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Elizabeth Alvarez has been searching for her brother since 2013, when the 31-year-old left his home to run an errand in Mexico City.<\/p>\n
For 12 years she had no news of his fate until she learned in early November that he had been run over and may be buried in a mass grave in a cemetery some 20 kilometers (12 miles) from her home.<\/p>\n
The news brought a measure of closure but also reopened old wounds.<\/p>\n
“It’s been so many years. You don’t want to find him like that,” Alvarez, a 45-year-old housewife, told AFP.<\/p>\n
Victor Manuel Alvarez is one of the more than 120,000 people that have vanished in Mexico since the 1950s — the population of a small city — many of them abducted and killed by drug cartels.<\/p>\n
The number rocketed after 2006 when the government went to war against drug traffickers, touching off a conflict that has left nearly half a million people dead.<\/p>\n
One of the symbols of the conflict is the clandestine mass graves that have popped up across the country, used by criminals to hide the bodies — or parts of bodies sometimes found decapitated — of their victims.<\/p>\n
But authorities in Mexico City also dig mass graves, to house the\u00a0hundreds of bodies discovered each year that are never reclaimed or identified.<\/p>\n
The remains of these invisible dead end up in Dolores Cemetery, Mexico’s largest, situated in Chapultepec Forest.<\/p>\n
Codes like “L.3” or “F.1” were the only forms of identification AFP saw on unmarked graves in a wooded area where forensic experts earlier this month began the monumental task of exhuming and trying to identify the dead.<\/p>\n
Authorities hope to identify over 6,600 people among the\u00a0thousands buried in 75 mass graves at the site.<\/p>\n
Luis Gomez Negrete, head of Mexico City’s Missing Persons Search Commission, welcomed the operation, which, he stressed, “no public institution had ever undertaken in the past.”<\/p>\n
Not all those buried in the mass graves are victims of drug cartels.<\/p>\n
But a wave of homicides linked to organized crime has triggered a forensic crisis, resulting in overflowing morgues and a massive backlog of bodies waiting to be identified.<\/p>\n
Despite being relatively spared by cartel warfare, Mexico City is struggling to name all its dead.<\/p>\n
Each year around 500 people are buried in unmarked graves in Dolores Cemetery.<\/p>\n
– Fifteen deep –<\/p>\n
Elizabeth Alvarez struggles to understand how it took so long to learn her brother’s fate.<\/p>\n
“Why did they let so much time pass?” she wonders.<\/p>\n
The exhumation efforts launched this month began with bodies recovered between 2013 and 2015 — the period during which Victor Manuel was killed.<\/p>\n
The grave in question is 15 layers deep, with bodies buried one on top of the other.<\/p>\n
“We have no idea what condition the bodies will be in,” one official told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic.<\/p>\n
In the first five days, forensic experts gingerly removed earth, millimeter by millimeter, recovering 3,463 bone fragments.<\/p>\n
But they had yet to identify a single victim.<\/p>\n
“We have to search for even the smallest part… it’s not about removing complete bodies,” one of the firefighters involved in the excavations told AFP.<\/p>\n
– ‘Even a tiny bone’ –<\/p>\n
Identifying the remains could take years.<\/p>\n
But the relatives of the missing are prepared for the wait.<\/p>\n
Maria del Refugio Palacios, 40, knows that her 71-year-old mother, who disappeared in September 2024 while walking to her daughter’s house in Mexico City, won’t be found quickly.<\/p>\n
“We’re going to have to wait a very long time” until the exhumation teams work their way up to the more recent graves, she told AFP as she watched the teams at work.<\/p>\n
But the partial remains already recovered give her hope that her search may soon be nigh.<\/p>\n
“Even a tiny bone makes a difference,” she said.<\/p>\n
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