Heads have rolled after a refrigerator truck containing 157 unidentified corpses from the Guadalajara morgue was found abandoned in a field adjoining a subdivision in Tlajomulco.
Both the state attorney general and director of the morgue have been relieved of their duties in the wake of the scandal.
The bodies – many of which had been dug up from mass graves – were being stored in plastic bags in the trailer to ease the overcrowding of corpses at Jalisco’s Forensic Sciences Institute (IJCF). With more than 1,500 homicides registered so far in Jalisco this year, the state is on course for the most violent 12 months in its history.
Authorities were alerted to the trailer after complaints about the stench from neighbors living in the nearby Paseos del Valle subdivision.
It was later revealed that the trailer had been shuttled around various municipalities in the Guadalajara metropolitan area before being dumped in the field. It had previously been parked in a warehouse in Tlaquepaque but was ordered to move on by Mayor Maria Elena Limon as a potential health hazard.
According to reports, IJCF Director Luis Octavio Cotero Bernal had also rented a second truck to store the surplus of bodies. The morgue only has space to hold 77 corpses, local media reported this week.
Jalisco Government Secretary Roberto Lopez Lara said the decision-making process leading to the trailer’s junket around the city’s suburbs showed an “unacceptable lack of sensitivity” toward the families of the victims and laid the blame squarely at the door of two agencies, the state Attorney General’s Office (FGE) and the IJCF.
The FGE is legally responsible for unidentified corpses but the IJCF is entrusted with their storage, in addition to performing autopsies.
“It’s clear major errors were made,” Jalisco Governor Aristoteles Sandoval told reporters Monday before dismissing Cotero. And on Wednesday, he took matters even further, ordering Attorney General Raul Sanchez Jimenez to stand down from his job.
Cotero slammed the decision to fire him, and denied his agency held any responsibility for the debacle, claiming the FGE had assumed complete control over all homicide victims more than two years ago. He refuted suggestions that he had ordered the trailer to be driven away from IJCF’s installations in Guadalajara and denied he had acted insensitively, noting that his own daughter had been listed as “disappeared” more than a year ago.
Under pressure from families of missing persons and the State Human Rights Commission, Sandoval ordered an immediate restructuring of the morgue to include the construction of a refrigerated space able to hold up to 300 corpses. He also demanded that extra efforts be made to identify all the bodies, even though some are in a severe state of decomposition.
University of Guadalajara (UdG) researcher Pablo Moloeznik, a specialist in public security, said it is illogical to think that Sandoval was not aware of the overcrowding of bodies at the morgue. The UdG issued a statement criticizing the firing of the IJCF chief, calling it an “impulsive” act.
Family members of missing persons in Jalisco demonstrated outside the installations of the IJCF this week and demanded they be shown photographs of the unidentified bodies. At least 2,500 people are reported as missing in the state.
Complicating matters further this week were conflicting reports about the number of unidentified corpses held by the IJCF. Instead of 157, as mentioned earlier, the real number could be as high as 450, some reports suggested. Both the state and national human rights agencies demanded rapid clarification of the total.