Mexico
Mexico faces a humanitarian crisis with more than 133,000 people missing or unaccounted for.
Adding to this situation is a backlog of over 72,000 unidentified recovered bodies, currently held by forensic services and state prosecutors' offices. Although the government created the National Search Commission and state commissions, their impact has been limited, leaving much of the work to local authorities, civil organizations, and groups of family members who continue the search.
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FAFG has received requests from several Mexican states to provide technical advice and training to state institutions, which FAFG has provided since 2019 to, among others, Coahuila, Jalisco, Sonora, Nayarit, Sinaloa, Colima, and Tamaulipas, as well as at the federal level. The proposed action seeks to promote the identification of victims of enforced disappearances in Sinaloa, Tamaulipas, and at the regional level through training and technical advice to relevant state institutions, including state governments, the Specialized Prosecutor's Offices for the Search for Disappeared Persons (CEB), Attorney General's Offices, Specialized Prosecutor's Offices for the Search for Disappeared Persons, and forensic services, for the implementation of a multidisciplinary system with a mass approach.
There are significant differences in how cases are handled within a Multidisciplinary System and a Traditional Forensic System. Traditional systems seek to respond to specific requests from prosecutors and other institutions within the judicial system by investigating individual cases of crimes of all kinds, and in this sense, they become overwhelmed in contexts of mass disappearances. The Multidisciplinary System specifically addresses cases of missing persons by analyzing all available antemortem and postmortem information based on a specific time and geographic area, and taking into account the very phenomenon of disappearance.
The Multidisciplinary System recognizes the complexity of mass disappearance contexts, such as those in Mexico, and implements an infrastructure capable of processing large amounts of genetic information, allowing for the mass comparison of skeletal and reference samples to generate identifications. This initiative will provide training in the application of forensic sciences to the search and identification of missing persons to the families of victims, search collectives, and civil society organizations (CSOs) to increase their knowledge and facilitate their participation in search processes. FAFG proposes to carry out the following activities. Based on the different projects being developed in Mexico, these activities will be approached from various perspectives, depending on the specific needs of each state or region.
