Families of the disappeared launched 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 thousand cases.
Accompanied by the National Search Commission (CNB) of the federal government, families from Jalisco, state of Mexico with the highest number of disappearancesthey inspect records of burials in pantheons 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 where they found a body, what condition he was in, characteristics and how long he spent in the Forensic Medical Service (Semefo).
They have also verified the irregularities in the legal and forensic processes, he told the agency EFE Guadalupe Ayala, member of the collective of Families United for Our Disappeared in Jalisco (Fundej).
An example of this is the visit to the pantheon of the municipality of Ocotlán, where they saw that 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’s a record, but we don’t really know who they belong to“, he claimed.
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 found, a body has to be in a dignified place, not in a common grave”, he added.
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 simentaldisappeared 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 at the same Semefo, to which he arrived 5 days after his disappearance and where he was all those months.
Sánchez told the agency that, after finding his son, he dedicates himself to helping families with missing persons and knows that looking for them in pantheons is a way to circumvent irregularities.
“(In 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 exposed.
CNB officials have visited 37 pantheons since 2020 in the State of Mexico, Sonora, Puebla, Oaxaca, Chiapas, Guerrero, Veracruz, Morelos, Jalisco and Mexico Cityand have collected more than 21 thousand records.
With this search modality they have identified nine people 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, he explained to EFE Xcaret González, from the Directorate of Search Operations of the CNB.
He explained that the collection of these records in the field is valuable, since not all unidentified bodies in mass graves go through 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 a research folder”, he stressed.
During the visits, they scan the documents found so that they can be added to the database of the CNB Mass Graves Module, which is public and onlinedetailed Daniela López, CNB liaison in Jalisco.
