A femur changed the life of the Castillo family. On a Friday, March 15, 2011, 20-year-old Baudilio Alexander left his village in Jumaytepeque, Guatemala for a better life and job in Louisiana. Two weeks later, his relatives lost contact with him, and weeks later, his father read in the newspaper that 48 secret graves in San Fernando, in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, were in the middle of the migration corridor to the United States. . “That’s when our ordeal began,” his father Baudilio Castillo said, as he has so often said, during a forum in Mexico late last year. “This is my son, found in 2011, in grave number one, like body 14,” the man said while holding a photo. Since 2014 alone, the United Nations estimates that nearly 7,000 migrants have disappeared across the continent, with more than 4,000 on the US-Mexico border.
Knowing that body 14 was Baudilio Alexander took time. In October 2013, the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF), a non-governmental organization that has worked in cases such as the disappearance of the 43 normalists from Ayotzinapa, signed an agreement with the Attorney General’s Office (now the Attorney General’s Office). Identify 200 bodies found in pits in northern Mexico, most in San Fernando. Shortly thereafter, a delegation of specialists traveled to Guatemala to draw blood samples from Baudilio Castillo and create a genetic profile. There was also a fight so the remains exhumed at Tamaulipas could not be cremated and their DNA compared. After years of fear, Baudilio Alexander was identified and eventually repatriated so his family could take care of him.
This is one of the 283 unlocated migrants who have been identified so far, thanks to the efforts of the Frontera Project, an EAAF-led coalition involving non-governmental organizations, disappearance search collectives and US authorities in the regions of Mexico , Honduras and El Salvador. “This work shows that this is an objectively difficult search situation and also very painful, but not impossible,” says Mercedes Doretti, EAAF director for Central and North America.
“The project came about somewhat unexpectedly in 2009,” says Doretti in a telephone interview. Argentine forensics have been working on cases of femicide in Ciudad Juárez, one of the epicenters of violence on Mexico’s northern border, for five years. “We found that there were many unidentified female remains,” he recalls, “there were 50 remains that did not match any of the families of missing girls reported in Chihuahua.” New hypotheses emerged, likely involving women who had been reported missing in another state or country, or people who had come to work in the maquilas or who were looking for ways to cross the Wall. By this point, the specialists were convinced that the migration variable was key to understanding what they were seeing.
Requesting the lists of women’s enforced disappearances in the states most migrating to Juárez and the state of Chihuahua seemed like an easy task. But what was really complicated was that in 2009 there was very little genetic information in Mexico and Central America, there were no national DNA banks, and what few resources were available in isolated bases scattered across the region. “The quantity and quality of the data was very poor, it wasn’t organized, and it was very difficult to identify individuals,” says Doretti. The project was conceived as a kind of bridge between the seekers and the information of those who were not there: the families and their disappeared. Between the morgues of destinations and the communities that displace migrants. Between remains buried in mass graves or in “nameless” urban pantheons and the possibility of using science to find a new hope, the last resort in finding a loved one.
A year later, the first forensic databases of migrants who were not along the migration route were created. Part of the work also consisted of reaching out to the families and taking different genetic profiles from their blood or saliva to be able to compare them with the remains found in the field. Interviews are also conducted to obtain information about the missing persons: name, date of disappearance, country of origin and other relevant data. Finally, the software is used to search for matches between the profiles. “The relatives welcomed us with open arms,” says Doretti.
In addition to the fragmentation of information, one of the main obstacles has been the resistance of many authorities to granting access to their databases in the countries where the remains were found. In the case of the United States, she was asked in 2018 to explain to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights why she does not allow forensics access and cross-checking of data. Legal battles have also been fought to prevent remains from being cremated and the genetic information of the corpses being lost, or to obtain information from corpses from which no samples had been taken. “In the case of Texas or Chiapas, we started exhuming bodies,” he says. “It’s a huge task, but it has to be done,” he adds.
Between 2010 and November of this year, 123 migrants have been identified who have disappeared in Mexico and 159 in the United States, mostly in Arizona and Texas. Among those found were 109 Mexicans, 61 Hondurans, 58 Salvadorans and 45 Guatemalans. They have also worked with families from Nicaragua, Peru, Costa Rica, Brazil and Ecuador. “We have an identification percentage between 10% and 15%,” says Doretti.
But the potential is huge because they managed to collect genetic profiles from 1,919 migrants and 4,948 donors from 1,817 families. If Proyecto Frontera’s network grows and there is a greater exchange of information throughout the region affected by the migratory phenomenon, “there could be many more identifications,” says the coroner. In 2022, 34% more samples were collected from missing migrants than in the previous year, and the number of donors increased by 43%.
“The main issue is one of public order, it is the political will of the countries involved to agree to receive and share information,” Doretti admits. “It’s not easy and there’s a lot to do, but 10 years ago it seemed impossible and today it’s everyday practice,” concludes the coroner. In one of the world’s most dangerous migratory corridors, the hope is to find a partner who will end years of torment and offer the truth and justice that thousands of families in the region yearn for.
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