Searching for a ‘miracle’ in the Mexican desert: Bringing missing people home

The cardboard box was light and barely big enough to fit a baby, let alone an athletic 26-year-old. But inside was Diego Fernando Aguirre Pantaleón, or at least his remains, excavated from a common grave in the northern Mexican desert.

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

Aguirre Pantaleón’s father, Miguel Ángel Aguirre, 66, said of his family: “We all ended our lives. After his son disappeared, he would sleep on the living room sofa and wait for the sound of his son’s footsteps.

It took 12 years, until February 2023, for my son’s remains to be placed in a box and returned home. His parents refused to look inside. Scientists said his body was burned.

It was a tragic and rare resolution in a country where more than 120,000 people have gone missing since the 1950s, according to government data, and where relatives are desperately seeking clues to their fate. Until recently, hundreds of families in Coahuila faced the same uncertainty. But through a unique partnership, search volunteers, scientists and state officials are stepping up to change that.

The alliance created the Regional Center for Human Identification, the first specialized research institute in the United States. There is a mission that is almost impossible. The goal is to find the remains of missing people and return them home.

“Dignity and human rights do not end with death,” said Yezka Garza, general coordinator of the center, which is based in Saltillo, an industrial city in the desert of Coahuila. “What we seek is to ensure that the body is never forgotten again.”

The center, built next to Saltillo’s morgue, opened in 2020 with funding from the state government, Mexico’s federal search committee and the U.S. Agency for International Development. The number of employees is approximately 50. Families of the missing saw their young age as a sign that they were not corrupt and requested that some of them be recent graduates.

They work almost every day to find, excavate, catalog, store and identify human remains.

Since 2021, researchers have recovered 1,521 unclaimed, unidentified or undiscovered remains through mass searches in state morgues, common graves and secret burial sites. Through genetic and forensic analysis, 130 bodies were named, and most of them, 115, were handed over to their families.

Many of the dead are likely victims of severe violence perpetrated in the state of Coahuila by the Los Zetas cartel and security forces allied with it. Homicides peaked in 2012. The state is currently one of Mexico’s most peaceful, and more than 3,600 people remain missing.

Memories of shootings, disappearances and bodies hanging from bridges remain vivid for residents to this day.

“A lot of my high school friends lost their way and got into organized crime,” said Alan Herrera, 27, a lawyer and searcher at the center. “They lasted a month and they killed 12- and 13-year-olds.”

Mr. Herrera’s calm voice helps him in his field of work: making first contact with people searching for their loved ones. Last November he visited the home of Jorge Brettado, 65, in Torreon, another industrial town west of Saltillo. The two people sat in a cramped living room and conducted an interview.

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

What’s going on? Local police arrested them in 2010. He never saw them again.

Did he call the police? “no.” Mr. Bretado answered nervously. Back then, cartels, not the law, ruled. “And they told us that if we reported them, they would kill our whole family,” he said.

“I sincerely hope your relatives are not with us,” Mr. Herrera said after the interview.

He then put on blue gloves and pricked Mr. Bretado’s finger to collect blood. Researchers will use it to match DNA in an ever-growing database. If his son’s body was in one of the centre’s refrigerated cabinets, Mr. Bretado would have heard from him.

Identifying the remains of victims in Coahuila is not always easy. The Zetas confirmed this. The cartel’s goal is to make sure “there is nothing left of that person,” said Mónica Suárez, the center’s senior forensic geneticist.

If there are any remains, they are often bone fragments, often blackened by flames or eaten away by acid. Anthropologists spend months trying to arrange them like a jigsaw puzzle. To a geneticist, fragments that are too small or broken down to contain intact DNA are not useful.

Aguirre Pantaleón’s family is one of hundreds of people in Coahuila who have been placed under some form of lockdown.

On a recent afternoon, Mr. Aguirre and his wife, Blanca Estela Pantaleón, 61, visited their son’s crypt at a church in Saltillo. “I think it’s truly a miracle that we found him.” She said, placing her hand on the cold stone engraved with her son’s name. “Here in Mexico you hardly find anyone.”

When Silvia Yaber heard that Mr. Aguirre Pantaleón’s remains had been found in the cemetery, she wondered if her nephew, Víctor Hugo Espinoza Yaber, another police graduate kidnapped the same night, could also be there. She asked scientists to exhume the remains and take DNA samples of seven relatives, including Espinoza Yaber’s mother and sister, who died of kidney failure.

“I never stopped looking for him.” Yarber, 66, said. She even went to the cartel hideout and scoured the hills for any sign of her nephew. Last August, she received news of her genetic match. Her nephew’s remains were also exhumed from the same grave.

One recent day, Mr. Jaber went to the cemetery in Saltillo with two bouquets of flowers. She laid flowers at her family’s gravesite. Cement was used to reseal it. This time, Espinoza Yaber’s remains were inside.

“Your son is here now.” She remembers saying this to her late sister as she placed his remains in the burial ground:

Afterwards, she asked the prosecution to close the case. “That is not justice.” She sat down on the tomb, lit a cigarette and said: “But I found him, and I buried him. That’s everything to me.”

The search for missing people continues elsewhere in Coahuila.

Patrocinio, a vast desert area about an hour east of Torreon, has become the center of the latest effort led by volunteers and scientists. Among the sand dunes, chaparral and mesquite brush, Los Zetas members burned their victims and dug hundreds, if not thousands, of graves, searchers and families believe.

For two consecutive weeks in November, many archaeologists, prosecutors and relatives of the missing came to Patrocinio to exhume as many remains as possible.

Death here smells like diesel. Ada Flores Netro, an archaeologist at the Identification Center who was supervising the work of her colleagues in the newly dug pit, said a smell was a sign that a secret tomb had been discovered. Colleagues later found rusty handcuffs and bone fragments there.

Most unmarked burials here are typically found near large shrubs, Flores Netro said. Cartel members apparently sought shade as they burned and buried their victims.

But volunteer searchers with years of experience and training, not scientists with sophisticated equipment like drones or thermal imaging cameras, have discovered most of the recently discovered secret tombs, said Rocío Hernández Romero, 45, a member of the Grupo Vida search group. said. Her brother Felipe.

Hernández Romero discovered at least five burial sites the day before. She described her technique as more “rudimentary,” which involved kneeling near thorny bushes and dragging a spatula along the ground to detect color changes or other disturbances.

“Sometimes the dirt itself speaks to you,” she said.

Isabel García, a geophysicist sheltering from the sun under a tent, said she has learned how to find better clues about burial sites through constant conversations with searchers like Hernández Romero.

“I couldn’t do anything without them,” said García, 28.

She then piloted a giant drone equipped with cameras to map the tombs excavated that day.

Holes were dotted several feet away, and archaeologists and volunteer searchers unearthed the remains of Sandra Yadira Puente Barraza, 19, last year. She and a friend went missing in 2008 after police stopped the taxi they were riding in. Travel for shopping.

When DNA testing matched Puente Barraza’s remains, her mother, another searcher, left a wooden cross with a pink plastic rose at the spot where she was found.

“It was a tough day,” said Silvia Ortiz, leader of the search group, as she sifted buckets of dirt through a mesh screen to retrieve bones and teeth. “I’m glad you found her. “But it hurts so much.”