Mexico: Common Graves, No Names and Parents Who Don’t Give Up

Tetelcingo, Mexico.- When the air flows through the Las Cruces pantheon, over the inert bodies in a mass grave, a bittersweet stench spreads throughout the tents where relatives of the disappeared expect probable good news after searching, unsuccessfully, for a son, brother, or a father across the country. Now they search in this town, their neighboring Jojutla in the state of Morelos.

“Now my head hurts,” says Guillermina Sotelo when breathing in the scent from behind a fence that divides the hopeful families from the experts of the Attorney General’s Office and the State Attorney; from observers of human rights, doctors, and university scientists who try to extract each rotting corpse.

Prosecutors quietly buried them here and in Jojutla on March 28, 2014 ? 116 bodies in two graves without taking samples for later identification, and without enacting proper protocols. There was no more room left in the morgue, overwhelmed by the death that comes from the penetration of criminal bands: Los Rojos, Guerreros Unidos and Los Laredo.

And they would still be there if it were not for the mother of Oliver Navarrete, a young man kidnapped and assassinated in 2013, who could document that, in addition to her son’s body that was sent to that common grave by accident, there were others. Of whom? Nobody knows. There are at least 32,000 disappeared in Mexico, 100 officially recognized in Morelos.

Only about five relatives — activists from the local towns — can see closely the violent process of the exhumation that began last Monday; the rest hope, holding their breath.

Guillermina Sotelo traveled from South Carolina in search of her son Cesar Ivan Gonzalez, who disappeared on August 19 in an unknown location between Cuautla and Huitzuco, where the family is originally from and where he lived. “I always asked him to come back to the United States because we are legal residents, but he did not want to: he went came and went, and the last time he stayed for two years”.

Next to this mother, another woman with a contorted face attempts to hold back her tears while sitting at a table and carelessly stroking out letters. She is Patricia Manzanares, who has been looking for her son Juan Hernandez, 23, since 2011. He disappeared in a hotel in Nuevo Leon, the last known place where he spent the night as a member of a law enforcement agency.

“I think the Federal Police handed my son to criminals in exchange for something because, how how else could he disappear just like that? It was just him and his partner, and then they accused him of abandoning his duty; they did not tell me that he was missing and when they finally did they wanted to give me a pension in exchange for signing a document accepting a presumption of death”.

Manzanares refuses to accept that her child died and that is why she is here, waiting for them to take out the bodies, take samples, compare their DNA, and meanwhile, she writes an unrealistic message on a banner. Unrealistic, but it gives her strength: “You are already in my arms, I’m just missing your resting place”.

The air reheats and releases foul-smelling puffs, a sign that another body has been extracted, the third of four that will be drawn out this day. Meanwhile, during a press conference, the prosecutor of Morelos, Javier Perez, calculated that all the corpses will be extracted in about a week. Some skeptics think that it will take more. It’s Tuesday already, the second day at work and they’ve only added two pairsto the more than 50 that rest in the common grave.

Activist and founder of the Movement for Peace and Dignity, Javier Sicilia, has been watching the excavation and handling of corpses from under a tree to accompany the ones who are hurting, his way of adhering to the rancor he holds against the local government, which he considers cynical and irresponsible.

“The same day I announced the creation of the Law for the Care of Victims, in memory of the assassination of my son — murdered by a criminal gang that led him to lead a caravan around the country against corruption — the bodies were buried in irregular, hidden graves, to forget the dead, without investigation, in total impunity,” he says to this newspaper.

“This only happens in a society that must have a total revolution in its structures, starting with the judicial system.”

Behind Sicilia, Manuel Rodriguez Juarez, also observes with detail the movements of the experts dressed in white and blue surgical masks.

As a father of Monica Alejandrina Rodriguez, a young woman who disappeared in 2004, he knows the harm done by corruption in public life and the impunity in the country, the same causes that allow him to remain hopeful in Morelos, 16 years later.

“I had to hire a private investigator to help me get the phone numbers my daughter called and discovered that it was a policeman and his son who had kidnapped her, with the help of a friend of hers,” he says.

“That cop had previously worked here in Morelos and therefore, I believe that if he killed her he could have brought her here.”

According to the Atlas of Violence in the state, prepared by the Autonomous University of Morelos, impunity of crimes in the state is 70%, a figure that allows criminal acts to be repeated again and again, leaving a trail of pain that will remain for generations.

Liborio Vilanueva, father of Isacc Yahir, is also among the present at the Tetelcingo Cemetery, atesting to the damage these unmarked burials caused his family. Isacc disappeared in 2011 after going to a convenience store of Cuautla, the town where they removed bodies today. He had two small children who were left with a fatherless future.