Some of the bodies may have been buried in the mass graves simply to
clean out a state morgue. But some of the bodies lacked the case file
markers they are supposed to be buried with, leading to questions about
how they died.
The grisly discovery in the central state of Morelos has raised
questions about whether the case is another example of shoddy police
work that denied families the right to recover the bodies of their loved
ones, or something even more sinister.
The scandal began when detectives asked relatives of a kidnapping victim
killed in 2013 to keep his body for further testing. About a year
later, the family of Oliver Wenceslao went to retrieve his body but were
told it had already been sent to a common grave.
In September, a judge ordered the state prosecutors' office to exhume Wenceslao's body and return it to his family.
But investigators, using a backhoe, found they had to dig around about
150 plastic-wrapped bodies in the unmarked pits to get to Wenceslao's.
State officials told local media that only 105 bodies were in the pits,
and that it was simply a common grave of the kind used for unidentified
remains.
"The bad thing is that, during this exhumation, they found several
things wrong," said Rafael Idiaquez, spokesman for the Morelos state
human rights commission.
Normally, morgue workers in Mexico prepare bodies headed for common
graves by wrapping them in plastic bags. Inside the bag with each body,
they put a piece of paper with a case file number written on it. The
note is placed inside an empty plastic bottle so that fluids from the
decomposing corpse won't render it illegible.
"There are bodies that don't have any case file number," Idiaquez said.
"We don't know why they are there, if they were executed, if they have
relatives, if any investigation was ever done in their cases."
During an inspection visit to the open field in a town east of the city
of Cuernavaca on Friday, commission investigator Fabiola Colin said that
several procedures and permits required for a potters' field or common
grave were not followed in the case.
Idiaquez said several people have contacted the commission, saying they fear their missing relatives might be in the pit.
Adding to suspicions about the mass graves is the fact that since the
1990s, Morelos has been gripped by a wave of kidnappings and executions,
when the Juarez and Beltran Leyva cartels, and later other drug gangs,
moved into the state. Several high-ranking states officials have been
accused of or convicted for aiding drug gangs.
The Morelos state prosecutors' office said in a statement Thursday that
it condemned the burials and had started internal investigations that
could result in criminal charges, possibly including illegal burial and
abuse of authority.
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