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Whom was he looking for?<\/em> His son and his ex-wife.<\/p>\nWhat happened?<\/em> Municipal police officers took them away in 2010; he never saw them again.<\/p>\nDid he file a police report?<\/em> \u201cNo,\u201d Mr. Bretado replied nervously. Back then, the cartel, not the law, ruled. \u201cAnd they told us that they would kill the whole family if we made the report,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\u201cI wholeheartedly hope your relatives are not with us,\u201d Mr. Herrera said after the interview.<\/p>\n
He then put on blue gloves and pricked Mr. Bretado\u2019s finger to collect his blood, which researchers would use to match with DNA in their ever-growing database. If his son\u2019s body was in one of the center\u2019s refrigerated cabinets, Mr. Bretado would hear from him.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not always easy to identify victims\u2019 remains in Coahuila \u2014 the Zetas made sure of that. The cartel\u2019s goal, said M\u00f3nica Su\u00e1rez, the center\u2019s lead forensic geneticist, was to make sure \u201cthere was absolutely nothing left of the person.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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If there are remains, they are often bone fragments, darkened by flames or eaten by acid. Anthropologists spend months trying to arrange them like a jigsaw puzzle. For a geneticist, those fragments, too small or degraded to have intact DNA, are not useful.<\/p>\n
Mr. Aguirre Pantale\u00f3n\u2019s family is among hundreds in Coahuila to get some form of closure.<\/p>\n
On a recent afternoon, Mr. Aguirre and his wife, Blanca Estela Pantale\u00f3n, 61, visited their son\u2019s crypt in a church in Saltillo. \u201cI do think it was a miracle that we found him,\u201d she said, placing a hand over the cold stone engraved with her son\u2019s name. \u201cHere in Mexico, they hardly find anybody.\u201d<\/p>\n
When Silvia Yaber heard that the remains of Mr. Aguirre Pantale\u00f3n had been found in a common grave, she wondered if her nephew, V\u00edctor Hugo Espinoza Yaber, another police graduate abducted the same night, could also be there. She asked scientists to exhume the remains and sample the DNA of seven relatives, including Mr. Espinoza Yaber\u2019s mother, her sister, who had died of kidney failure.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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\u201cI never stopped looking for him,\u201d said Ms. Yaber, 66. She even went to cartel hide-outs and scoured the hills for any sign of her nephew. In August, she got news of a genetic match. The remains of her nephew had been dug up from the same grave.<\/p>\n
On a recent day, Ms. Yaber, carrying two bouquets of flowers, went to a cemetery in Saltillo. She put the flowers on her family\u2019s gravesite. Cement had been used to seal it again \u2014 this time with Mr. Espinoza Yaber\u2019s remains inside.<\/p>\n
\u201cYour son is here now,\u201d she remembers saying to her late sister when she had his remains added to the burial site.<\/p>\n
Afterward, she had asked prosecutors to close the case. \u201cIt\u2019s not justice,\u201d she said, sitting on the grave and lighting a cigarette. \u201cBut I found him, I buried him \u2014 and that\u2019s it for me.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Elsewhere in Coahuila, the search for the missing continues.<\/p>\n
Patrocinio, a vast expanse of desert about an hour east of Torre\u00f3n, has become the focal point for the latest efforts, led by volunteers and scientists. Among the sand dunes, bushes and mesquite shrubs, Los Zetas members had burned victims and dug hundreds, if not thousands, of graves, searchers and families believe.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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For two continuous weeks in November, a large group of archaeologists, prosecutors and relatives of the missing came to Patrocinio to unearth as many remains as they could find.<\/p>\n
Here, death smells like diesel. A whiff of it signals you\u2019ve come across a clandestine grave, said Ada Flores Netro, an archaeologist with the identification center who was overseeing her colleagues\u2019 work in a freshly dug hole, where they would later unearth rusty handcuffs and bone fragments.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Most unmarked burial sites here are typically found near large shrubs, Ms. Flores Netro said: Cartel members apparently sought shade as they burned and buried their victims.<\/p>\n
But volunteer searchers with years of experience and training \u2014 not scientists with sophisticated equipment like drones and thermal cameras \u2014 had discovered most of the recently found clandestine graves, said Roc\u00edo Hern\u00e1ndez Romero, 45, a member of the Grupo Vida search collective who was looking for her brother Felipe.<\/p>\n
Ms. Hern\u00e1ndez Romero had found at least five burial sites in previous days. Her technique is more \u201crudimentary,\u201d she explained, kneeling near a thorny brush and dragging a spatula along the ground to detect coloration changes or other disturbances.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe dirt itself,\u201d she said, \u201csometimes it speaks to you.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n