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A hope underground: after the last trace of the missing migrants heading to the United States

2022-12-04T11:10:47.585Z


The Frontera Project, led by the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, has managed to identify the remains of more than 280 people who died on their migratory journey


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 to find a better life and work in Louisiana.

Two weeks later, his relatives lost contact with him and after another couple of weeks, his father read in the newspaper that 48 clandestine graves had been found in San Fernando, in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, in the middle of the corridor immigration to the United States.

"That's where our ordeal began," said his father Baudilio Castillo, as he has done so many times, during a forum in Mexico at the end of last year.

"This is my son, found in 2011, in grave number one, like corpse 14," the man recounted, while holding a photograph.

Since 2014 alone, almost 7,000 migrants have disappeared across the continent,

Knowing that corpse 14 was Baudilio Alexander took time.

In October 2013, the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF), a non-governmental organization that has collaborated in cases such as the disappearance of the 43 normalistas from Ayotzinapa, signed an agreement with the Attorney General's Office (now the Attorney General's Office) to identify 200 bodies found in pits in northern Mexico, the majority in San Fernando.

Shortly after, a delegation of specialists traveled to Guatemala to take blood samples from Baudilio Castillo to put together a genetic profile.

There was also a fight so that the remains exhumed in Tamaulipas were not cremated and his DNA could be compared.

After years of anguish, Baudilio Alexander was identified and eventually repatriated so that his family could watch over him.

This is one of the 283 unlocated migrants who have managed to be identified to date thanks to the efforts of the Frontera Project, a coalition led by the EAAF in which non-governmental organizations, collectives for the search for disappeared persons and United States authorities participate. regions of Mexico, Honduras and El Salvador.

“This work shows that it 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 arose in 2009, a bit unexpectedly,” says Doretti, in a telephone interview.

Argentine forensics had already been working for five years on cases of femicide in Ciudad Juárez, one of the epicenters of violence on the northern border of Mexico.

“We realized that there were many unidentified female remains,” she recalls, “there were 50 remains that did not match any of the families of missing girls reported in Chihuahua.”

New hypotheses arose, probably it was about women whose disappearance had been reported in another State or in another country or people who had come to work in the maquilas or who sought to cross the wall in search of opportunities.

At that point, the specialists were convinced that the migration variable was key to understanding what they were seeing.

Requesting the lists of disappearances of women in the States that migrate the most to Juárez and the State of Chihuahua seemed like a simple task.

But what was really complicated is that in 2009 there was very little genetic information in Mexico and Central America, there were no national DNA banks, and the few resources that were available were scattered in isolated bases throughout the region.

“The quantity and quality of the data was very poor, it was not organized and it was very difficult to identify people,” says Doretti.

The project was conceived as a kind of bridge between those who were searching and the information of those who were not there: the families and their disappeared.

Between the morgues of the places of destination and the communities that expel migrants.

One year later, the first forensic databases of migrants not located along the migratory route were established.

Part of the job was also to approach the families and take various genetic profiles from their blood or saliva to be able to compare them with the remains found in the field.

Interviews are also carried out to obtain information about the missing persons: their name, date of disappearance, country of origin and other relevant data.

Finally, matches are searched between the profiles by means of

software

.

"The relatives welcomed us with open arms," ​​says Doretti.

In addition to the fragmentation of information, one of the main obstacles was the resistance of many authorities to give access to their databases in the countries where the remains were found.

In the case of the United States, it was requested in 2018 to explain to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights why it did not allow access and cross-checking of data to forensics.

Legal battles were also fought to prevent remains from being cremated and losing the genetic information on the bodies or to obtain information from corpses that had not been sampled.

“In the case of Texas or Chiapas, we began to exhume bodies,” he affirms.

“It's a huge task, but it has to be done,” he adds.

Between 2010 and November of this year, 123 migrants who disappeared in Mexico and 159 in the United States, mainly in Arizona and Texas, have been identified.

Among the people found were 109 Mexicans, 61 Hondurans, 58 Salvadorans and 45 Guatemalans.

They have also collaborated with families from Nicaragua, Peru, Costa Rica, Brazil and Ecuador.

“We have an identification percentage of between 10% and 15%,” says Doretti.

But the potential is enormous because they have managed to gather genetic profiles of 1,919 migrants and 4,948 donors from 1,817 families.

If the Proyecto Frontera network grows and there is a greater exchange of information throughout the region involved in the migratory phenomenon, "there could be many more identifications," says the coroner.

In 2022, 34% more samples of missing migrants have been taken than the previous year and donors have grown by 43%.

“The main problem is one of public policy, it is the political will of the countries involved to agree to obtain information and share it”, admits Doretti.

“It is not easy and there is a lot to do, but 10 years ago this seemed impossible and today it is a daily practice”, concludes the coroner.

In one of the most dangerous migration corridors in the world, the hope is to find a match that will end years of anguish and provide the truth and justice that thousands of families in the region yearn for.

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2022-12-04

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