In four years, the lab processed 1,465 samples, according to information requested from the agency. And through DNA samples, fingerprints, dental records, surgical implants, scars, and tattoos, the laboratory succeeded in identifying 676 people. The rest are in common graves or warehouses waiting to be claimed by their families.

Nevertheless, before the laboratory was built, those tests were only done at the request of family members. In 10 years, 77 analyses were done with the support of the federal Attorney General’s office. Ten more were done in the forensic laboratories of Sonora and Guanajuato. All those cases were identified and claimed by their families.

***

“The prosecutors’ office, I tell you, they don’t want to bury,” says Rubén. It is October 2016, and he is pointing to six coffins within a chapel at the Altares cemetery in the south of Guamúchil. The smell is unbearable, a combination of decomposing flesh and rotten eggs. The coffins contain the bodies of six people, deposited there since 2014.

“Why not?”

“Honestly… we went once, and the boss told us… the owner said that we should bury them, but we couldn’t,” Rubén replies.

“Because?”

“Right, because we can’t bury them until it is authorized by the prosecutors’ office.”

On the outside of the coffins are white sheets, on which are written dates and names of towns. Rubén explains that two of them had died in an accident, and the other four had been shot. None had been claimed or identified. 

“What is the writing?”

“It’s so that they don’t lose control,” he says.

Rubén, whose name has been changed to avoid retaliation, works for the Emaús funeral company.

He is one of those who handles processing and registering the bodies of the dead who enter the cemetery.

When he granted the interview, he revealed a scene worthy of a horror film: a chapel, with the image of Christ, and six deteriorating coffins. It smelled of putrefaction. There were dead maggots on the floor, the traces of the decomposition of the six people who had been stored there for two years, because the state government would not authorize their burial.

In Sinaloa, funeral companies frequently bury bodies in common graves. The attorney general’s office has four morgues, but only utilizes one, which is located in Culiacan. 

In 2005, with the increase in violence in the state from criminal groups in the so-called ‘war on drugs’, the authorities were overwhelmed and requested assistance from funeral companies to conduct forensic work in their facilities until a proper infrastructure could be constructed.

The companies negotiated collectively and reached an agreement: as managers and owners have explained, in exchange for storing bodies until they could be identified, they would be allowed to work directly and without competition. They organized and coordinated with the authorities to work shifts, during which the undertakers would collect bodies from the scenes of the crimes and take them to their offices, where forensic investigators would examine them.

If the people are unidentified, they stay there, but after three days—according to sanitary code—the funeral home can request permission to bury them in common graves.

“The projection is that we will stop utilizing the spaces of funeral homes once the forensic offices in the north, center-north, and south are totally functional,” announced the attorney general’s office in an official document obtained through freedom of information request. Nevertheless, four years after those facilities were constructed, they have yet to be used for this purpose.

***

What is happening in Sinaloa is a display of the national forensic crisis.

During an international meeting on new forensic search tools in July 2019, Mercedes Doretti, the Mexico director of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF), explained that there is a continual crisis of violence and disappearance in the country, which can not be resolved solely with searches by families of the disappeared.

She underscored the necessity of an extraordinary forensic identification mechanism, a project that would attempt to process and identify all the bodies and remains that are currently held by the state in cemeteries, refrigerated warehouses, and other institutions.

“There should be 200 professionals who are finding, exhuming, and analyzing each body to be very sure that the information is gathered correctly, particularly the genetic material, because that holds the key to answers for many families,” she notes, after providing a list of statistics, which she described as an institutional paradox.

“The great problem in Mexico is that there is an attempt to win through numbers, when the really important thing is making sure that the mechanisms that already exist actually function properly.”

Although those numbers, provided by the National Search Commission, also provide a series of answers, such as revealing that there are 8,116 unidentified bodies in 263 forensic offices as of July 2019.

The numbers also tell of the other 37,443 bodies with unclear information about their death from 2006 to 2019, the majority of which were buried in common graves.

Doretti has explained that this extraordinary mechanism would require the construction of forensic cemeteries—that is to say, locations containing only unidentified bodies, who after being exhumed from municipal graveyards could be examined and processed to create new records.

“We are talking about huge challenges: the families of the disappeared who have gathered evidence and remains that are unidentified for whom it is urgent to determine why more identifications are not happening,” the director said.

Forensic cemeteries are different than traditional graveyards: they only contain remains or bodies of those who have not been identified by family members, and the preparation of the crypts or graves includes special material to best preserve the genetic material, which implies another challenge: creating a database of the families of the more than 72,000 disappeared in the country.

“The material is already there for most of the families in Mexico—because in the past 15 years I’ve only rarely encountered a family that had not provided blood for a genetic analysis—you have to assume that many of the unidentified bodies already have processed DNA samples.”

The proposal to construct the forensic cemeteries is being coordinated by the Subsecretariat for Human Rights, a part of the Interior Ministry, which announced in 2019 the construction planning for 15 cemeteries.

The states chose for the initial process were Veracruz, Sinaloa, Jalisco, Guerrero, Michoacán, Baja California, Colima, Nayarit y Tamaulipas.

In none of those are there currently forensic cemeteries, but there are common graves.

The construction of forensic cemeteries would serve to facilitate the localization of disappeared persons, but it would also depend on the economic projects of the attorneys general and the mechanism.

For example, the state Attorney General in Sinaloa indicated, in documents obtained through freedom of information requests, that exhumations would need to occur at 12 municipal and private cemeteries in order to conduct forensic analyses on the hundreds of bodies buried there.

“The exhumation of bodies from common graves will begin once projects that are currently underway are completed and once there is a forensic cemetery, which will require new investigations to attempt to identify unidentified bodies,” the document notes.

If those exhumations occur, they will acknowledge what families of the disappeared have known: that the barbarity came not only from the violence of criminal groups but from state institutions. 

If that happens, all those who have kept the registries of common graves in their memories could rest. They can die without having their conscience haunted by the knowledge that they alone knew where unidentified bodies were buried. They will have completed the task handed to them by officials who should have been returning bodies to families.