UN in the face of the forensic crisis in Mexico: “It would take 120 years to identify human remains”

The phenomenon of the crisis of disappearances in Mexico is not a fact that comes alone, alongside it is the forensic crisis that the country is experiencing. There are currently more than 52,000 unidentified dead people lying in mass graves, facilities of forensic services, universities and forensic protection centers.

This figure, despite its magnitude, does not include bodies not yet located, nor the thousands of fragments of human remains that families and search commissions collect weekly in clandestine graves.

According to several experts interviewed by the United Nations (UN) Committee on Enforced Disappearances, under current conditions it would take 120 years to identify human remains, without count the new bodies that are added every day.

This means that many of those who hope to find their missing relatives would have to wait more than ten decades to find out if the remains of their loved ones were identified.

One of the main points of alert for the Committee is the handling of genetic material delivered by the relatives of missing persons, as well as the safeguarding and protection of related information.

Another alarming point detected by the collective of the world organization was that there are deficiencies in the registry system: information that is incomplete, outdated and lacking relevant data (such as the date of entry of the deceased persons, their origin, place of discovery, bodies identified and given or not to the families and their location) are some of the situations witnessed by the Committee.

In addition, there are currently fourteen forensic services in the country that do not keep an electronic record, which makes it difficult to optimize the location service. In addition, several of the records provided for in the General Law by the Office of the Attorney-General of the Republic have not yet been created and the Single Information System Technology and Informatics is not implemented.

It should be noted that Baja California, Mexico City, State of Mexico, Jalisco, Chihuahua, Tamaulipas and Nuevo León account for 71.73% of the unidentified bodies.

In view of the circumstance, the UN Committee denounced that forensic services are insufficient. At the same time, he stressed that there are a variety of instruments provided for in the General Law that have not yet been established, but above all, that there is no public policy of human identification in relation to the disappearance of persons.

He also emphasized to the authorities on addressing deficiencies in the location and notification of relatives or relatives of identified persons and irregularities in the identification process, which prevent persons notified of a finding and identification from being certain that the remains received are those of their missing family member.

The structural causes attributed to the forensic crisis include, on the one hand, the increase in levels of violence as a result of the militarization of public security, which is reflected in the number of homicides (27.8 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2020) and in the large number of missing persons: the National Register of Disappeared and Unlocated Persons, counted as of April 13, 98,944 people whose whereabouts are unknown.

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