In the Mexican desert, excavating for a “miracle”: bringing the missing back home

The cardboard box was light, barely big enough for an infant, let alone an athletic 26-year-old. However, it contained Diego Fernando Aguirre Pantaleon, or at least his remains, which were exhumed from a common grave in the desert in northern Mexico.

His family does not know how he ended up in the grave in Coahuila state. Authorities said he was kidnapped in 2011 on graduation day with six other classmates, all of whom were considered recruits for a new specialized police force trained to combat organized crime in Coahuila. Armed men stormed the bar where the young police officers were celebrating and took them away.

“We were all dead in life,” Miguel Angel Aguirre, 66, Mr. Aguirre Pantaleon’s father, said of his family. After his son disappeared, he slept on the living room sofa, waiting to hear his son’s steps.

It took 12 years – until February 2023 – for his son’s remains to return home in a box. His parents refused to look inside. Scientists told them that his body had been burned.

It was a tragic but unusual decision in a country where more than 120,000 people have disappeared since the 1950s, according to Government dataLeaving their relatives desperate for clues about their fate. Until recently, hundreds of families in Coahuila faced the same uncertainty. But in a unique partnership, research volunteers, scientists and state officials set out to change that.

From this alliance emerged a specialized research institute – the Regional Center for Human Identification – the first of its kind in the country. She has an almost impossible task ahead of her: to find the remains of the missing and bring them home.

“Dignity and human rights do not end with death,” said Yezca Garza, general coordinator of the center based in Saltillo, an industrial city in the Coahuila desert. “What we seek is that these bodies will never be forgotten again.”

The center, built next to the Saltillo morgue, opened in 2020, with support from funds from the state government, Mexico’s Federal Research Commission and the Drug Enforcement Authority. USAID. It employs about 50 staff – and the families of the missing have requested that many of them be recent graduates, seeing their young age as a sign that they are not corrupted.

They work to find, extract, classify, store and identify human remains almost every day.

Since 2021, researchers have recovered 1,521 unclaimed, unidentified or undiscovered human remains from large-scale searches of government morgues, mass graves and secret burial sites. Through genetic and forensic analysis, they were able to identify the names of 130 of those bodies, most of which (115) were returned to their families.

It is likely that many of those killed were victims of the extreme violence suffered by the state of Coahuila at the hands of the Los Zetas cartel and the security forces that colluded with them, with murders peaking in 2012. Although the cartel’s grip on Coahuila has weakened since then, the state is now One of the most peaceful states in Mexico, more than 3,600 people are still missing there.

Memories of shootings, disappearances and bodies hanging on bridges remain fresh in the minds of residents to this day.

“Many of my friends from high school have strayed into organized crime,” said Alan Herrera, 27, a lawyer and researcher at the center. “They went on for a month and killed them – 12- and 13-year-old children.”

Mr. Herrera’s calm voice is useful in his line of work: making first contact with people searching for loved ones. In November, he visited the home of Jorge Britado, 65, in Torreon, another industrial city west of Saltillo. The men sat in a cramped living room, and the interview began.

Who was he looking for? His son and ex-wife.

What happened? They were taken by municipal police officers in 2010; He never saw them again.

Did he file a police report? “No,” Mr. Britado answered nervously. At that time, it was the cartel, not the law, that ruled. He added: “They told us that they would kill the entire family if we filed the report.”

“I hope with all my heart that your relatives are not with us,” Mr. Herrera said after the interview.

He then donned blue gloves and pricked Mr. Pretado’s finger to collect his blood, which researchers will use to match DNA in their ever-growing database. If his son’s body was in one of the center’s refrigerated vaults, Mr. Britado would hear from him.

It’s not always easy to identify the remains of victims in Coahuila, and the Zetas made sure of that. The cartel’s goal is to make sure “there is absolutely nothing left of the person,” said Monica Suarez, the center’s lead forensic geneticist.

If there are remains, they are often bone fragments, darkened by fire or eaten away by acid. Anthropologists spend months trying to put them together like a jigsaw puzzle. To a geneticist, fragments that are too small or too degraded to contain intact DNA are not useful.

Mr. Aguirre Pantaleon’s family is among hundreds in Coahuila who have received some form of closure.

On a recent afternoon, Mr. Aguirre and his wife, Blanca Estela Pantaleon, 61, visited their son’s crypt in a church in Saltillo. “I think finding him was a miracle,” she said, placing her hand on the cold stone engraved with her son’s name. “Here in Mexico, they rarely find anyone.”

When Sylvia Yaber heard that Mr. Aguirre Pantaleon’s remains had been found in a mass grave, she wondered if her nephew, Victor Hugo Espinosa Yaber, another police graduate who was kidnapped that same night, might also be there. It asked scientists to exhume the remains and take DNA samples from seven of his relatives, including Mr. Espinosa Yaber’s mother and sister, who died of kidney failure.

“I never stopped looking for him,” Ms. Yaber, 66, said. She even went to the cartel’s hideouts and searched the hills for any sign of her nephew. In August, she received news that Jenny was a match. Her nephew’s remains were exhumed from the same grave.

One day, carrying two bouquets of flowers, Mrs. Yaber went to a cemetery in Saltillo. Flowers were placed on her family’s grave. Cement was used to seal it again – this time with the remains of Mr. Espinoza Yaber inside.

“Your son is here now,” she remembers telling her late sister when his remains were added to the burial site.

After that, I asked the prosecution to close the case. “It’s not justice,” she said, sitting on the grave and lighting a cigarette. “But I found it, buried it, and that’s it for me.”

Elsewhere in Coahuila, the search for missing people continues.

Patrocinho, a vast expanse of desert located about an hour east of Torreon, has become the focal point of the latest effort led by volunteers and scientists. Among the dunes, bushes and mesquite bushes, members of Los Zetas burned victims and dug hundreds, if not thousands, of graves, researchers and families believe.

Over the course of two straight weeks in November, a large group of archaeologists, prosecutors and relatives of the missing came to Patrocinio to explore as many remains as they could find.

Here death smells like diesel. A whiff of it indicates you’ve come across a secret grave, said Ada Flores Nitro, an archaeologist at the Identification Center, who was supervising her colleagues’ work in a freshly dug pit, where they would later discover rusty handcuffs and bone fragments.

Ms. Flores Nitro said that most of the unmarked burial sites here are usually found near large bushes: cartel members seem to seek shade as they cremate and bury their victims.

But volunteer researchers with years of experience and training — not scientists with sophisticated equipment like drones and thermal cameras — have discovered most of the recently found secret tombs, said Rocio Hernandez Romero, 45, a member of the research collective Grupo Vida. Who was looking for her brother Felipe.

Ms. Hernandez Romero had found at least five burial sites in the previous days. She explained that her method is more “primitive,” where she kneels near a spiky brush and drags a spoon along the ground to detect color changes or other disturbances.

“The dirt itself, sometimes it talks to you,” she said.

Sheltering from the sun under a tent, geophysicist Isabel Garcia said that constant dialogue with researchers like Ms. Hernandez Romero had taught her how to look for better clues about burial sites.

“We couldn’t do anything without them,” Ms. Garcia, 28, said.

She then flew a huge drone equipped with cameras to map the graves discovered that day.

A few feet away was an area full of holes in the ground where archaeologists and volunteer researchers last year discovered the remains of 19-year-old Sandra Yadira Puente Barraza. She and a friend disappeared in 2008 after police officers stopped the taxi they were traveling in. Travel to go shopping.

When DNA tests matched Ms. Puente Barraza’s remains, her mother, another researcher, left a wooden cross with pink plastic roses at the spot where she had been found.

“That was a tough day,” said Sylvia Ortiz, leader of the group search team, as she sifted buckets of dirt through a net to pick up bones and teeth. “It feels good in the sense that you found her. But it hurts a lot.”