Breathe
By Sonia Serrano
If at this moment two trailers had to be rented to deal with the forensic crisis in Jalisco, they would be insufficient. When the previous state government took this measure to store the bodies that no longer fit in the refrigerators, the backlog was around 900 bodies and segments. The collectives of relatives of the disappeared claim that throughout the current administration there have been between three and six thousand.
The difference, and what has allowed the current government to stay out of the scandals, is that they found ways to accumulate the bodies within the same spaces of the Jalisco Institute of Forensic Sciences. In other words, the current situation is much worse than the one that led the state to appear in the media all over the world, but instead of trailers, they use refrigeration boxes inside the facilities.
This month marked the fifth anniversary of that scandal. The then director of the Jalisco Institute of Forensic Sciences (IJCF), Luis Octavio Cotero Bernal, has recounted on several occasions what happened: the bodies were piling up in the coroner's office and there were no more spaces to treat them with dignity, so the Attorney General's Office decided to rent a trailer that was parked inside the building of the same institution.
The problem arose because, due to the lack of supplies, the refrigeration system stopped working on several occasions and the bodies began to decompose, becoming a source of infection and a problem for workers and neighbors. In addition, the space where the trailer was installed was used for vehicle inspections.
Then the decision was made to move it to a site outside the IJCF, but in the first place they took it to, the height of the entrance was lower than the height of the truck, so it was decided to move it again. It was on this last trip when it got stuck in the mud of a street and, while they found a way to move it, a scandal broke out over the vehicle with 157 corpses wandering around the city.
By that time, a second trailer had already been rented. In total, about 400 bodies were stored in both boxes.
In the last months of the previous state administration, forensic personnel were required to work flat out to end the backlog in the identification of bodies. According to an internal report delivered via transparency by the IJCF, on December 6, 2018, when Governor Enrique Alfaro Ramírez took office, only 289 bodies and human remains remained in the different forensic refrigeration spaces.
This means that the current forensic crisis in Jalisco could be at least three or four times that of when the trailers were rented.
The authorities have assured that the problem is being addressed. In fact, resources have increased and new areas have been created to address this agenda. But the claim of the collectives remains the same: there is a lack of geneticists, forensic doctors and personnel in general. What is needed is not more space to store bodies, but for them to be identified and handed over to their loved ones.
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of Opinion 51.
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