MEXICO CITY — Prosecutors in northern Mexico said they will investigate the case of a long-missing man whose body was found unidentified in a state morgue, despite months-long pleas to find him.
The Zacatecas state Prosecutor’s Office said Thursday night that it had “opened investigations into the situation and to determine whether any public servant was responsible for the failure to act.”
The man’s mother, Virginia de la Cruz, had approached authorities in the north-central state of Zacatecas eight months ago seeking help finding her missing son, José Alejandro. For months, prosecutors told De la Cruz they had no information. But she discovered that they had the body of her son all that time.
Mexico has around 115,000 missing people, whose relatives often have to look for them with their own resources due to the government’s inaction. But the country also has a backlog of around 50,000 bodies that have been found, but which authorities do not have the manpower or equipment to identify.
It was finally discovered that De la Cruz’s son was one of them, after he disappeared in November 2023. But it wasn’t even the authorities who identified him: it was his mother.
On one of his countless trips to prosecutors’ offices and the morgue, De la Cruz was asked to enter the morgue in early July to look at a body that had been found months earlier.
The corpse’s face was too disfigured by a gunshot wound to be recognizable, De la Cruz recalled in an interview with local media on Friday. But she had an idea.
“Show me his hands, because he had ‘Alex’ tattooed on him,” he asked. “They showed me both of his hands and it was indeed my child,” she said, crying.
No one paid much attention to the case (or facilitated the release of the body for burial) until De la Cruz stormed the state legislature, screaming, crying, and cursing at the officials’ inaction.
“They had the DNA and they never called me,” De la Cruz sobbed on the floor of the state Congress on Thursday.
DNA testing is often the best way to identify bodies, but Mexico has not invested enough money or effort to expedite such testing, subjecting mothers to months, years and even decades of uncertainty and suffering.
Successively, Some morgues are so overwhelmed They have to store hundreds of bodies (sometimes in refrigerated trailers) or bury them without identifying them while families wonder what happened to their loved ones.
The government’s state human rights commission said it had also opened an investigation into the case of De la Cruz’s son.
The Zacatecas Sangre de mi Sangre voluntary search group, one of hundreds of such groups in Mexico, composed primarily of mothers of the missing — said that unfortunately De la Cruz’s experience was all too common.
“This painful case is just a reflection of a generalized crisis in Zacatecas and Mexico,” the group wrote in a statement.
Zacatecas is one of the states where bloody turf battles between rival drug cartels have caused the most carnage.
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