Semefo: no rules, no coordination

The Semefo's , Institute of Forensic Sciences , situation in some states is critical, as its operative capacity has been surpassed for some time, in the context of the violence and insecurity crisis the country is going through. This in itself is grave and outrageous, but it reveals a series of shortages and anomalies in this institution, beyond infrastructure. Nowadays, the focus of the public discussion is on the number of murders that take place in Mexico every day, and the dozens of thousands of missing people reported in the last six years.

To fully understand the dimension of the drama, just between January to August 2018, coroners in the 10 most violent cities in the country received over 5,000 corpses of intentional and culpable homicides.

Contrary to what Semefo authorities claim, interviewed by EL UNIVERSAL , insist that this organism works with relative normality in most cases and that has no issues with the creation of the identification record or the delivery or storage of corpses , yet groups of people looking for their missing loved ones have documented the opposite, and promptly indicate that these organisms work under no laws and without coordination. This is why they don't trust the information given to them by these organisms.

And after the “ death trailers ” case, from Jalisco, was known, the events seemed to confirm what has been said by these groups: there is no law that specifies the time needed to send an unidentified body to a common grave. Not even the Federal Health Law talk about the issue. Today, this is unacceptable.

In the management of unidentified bodies, there isn't an authority that supervises that these are buried after taking a DNA sample , a void that has allowed the states, in the context of contingency for their overwhelmed coroners, to manage things the way they wish to, and at the same time, that the families of those missing find it impossible to recover their bodies.

With this, a great paradox, the institutions that should look after the good management of the unidentified or unclaimed bodies turn into another factor, perhaps unintentionally, that hinders that the bodies are found by their relatives. A situation both absurd and vile, which takes place due to, as it's been said, by legal voids, but also because if grave situations, mistakes, decisions, and human mistakes.

Because of the security emergency the country is going through, which sadly doesn’t seem like it will end soon, it's urgent to approve action protocols and data bases to be used in the Institute of Forensic Services all over the country, and that there is coordination and communication among them, but mostly will to identify the thousands of corpses that have been accumulated in Mexico .

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