how long it spent in the Forensic Medical Service (Semefo ).
They have also verified irregularities in legal and forensic processes, Guadalupe Ayala, a member of the Families United for Our Disappeared in Jalisco (Fundej) collective, told EFE.
An example of this is the visit to the pantheon in the municipality of Ocotlán, where they saw that the remains of 47 people are in a single space and there are no documents to help identify them.
“There is no custody, they are only files of 47 people who were buried in the common graves. There is a record, but we don’t really know who they belong to,” she stated.
The representatives of the CNB made a first visit to Jalisco in March 2022 to collect information from two cemeteries in the municipality of Guadalajara.
On this second occasion, groups came together with renewed hopes to find their relatives.
“It is a very good beacon of hope, it is a task that today the CNB came to support us in creating a database so that all those families who have their children who have disappeared for many years can know who they are,” said Ayala.
“They could rest when they are found, a body has to be in a dignified place, not in a common grave,” he added.
FORENSIC CRISIS
According to the National Registry of Missing and Unlocated Persons, Jalisco is the state with the most cases of forced disappearance, with 15,010 people, followed by the State of Mexico with 12,682 and Tamaulipas with 12,632.
The discovery of at least 168 clandestine graves since 2018, many of them with fragmented bodies, coupled with the lack of specialized forensic personnel and infrastructure, complicates identification and causes families to wait years to have the remains of their loved ones.
This is illustrated by the case of Brian Manuel Simental, who disappeared on January 10, 2022.
His mother, Teresa Sánchez, made multiple visits to Semefo and several unsuccessful DNA tests.
But a citizen search group identified Brian in October in the same Semefo, where he arrived 5 days after his disappearance and where he had been for all those months.
Sánchez told EFE that, after finding his son, he dedicates himself to helping families with missing persons and knows that looking for them in cemeteries is a way to circumvent irregularities.
“(At Semefo) they give us the data very late or they simply don’t give it to us, they send us elsewhere or they don’t attend to us, it’s that easy. In the pantheons, the records are more complete, ”he explained.
NATIONAL DATABANK
CNB officials have visited 37 cemeteries since 2020 in the State of Mexico, Sonora, Puebla, Oaxaca, Chiapas, Guerrero, Veracruz, Morelos, Jalisco and Mexico City, and have collected more than 21,000 records.
With this search modality, nine people have been identified and there are 51 folders under follow-up.
The data found in the cemeteries is compared with the National Registry of Missing and Unlocated Persons and the DNA banks to look for similarities that help solve more cases, explained to EFE Xcaret González, from the Directorate of Search Operations of the CNB.
He explained that collecting these records in the field is valuable, since not all unidentified bodies in mass graves go through the forensic services.
“Locations have been made of people who never went through Semefo, but went directly to the universities or a shelter and that is how they have arrived at the mass grave, without ever having gone through Semefo and without having an investigation folder,” he said. .
During the visits, they scan the documents found so that they can be added to the database of the CNB’s Mass Graves Module, which is public and online, explained Daniela López, CNB liaison in Jalisco.
