Fabiola Martinez and Laura Poy
Newspaper La Jornada
Friday, March 18, 2022, p. eleven
Endorsing the investigation by the National Movement for Our Disappeared, according to which there are just over 52,000 unidentified bodies in Mexico, the Undersecretary for Human Rights of the Ministry of the Interior, Alejandro Encinas, warned of the lack of political will and capacity of the state authorities to deal with this problem.
He pointed out that local authorities do not generate and do not share the necessary information to face the forensic crisis, even though they have been allotted more than 3 billion pesos from the federal budget to deal with this emergency.
During a report presented at the morning press conference at the National Palace, the official reported on the actions to expand the structure and specialized training.
He said that an agreement was signed with the Genetic Identification Laboratory of the University of Innsbruck (located in Austria, the same one that has identified the remains of the Ayotzinapa normalistas, who disappeared in September 2014) to train specialists from the National Institute of Genomic Medicine .
“The objective of this agreement is to develop human identification capabilities based on complex samples (…). In other words, we want to have a Mexican Innsbruck,” added Encinas, emphasizing that the country lacks a national genetics database.
After some censuses and inquiries to measure the problem, it was found that the main lag is that the information is fragmented and the situation is complicated by mass graves.
A piece of information that we have taken up from the National Movement for Our Disappeared, which based on requests for information and fieldwork has compiled a registry, which accounts for just over 52,000 unidentified bodies in the country’s forensic services and mass graves.
he specified.
Ten entities concentrate 80 percent of the bodies of people who died in this situation: Baja California, Mexico City, the state of Mexico, Jalisco, Chihuahua, Tamaulipas, Nuevo León, Veracruz, Sinaloa and Sonora.
this landscape collides with other problems: there is no census of unidentified bodies, nor of those identified and unclaimed in mass graves. It is a very serious legal omission that involves different areas of authorities, from prosecutors, health secretaries or courts, to municipalities, for the management of mass graves in cemeteries
.
