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 News from Around the Americas | August 2005 
New Tool Helps Find Missing Migrants
 Leslie Berestein - Union-Tribune
| | Out of the more than 3,200 people known to have died trying to cross from Mexico into the U.S. illegally in the past decade, at least 1,000 remain unidentified, most of them buried in unmarked graves in border cemeteries. |
The long-distance call came in to the Mexican Consulate in San Diego the first day of June, the caller's request all too familiar.
"Please," said the woman on the line, calling from Mexico City. "I need your help. I am looking for my brother."
She said she had last seen him when he took a flight to Tijuana on Jan. 6, Three Kings Day, which in Mexico marks the end of the holiday season.
Her brother, José had planned to enter the United States through the San Ysidro port of entry with false documents. But months had gone by, and no one in the family – not even his wife – had heard from him.
Calls like these have poured in to Mexican consulates throughout the United States for years, particularly those in Southwest border cities. Families call searching for relatives who headed north with plans to cross the border but who failed to arrive at their destination, or for family members already here who have dropped out of touch.
Searches find many of these missing people, sometimes alive, sometimes not. But many cases of missing migrants go unsolved. Out of the more than 3,200 people known to have died trying to cross from Mexico into the U.S. illegally in the past decade, at least 1,000 remain unidentified, most of them buried in unmarked graves in border cemeteries.
Now a new Mexican government database, officially operating since June, is showing promise as a tool to help identify at least some of the unidentified dead, the majority of whom are believed to be Mexican. In San Diego, it is already credited with helping solve at least one unidentified migrant case, according to the consulate and the Medical Examiner's Office.
SIRLI, an acronym for System for the Identification of Remains and Localization of Individuals, was created by ImageWare Systems Inc., a San Diego high-tech firm that specializes in identity management software. It can be used to help locate missing relatives as well as identify the dead. The database contains information from missing-persons reports filed by families, including photos, as well as fingerprints and signatures taken from Mexican consular, military and voter registries.
The database also contains forensic information provided by medical examiners and will be linked with a DNA bank being compiled at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, consular officials said.
After a trial phase in May and June, the system is operating in all 47 Mexican consulates in the United States and in 53 foreign relations offices throughout Mexico.
"We are, in theory, now having access to foreign databases we never had access to," said Gretchen B. Geary, a medical examiner investigator for San Diego County. "It is a fact of life living on the border that people are going to cross into the U.S. illegally, and anything we can do to get them identified is great."
Geary, who is in charge of unidentified cases, said it has always been easier to identify "John Doe" victims who are U.S. citizens because it's more likely their information is in U.S. databases.
Medical examiners and other authorities in the U.S. don't have direct access to the SIRLI system, but can provide data on John Doe cases to the consulates, who in turn will check it against existing entries in the system to find a match.
One case that Geary credits the Mexican database with helping her solve recently is that of the missing Mexico City man, who consular officials say is the first John Doe migrant identified in San Diego using the new database.
About three weeks after 44-year-old José Jesús Reyes Martínez left his home in January, the body of an unidentified man was found floating in the Tijuana River late one night by police.
His hair was dark and straight, with a receding hairline. He wore blue jeans, black tennis shoes with white stripes, a dark jacket and a T-shirt featuring a logo of a Mexican restaurant with an English name, but no address or number. Around his swollen neck hung a red-and-yellow scapular of St. Jude Thaddeus, the patron saint of lost causes.
But he had no identification, not even a scrap of paper with a telephone number. Because he appeared to be Latino, medical examiners contacted the Mexican Consulate and provided photographs of him and his personal effects. They were entered into the database, then still in development.
Consulate staff members located and called several restaurants around the U.S. with the same name as on the man's T-shirt, asking if any had a missing employee who matched his description. They learned nothing.
Then, more than four months later, the call came from the woman seeking her brother.
She provided a physical description and photographs, e-mailed from an Internet cafe, and consulate workers entered the information into the database. They cross-referenced it with existing data on other unidentified dead men, and came up with about a dozen possible matches.
The woman mentioned that her brother had a distinctive scar on his upper lip, something consulate workers hadn't noticed in the forensic photos. Using the database, an employee magnified an old photo of him provided by his sister next to a magnified forensic photo. The scar was unmistakable.
Finally, a military identification card sent by the family that contained a fingerprint was entered into the system and cross-referenced against a forensic fingerprint. It didn't match at first – medical examiners had recorded prints from a different finger on the victim. But when new prints were taken, they matched.
Last week, Reyes' ashes were flown home to his relatives, who declined to be interviewed. At least, consular officials say, they now know what happened to him.
"This system was created to help find people," said Consul General Luis Cabrera Cuarón. "Maybe he would have been identified another way. But this system made the search easier, and he was found."
Since October 2003, nearly 700 migrants have been found dead along the border with Mexico, according to Border Patrol records. For now, only the most recent unidentified cases stand to be solved. The SIRLI database only contains data on unidentified dead migrants found since the beginning of 2004.
The plan is to expand the database to include older cases, but how much it will be expanded "depends on resources," Jerónimo Gutiérrez undersecretary for Mexico's foreign relations ministry, said during a recent visit to San Diego. There are no immediate plans to exhume bodies to retrieve DNA samples, a costly process.
Most of the more than 350 unidentified migrants buried in the Holtville cemetery near El Centro were interred before 2001, when California coroners were required by law to begin taking DNA samples from unidentified bodies; DNA sampling is still optional in other border states.
In some cases, exhumation will be necessary when personal effects and photographs won't do, said Claudia Smith of the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation, who with other human rights advocates lobbied for the database and hopes the Mexican government will eventually pay for exhumations to retrieve DNA.
"If it involves exhumation in some instances, so be it," Smith said. "Families have been waiting more than 10 years to know what happened to the migrants they saw leave with so much hope, and never heard from again."
Fortunately, not all old cases will need DNA matches to make a positive identification, said Henry Proo, a coroner investigator for Imperial County, where 114 migrants were found dead in 1998.
Even for those long buried, there are still photographic negatives on file that recorded what these people looked like when found. The negatives also show what they wore, their jewelry, even photocopies of scraps of paper they carried in their pockets, all of which could help some families identify a long-lost missing relative.
Proo hopes the database will be expanded to include cases from previous years.
"It would be really nice if they can let us put in our cases from 10 years ago," he said, "and see how many we can get identified over the next few years, as the Mexican people learn about this." |
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