Fabiola Martinez and Roberto Garduno
Newspaper La Jornada
Friday April 1, 2022, p. eleven
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador sent to the Chamber of Deputies the initiative to create the national center for human identification. The search and identification of disappeared persons is a commitment and priority of the Mexican government.
is indicated in an official message, released yesterday on social networks.
The initiative contained in ten pages warns of the deficiency in the operational capacity of the State to attend to the forensic crisis. Until 2019, at the national level, there were only 217 laboratories and 263 amphitheaters. Most of the states barely have the capacity to identify 20 percent of the bodies they receive, while the storage facilities are overcrowded by at least 40 percent.
. According to the proposal, the national center for human identification will carry out a forensic system that combines the mass or large-scale approach systems with the individualized or traditional one.
Just last March 17, officials from the Ministry of the Interior updated the context related to the forensic crisis in front of the president; They pointed out that, despite advances in the matter, there is no certainty about the number of unidentified bodies. After crossing different figures and data banks, the investigation of the Movement for Our Disappeared, published in 2021, was taken as valid, according to which in Mexico there are more than 52 thousand unidentified deceased people
. Ten states accumulate 80 percent of the bodies in that condition.
In the explanatory memorandum sent to San Lázaro, on the initiative to change the General Law on Forced Disappearance of Persons, Disappearance Committed by Private Parties and the National Search System for Persons, the right of every person to be sought is weighed. and, where appropriate, identified.
To this end, it is proposed to strengthen the functions of the National Search Commission through the creation of a National Center for Human Identification.
The foregoing in order to move towards a model that allows providing an effective, accurate search and, where appropriate, a dignified treatment of unidentified bodies.
The Inter-American Court of Human Rights indicates that the right to the truth is contained in the right of the victim or their relatives to obtain from the State the clarification of the violations and the corresponding responsibilities, through investigation and prosecution.
This obligation includes the search for disappeared persons, therefore the States also have the obligation to carry out, ex officio, a search.
The document that includes the signature of President López Obrador is dated March 31, 2022.
They add faculties
As part of the initiative, which was fully disseminated by the Undersecretary for Human Rights, Population and Migration, Alejandro Encinas, the powers of the National Search Commission are added recover, collect, safeguard, transfer, transport and analyze for human identification purposes, bodies, human remains and bone samples for genetic processing purposes
.
It also entrusts the national center with safeguarding the information on the matter, which, after being processed, will be forwarded to the competent authorities and made known to interested families. In addition, the commission must request, from the institutions of the three orders of government, forensic or expert services, as well as from the prosecutor’s offices, the information concerning the search for people.
At the same time, it must issue the guidelines to regulate the information provided by the prosecutor’s offices and inspect shelter centers, cemeteries, mass graves and any place where unidentified bodies or human remains are found.
