The cardboard box was light, barely big enough for a baby, let alone an athletically built 26-year-old. Yet there was Diego Fernando Aguirre Pantaleón, or at least his remains, exhumed from a mass grave in the desert of northern Mexico.
His family does not know how he ended up in the grave in the state of Coahuila. Authorities said he was abducted on graduation day in 2011 with six other classmates, promising recruits for a new specialized police force trained to fight organized crime in Coahuila. Armed men broke into the bar where the young police officers were celebrating and took them away.
“We were dead when we were alive, all of us,” Mr. Aguirre Pantaleón’s father, Miguel Ángel Aguirre, 66, said of his family. After his son disappeared, he would sleep on the sofa in the living room, waiting to hear his son’s footsteps.
It took 12 years — until February 2023 — for his son’s remains to be returned home in a box. His parents refused to look inside. The scientists told them that his body was burned.
It was a tragic but unusual solution in a country where more than 120,000 people have disappeared since the 1950s, according to state dataleaving relatives desperately searching for clues to their fate. Until recently, hundreds of families in Coahuila faced the same uncertainty. But in a unique partnership, search volunteers, scientists and government officials decided to change that.
From that alliance, a specialized research institute — the Regional Center for Human Identification — was created, the first of its kind in the country. He has an almost impossible task: to find the remains of the missing and send them home.
“Dignity and human rights do not end with death,” said Yezka Garza, chief coordinator of the center based in Saltillo, an industrial city located in the Coahuila desert. “What we’re asking is that these bodies are no longer forgotten.”
The center, built next to the mortuary in Saltillo, opened in 2020 with the support of funds from the state government, the Mexican Federal Search Commission and US Agency for International Development. There are about 50 staff members — the families of the missing wanted several of them to be fresh graduates, seeing their young age as a sign that they were not corrupt.
They work to find, excavate, classify, store and identify human remains almost every day.
As of 2021, researchers have recovered 1,521 unclaimed, unidentified, or undiscovered human remains after extensive searches in state morgues, mass graves, and secret burial sites. Through genetic and forensic analysis, they gave names to 130 of these bodies, most of which, 115, were returned to their families.
Many of the dead were likely victims of the severe violence the state of Coahuila suffered at the hands of the Los Zetas cartel and security forces in cahoots with them, with the number of murders peaking in 2012. Although the cartel’s influence in Coahuila has since waned and the state now one of the most peaceful in Mexico, more than 3,600 people are still missing.
Memories of shootings, disappearances and bodies hanging from bridges remain fresh for residents even today.
“Many of my friends from high school have strayed and fallen into organized crime,” said Alan Herrera, 27, a lawyer and researcher at the center. “They lasted a month and they killed them – children of 12, 13 years old.”
Mr. Herrera’s soothing voice helps with his job: making first contact with people looking for their loved ones. In November, he visited the home of Jorge Bretado, 65, in Torreón, another industrial town west of Saltillo. The men were sitting in the cramped living room and a conversation began.
Who was he looking for? His son and his ex-wife.
What happened? Communal police officers took them away in 2010; he never saw them again.
Did he file a police report? “No,” replied Mr. Bretado nervously. Back then, the cartel ruled, not the law. “And they told us that they would kill the whole family if we reported them,” he said.
“I hope with all my heart that your relatives are not with us,” Mr. Herrera said after the interview.
He then donned blue gloves and pricked Mr. Bretado’s finger to draw his blood, which the researchers would use to match the DNA in their ever-growing database. If his son’s body was in one of the center’s refrigerated cases, Mr. Bretado would have contacted him.
It’s not always easy to identify the remains of victims in Coahuila — the Zetas took care of that. The cartel’s goal, said Mónica Suárez, the center’s leading forensic geneticist, was to make sure “there was absolutely nothing left of that person.”
If there are remains, they are often bone fragments, blackened by flames or eaten away by acid. Anthropologists spend months trying to piece them together like a puzzle. For the geneticist, these fragments, too small or degraded to have intact DNA, are not useful.
The family of Mr. Aguirrea Pantaleóna is one of hundreds in Coahuila who will receive some form of incarceration.
On a recent afternoon, Mr. Aguirre and his wife, Blanca Estela Pantaleón, 61, visited their son’s crypt in a church in Saltillo. “I think it’s a miracle we found him,” she said, placing her hand over the cold stone engraved with her son’s name. “Here in Mexico they hardly find anyone.”
When Silvia Yaber heard that the remains of Mr. Aguirre Pantaleón was found in a common grave, she wondered if her nephew, Víctor Hugo Espinoza Yaber, another police graduate who was kidnapped the same night, might also be there. She asked scientists to exhume the remains and take DNA samples from seven relatives, including Mr. Espinoza Yaber, her sister, who died of kidney failure.
“I never stopped looking for him,” said Ms. Yaber, 66. She even went to cartel hideouts and scoured the hills for any sign of her nephew. In August, she received news of a genetic match. Her nephew’s remains were exhumed from the same grave.
Recently, Mrs. Yaber, carrying two bouquets of flowers, went to the cemetery in Saltillo. She put flowers on her family’s grave. The cement was used again for closure – this time with the remains of Mr. Espinoza Yabera inside.
“Your son is here now,” she remembers telling her late sister as she had his remains added to the burial site.
After that, she asked the prosecutors to close the case. “It’s not justice,” she said, sitting on the grave and lighting a cigarette. “But I found it, I buried it – and that’s it for me.”
In other parts of Coahuila, the search for the missing continues.
Patrocinio, a vast expanse of desert about an hour east of Torreón, has become the center of the latest effort, led by volunteers and scientists. Among the sand dunes, brush and mesquite bushes, members of Los Zetas burned victims and dug hundreds, if not thousands, of graves, researchers and families believe.
For two continuous weeks in November, a large group of archaeologists, prosecutors and relatives of the missing came to Patrocinio to excavate as many remains as they could find.
Death smells like diesel here. The whiff signals you’ve stumbled upon a secret grave, said Ada Flores Netro, an archaeologist with the identification center who oversaw her colleagues’ work in the freshly dug hole, where they would later unearth rusted handcuffs and bone fragments.
Most of the unmarked grave sites here tend to be near large bushes, said Ms. Flores Netro: 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 and thermal imaging cameras — discovered most of the recently found secret tombs, said Rocío Hernández Romero, 45, a member of the Grupo Vida search that was looking for her brother Felipe.
Mrs. Hernández Romero found at least five grave sites in the previous days. Her technique is more “rudimentary,” she explained, kneeling next to a thorn bush and dragging a spade across the soil to detect discoloration or other disturbances.
“The dirt itself,” she said, “sometimes speaks to you.”
Sheltering from the sun under a tent, geophysicist Isabel García said the constant dialogue with researchers like Ms. Hernández Romero had taught her how to look for better clues about burial sites.
“We couldn’t do anything without them,” said Ms. García, 28.
She then flew a giant drone equipped with cameras to map the graves discovered that day.
A few meters away was an area dotted with holes in the ground where archaeologists and volunteer researchers last year discovered the remains of Sandra Yadira Puente Barraza, 19. She and a friend disappeared in 2008 after police pulled over a taxi they were in on a shopping trip.
When DNA tests matched Ms. Puente Barraza’s remains, her mother, another searcher, left a wooden cross with pink plastic roses where she was found.
“It was a difficult day,” said Silvia Ortiz, the search manager, as she sifted buckets of dirt through a mesh to separate bones and teeth. “It’s a good feeling in the sense that you found her. But it hurts a lot.”
