Nearly 15 years ago, the Mexican government launched a war against the drug cartels.
Since then, some 80,000 Mexicans have disappeared amid the violence and have never been found. Now, Mexico realizes that many of those bodies may have been in government custody all along, turning up in common graves, piling up in morgues, or donated to science.
Los Angeles Times foreign correspondent Kate Linthicum joined Spectrum News 1 anchor Lisa McRee on LA Times Today to talk about some families and their search for their missing loved ones.
The people that went missing or that were victims of violence shared similar characteristics.
"It is a big population of people, and many of them were likely connected to the drug trade or other criminal business," said Linthicum. "But others were in the wrong place at the wrong time. One thing they have in common is that they are generally poor. They are people who can go missing, and their families are not able to bring a lot of attention to their cases."
One incident that drew national attention was the disappearance of 43 students from a teacher training college in Guerrero State in 2014.
“The 43 young men went missing when they boarded a bus that we now believe may have been packed with heroin. And they may have stumbled into a drug trafficking operation and paid for it with their lives. Forty-three people disappeared without a trace, and they have not been found to this day.”
Mexico has a lot of problems when it comes to the criminal justice system and forensics.
“This is a country where 95% of homicides are not solved. The vast majority of crimes are never even brought to trial. So you can imagine what happens in a morgue that is like the police, overwhelmed with bodies from the violence here,” added Linthicum.
Many families do their best to look for their missing loved ones and rarely get help from government officials.
“We wrote about Guadalupe Aragón Sosa. She is from Tijuana. In 2018, her son went missing. He had a drug problem and had been in and out of drug programs, and lived on the street. She had heard a rumor that he had been murdered. So the first thing she did was go to the police and told them that she thinks her son is at the morgue," said Linthicum.
"She gave her DNA, and they told her they did not have him. So she joined the legions of families across America in search of him on her own. She would go into fields and parking lots around the outskirts of Tijuana, where narcos buried bodies. She actually found multiple corpses, but none of them was her son. She kept looking for him in these ways only to learn many months later that he had actually been in the morgue this whole time. And it was a forensic mistake that he had not been identified and that she had not been notified. So he had been buried in a common grave underneath 13 other cadavers.”
Despite the coronavirus pandemic, violence and homicides remain steady in Mexico.
“In 2019, the government did an active plan to try and identify every body in government custody, which is about 39,000 unidentified bodies in government custody. It was very ambitious. The pandemic has definitely slowed things down. But also, I think the government realizes what a massive task this is. These are bodies that are buried one on top of the other in plastic bags that have eroded over time. The genetic material has mixed, and it is challenging. And at the same time, you have unrelenting violence. People have still managed to kill themselves during the pandemic. So you have officials who are struggling with the pandemic with an influx of new bodies and then trying to get through this backlog of 15 years.”