La Bartolina, the updated horror in Mexico

Elements of the Prosecutor's Office carry out search actions in La Bartolina, Tamaulipas, this August.

The place of La Bartolina, in the northeast of Mexico, these days draws the drama of a country that has 90,000 missing people. Designated as an extermination center for criminal groups, its name jumped to the media a little over a month ago, when the national search commissioner, Karla Quintana, denounced that in a few years half a ton of skeletal remains had been rescued from there. Relatives of the disappeared turned to see the property, a few kilometers from the border with the United States. It was her new hope, a chance to find her own.

In the museum of the horrors of Mexico, La Bartolina begins to earn a prominent place, near, for example, the network of clandestine graves of Colinas de Santa Fe, in Veracruz, where the authorities rescued the remains of at least 300 people until 2019, thanks to the push of groups of relatives of the disappeared of the State. Other cases in Guanajuato, Guerrero, Nuevo León or Coahuila complete the room, always changing due to the constant discovery of new improvised pantheons for crime.

State tragedy, thousands of people have disappeared in the country during the last three governments, each one headed by a different party.

During the first three years of the current administration, chaired by Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the number of missing persons exceeds 21,000.

It is no secret that their families look for them, dead or alive, many times in properties like La Bartolina, located near Matamoros, in Tamaulipas.

More information

• The entanglement between Mexico and the UN Committee on Disappearances reaches the Supreme Court

• The López Obrador Administration accumulates more than 21,500 missing persons

Discovered four years ago, the figure that Quintana gave, 500 kilos of bones, put the property on the map, pointing out ungraspable pain: How many people were murdered there, tortured, burned, dismembered? In an interview with EL PAÍS, Quintana herself adds some questions, for example, "How could this happen without anyone noticing?" One more question: Is the same thing happening now, somewhere else, without anyone knowing? Quintana responds: "It is a possibility."

The four years of discoveries of skeletal remains in La Bartolina and the rediscovery of last month reveal the peculiar way of functioning of the authorities, specifically the Attorney General's Office, FGR.

Since 2017, the agency has spent a few weeks a year recovering bone fragments from the property, remains that it supposedly dumps later, to later extract DNA samples and cross them with its genetic databases of relatives of the disappeared.

Full bodies

One thing is logic and another is reality. Mexico has been experiencing a forensic crisis for years, recognized by the Ministry of the Interior, which translates into the inability of the investigative agencies to process all the deaths they encounter. Sometimes due to lack of resources, others due to negligence or excessive bureaucracy, the federal and state prosecutors have battled with a mountain of abused and abandoned human remains in every corner of Mexico. To the point that sometimes the dependencies do not really know what they have.

This is the case of La Bartolina.

Before Quintana's announcement of the 500 kilos rescued, the FGR has explained to relatives of the disappeared in Tamaulipas that there are actually 67. The difference, they suggested, is that within the 500 kilos there were also stones and earth, thus raising the calculation.

The FGR has not reported on the matter officially.

“It is up to the prosecution to report,” says Quintana, “our calculation is based on information from people who have been in the field these years.

What we consider essential is to focus on the horror in front of us and see how we respond ”, he adds.

Ejido 'La Bartolina' in the State of Tamaulipas.CNB

One of the people on the ground that Quintana speaks of is Rosa García, a neighbor of San Fernando, a town remembered for the killings of migrants at the hands of Los Zetas in 2010 and 2011 in the State. García's daughter, niece and brother disappeared between 2010 and 2012, under circumstances as strange as they were dire. "My brother was taken away because he did not want to lend them a machine to dig holes," explains García, 59, referring to the criminals. “Who knows my niece, she worked for Foreign Relations there in San Fernando. My daughter was taken from my business in 2012 ”.

It was she who found the La Bartolina property in 2017. “I don't quite remember how it was. But I guess they gave me a point, ”he says, alluding to a place where crime could have killed and disposed of people. “We looked there and we found something, remains, particles, teeth. I said, 'this is not animal, it is human'. And I started walking, I saw a little lake and it caught my attention. I saw strange things on the surface, like human parts, pure crushed, fragments, with the naked eye ”, he says.

The case fell to the state prosecutor's office, but given the magnitude, the amount of remains that were rescued, García took it to the FGR.

Four years after the discovery, García finds the figure of 67 kilos a bit strange.

“There must be a confusion: I have seen almost complete bodies taken from there.

Sure, they are skeletons and some are already light, but they weigh anyway ”, he ditch.

Research folders

There is unrest among the groups of relatives of the disappeared from Tamaulipas over the La Bartolina property.

García's has been there for years, observing forensic experts and anthropologists, writing down each finding in their notebooks.

With Quintana's statements, other groups turned to the place and asked to enter, to do the same as García and the others, a request that the prosecution denied in principle.

Faced with the refusal, relatives of a group of disappeared from Reynosa, west of Matamoros, approached the property, accessible to anyone due to the lack of vigilance by the authorities. That angered García and his group, who feared that the work previously carried out by the specialists would be affected. The new group, headed by Delia Quiroa and her mother, Maria Icela Valdez, ignored it and insisted that the authorities give them entry with the experts. They even organized a sit-in in front of the prosecutor's office and asked the criminal groups in the area for a truce to be able to search in La Bartolina.

At first, the FGR said no. The refusal was born from its work logic: it only allows the entry to this type of places to relatives of the disappeared who have included the site in question in their file. Far from facilitating the search for families, the bureaucratic mess makes their task difficult. In an interview, Quiroa says: “The problem is with the FGR itself, which does not want them to start questioning them. Because look, yesterday people from Matamoros arrived, relatives of the disappeared, and they were not allowed to enter, ”he explains.

At the insistence, the investigating agency finally relented.

Work at La Bartolina restarted this Monday, already with Quiroa and his group.

It is not a search

per se

, as there is nothing to search: the bones are on the ground, with the naked eye.

It is, in technical language, a “follow-up of the exhumation of skeletal remains”.

The experts advance in La Bartolina and the families wait for news.

Typically, these on-site rescues last two to three weeks.

The heat in the area these days is terrible.

But there is no choice.

Rosa García says: “If we don't look for ourselves, nobody is going to do it.

For me there are no climates, for me there are no times, for me there is nothing.

I am dead in life ”.

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