In 2008, Roxana Enríquez Farias, a twenty-seven-year-old archeologist and graduate student in human geography, stood silently before a clandestine mass grave in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. The grave had been discovered not long before and, from a distance, it looked no different from any of the innocuous plots of land where she had dug as an archeologist. But Enríquez knew this one was different. She eyed the excavation site warily, willing herself to approach.
Enríquez’s goal in life was to excavate ancient sites. She had come to Ciudad Juárez on an invitation from a friend from her archeology program, Alberto Peña Rodríguez, who was part of a team hired by the state’s prosecutor to exhume unidentified bodies buried in a common grave in one of the city’s cemeteries. The team had recently examined a similar, smaller grave in the city of Chihuahua, and was trying to replicate this effort on a larger scale. When the clandestine grave was discovered nearby, Rodríguez had instructed Enríquez and her colleagues to examine it, and had given the group specific instructions: they were to extract the remains, analyze the bones, develop biological profiles of the deceased containing details of their sex, height, age, and the like, and gather DNA samples.
Usually, this kind of work was done not by archeologists but by forensic anthropologists—scientists who study human remains to identify deceased persons and solve criminal cases. Before leaving for fieldwork, Enríquez had paged through all the forensic-anthropology guides she could find, including the United Nations “Manual on the Effective Prevention and Investigation of Extra-Legal, Arbitrary and Summary Executions,” from 1991, which became known as the Minnesota Protocol. The work it described was a far cry from unearthing ancient artifacts.
Reading the protocol, Enríquez had decided that she’d approach the work like an archeological dig. Now, as the corpses in the clandestine grave were unearthed, she reminded herself that archeologists also proceed by separating the things they uncover into different categories—the stones from the ceramics, say. They often fill out forms detailing what they find—painted wares or animal bones—before the items are sent off for cleaning. She settled into a similar rhythm, sorting hair and severed skeletal remains from clothing, family photos, and handbags.
Many experts regard 2008 as the start of what is now widely called a forensic crisis in Mexico. Around that time, Ciudad Juárez became increasingly violent, as two major drug cartels, Juárez and Sinaloa, faced off. The city experienced a spike in homicides, kidnappings, extortions, and clandestine burials. As the violence spread, mass graves proliferated around Mexico. In Ciudad Juárez, local forensic doctors became overwhelmed. In the months after Enríquez visited her first clandestine grave site, law-enforcement officials started asking her and her colleagues to identify more and more corpses. She helped unload trucks brimming with body bags and gloves, and watched as the team used up materials with horrifying rapidity. At the city’s medical forensic services office, the four giant morgue refrigerators were always full.
As the crisis worsened, Enríquez devoted herself entirely to examining the remains of murder victims. Currently, the National Search Commission lists nearly a hundred and sixteen thousand people as disappeared. The country is gripped in a concatenation of overlapping crises, most notably the so-called war on drugs—which was initiated, in 2006, by former President Felipe Calderón and which involved violent confrontations between the Mexican security forces, including the military, and the drug cartels—and the fallout that followed. Other contributing factors include the forced disappearances of migrants headed to the United States, and extremely high rates of gender-based killings of women and girls. According to forensic authorities, the remains of at least fifty-two thousand people were unidentified as of 2020; most bodies were languishing in under-regulated common graves and medical examiners’ offices, and others had been cremated or donated to universities. The U.N. Committee on Enforced Disappearances estimates that it will take a hundred and twenty years to identify them; in 2022, only 3.7 per cent of all criminal cases in Mexico were solved, and the percentage was even lower for disappearances.
Now forty-three, Enríquez is the general director of the Mexican Forensic Anthropology Team—the Equipo Mexicano de Antropología Forense (EMAF)—which is dedicated to conducting independent forensic investigations, training new forensic scientists, and promoting “horizontal dialogue” with the multitudes of frustrated Mexicans who, in the absence of adequate assistance from the government, are searching independently for their loved ones’ dead bodies. “I didn’t know what I was doing until I started doing it,” Enríquez told me, recalling her transformation from an archeologist into a forensic scientist. But Mexico was changing around her, and she had to change, too. She now regards the slow, self-assured pace of archeological work as a luxury from a bygone era.
The forensic crisis has collapsed boundaries between scientists and ordinary people. Many “searching mothers” or “searching families” have taken up the tools of forensic science, from pickaxes and drones to trained detection dogs. On a warm afternoon in Mexico City, Enríquez, who is tall, with black curly hair that falls just below her shoulders, led a workshop at the National School of Anthropology and History, or Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia (ENAH), for forensic scientists who are learning to work alongside the bereaved. “I think that all of us got into anthropology with different intentions,” she said, at the front of the room. “But we all realized that we are needed for a different purpose.” As awareness of the forensic crisis has increased, new academic programs have opened across the country, and so forensic anthropology is now a young field: most of the attendees were in their twenties and thirties. Some wore faded jean jackets and cotton scarves—the traditional archeologist’s uniform—while others sported pink Mohawks and vintage Metallica sweaters.
Mexican forensic scientists, Enríquez said, can find themselves working in an atmosphere of mutual distrust. Some families believe that experts will take over their efforts and discount their hard-earned progress in the field, whereas scientists worry that searching families will muddle their official investigations. “We fear that families break up the evidence,” Enríquez went on. “But families have a legitimate right to do their own searches when they are not getting any official response from governmental institutions and academia.” Around the room, attendees took notes, sipping the warm café de olla that Enríquez and her colleagues had served.
Enríquez decided to become an archeologist when she was eight or nine. On family trips to ancient sites like Teotihuacán and the Templo Mayor in Mexico City, she admired the hunched, careful researchers she saw hard at work. Later, when she went out on her first archeological digs, she felt almost as if she were playing in the dirt. She still believes that archeology is socially and aesthetically valuable. “But, right now, people aren’t worried about cultural heritage,” she told me. “They aren’t worried about our great, distant past.” She misses archeology but doubts that she’ll practice it again; when she feels a pang of loss for her old career, she closes her eyes and imagines her archeologist friends immersed in a dig.
After the session ended, Enríquez drove to the National Autonomous University of Mexico, or Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), where she was co-teaching an introductory forensic-anthropology course. She made her way to a large classroom, where she greeted Mirsha Quinto-Sánchez, the course’s primary professor. Students arrived in small clusters, some wearing long white lab coats with “U.N.A.M. Ciencia Forense” stitched delicately on the front. Quinto-Sánchez explained that the subject of that day’s class would be sexual dimorphism in humans; the students would be learning to differentiate between male and female bones.
As forensic anthropology has expanded in Mexico, the field has changed. Many Mexican forensic scientists now articulate their professional objectives in feminist terms: they argue that the crisis will not abate until disappeared women cease to be stigmatized through the victim-blaming that occurs whenever their cases go public. Zoraida García Castillo, the director of the UNAM’s recently created National School of Forensic Sciences, has said that forensic training should incorporate a gender-sensitive approach. Meanwhile, on the technical side, Mexico has invested in new tools and methods. Traditionally, for example, forensic scientists have identified victims by comparing DNA taken from the remains with the DNA of a possible living relative. (This is the method frequently employed in popular TV shows like “CSI” and “Bones.”) Increasingly, however, Mexican forensic scientists are using “massive comparisons,” in which computers are employed to compare the DNA of large numbers of bodies with that of large numbers of living people, allowing for the speedier identification of the deceased. In recent years, the Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala has been training Mexican forensic scientists to use mass-identification software that was originally developed after the September 11th attacks. “You can’t use the same technology employed in the traditional forensic system. That’s the biggest mistake,” Omar Bertoni Girón, its director of identity confirmation, told me.
There is a political dimension to the work of identifying the disappeared. The more people are identified, the worse the crisis seems. In 2017, Mexico passed the General Law on Disappearances, which created national- and state-level search commissions. The work of the commissions has vastly increased the official count of disappeared people. And yet Karla Quintana, the former national search commissioner, resigned last August, posting on X that she was doing so “in light of current circumstances.” It is speculated that she was pressured to step down because she opposed the President’s efforts to meddle with the data. Two months before, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador had announced that the government would carry out a census to verify and update the registry of disappeared people—a move that critics argued would inaccurately decrease the number of disappeared.
“Now we’re going to do an exercise,” Quinto-Sánchez said. He gestured to Enríquez, who began distributing forms that read “Anthropometric Registration Card.” Boxes marked where students were to write down their height, weight, B.M.I., waist measurement, head circumference, and skin color according to the PERLA Color Palette, which was originally designed by the Project on Ethnicity and Race in Latin America to study skin-tone variations across the region.
“Can I get a volunteer to help me demonstrate what you all are going to do?” Quinto-Sánchez asked.
A student with an overgrown buzz cut, wearing black jeans and a burgundy hoodie, raised his hand, and Quinto-Sánchez told him to step forward. Holding the student by the shoulders, Quinto-Sánchez positioned him before a silver stadiometer—a high-quality device for measuring height—at the front of the classroom. The student straightened his back as Quinto-Sánchez placed the horizontal bar atop his head. “That’s how you do it,” he said. “Now be careful with your postures, everyone!”
The students began working, and the room grew loud. One group struggled to measure each other’s skulls with tape measures that looked frustratingly droopy. Enríquez walked over to assist them. At the same time, Quinto-Sánchez put up a PowerPoint slide that asked the students to help solve the forensic crisis by getting involved in a project called FaceMx, which he’d co-created. Most of the reference data used by forensic scientists in Latin America was generated in Europe and the United States, and this can hinder identifications in places that have a different genetic history. FaceMx is a growing database of Mexico-specific biometric data; once completed, it will allow forensic scientists to connect human remains found throughout Mexico to specific regions of the country, taking into consideration bodily differences, such as stature and skull shape, that have both social and biological causes. FaceMx’s volunteer participants are sent to a dental laboratory for X-rays and a dental mold; their faces and heads are scanned; and their fingerprints, blood, and DNA are collected. The project was officially launched in 2022, with eighty-eight UNAM forensic-science students and researchers participating, and is now open to the public.
The students completed their personal anthropometric files and lined up to submit their forms. After class, several lingered to ask Enríquez questions about a future assignment. She stayed until the last student left. Then she bolted to her car, to return to the workshop she was leading about working with the bereaved.
In Mexico’s recently concluded Presidential elections, the forensic crisis took center stage. In January, the organizations Madres Buscadoras de Sonora (Searching Mothers of Sonora) and Guerreras Buscadoras de Guaymas y Empalme (Warrior Searchers of Guaymas and Empalme) attracted national headlines by announcing that they had uncovered thirty-three clandestine graves containing more than fifty bodies in El Choyudo, Sonora, where the Sea of Cortez abuts the Sonoran Desert. Forensic scientists are now trying to identify the remains. The country was also rattled by the disappearance, last April, of Juan Carlos Tercero Aley, a renowned expert in identifying the disappeared and a pioneer in underwater forensic techniques. Tercero had dedicated his career to addressing Mexico’s forensic crisis, and his unresolved disappearance prompted the journalist Javier Risco to argue, in El País, that “in Mexico no one is safe—not the families searching for their loved ones who are missing, nor the public officials who are in charge of doing so.”
Mexico’s official tally of the disappeared is increasingly contested. Before the election, in December, 2023, López Obrador defended his controversial census by announcing that nearly seventeen thousand people previously listed as “disappeared” had either been found to be alive or to have passed away. Since then, López Obrador has repeatedly argued that the real number of disappeared people is significantly lower than what the government’s National Search Commission reports. Some relatives of disappeared people have protested that their missing loved ones are no longer included on his revised list. Others accused López Obrador of purging names to score political points before the Presidential election. President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum, of the left-wing Morena party, will succeed President López Obrador in October. She has publicly supported the President’s controversial approach to verifying disappearances, arguing that it improves accuracy; during the campaign, she also proposed developing a better national system for data sharing, integrating data gathered by state prosecutor’s offices.
In February, Enríquez became the chair of graduate studies in physical anthropology at the National School of Anthropology and History. When we last spoke, she told me that the recent changes in how the disappeared get counted reveal that Mexico has yet to develop a satisfactory forensic public policy. She does not believe the forensic crisis will be solved in her lifetime. “Yes, we can have many more specialists, and many more resources,” she said. “But what we need is a shared strategy.” Identifying the disappeared requires not just field work but social and political agreement and a sense of common cause. “To give an identity back to all these people”—not just the dead but their families—“everyone needs to participate,” she concluded. And yet those in power may find it more convenient to leave the disappeared undiscovered. ♦
