The October 17 ribbon-cutting of a sparsely equipped autopsy theater marked a small but significant step toward transforming Chapala into the future headquarters of Jalisco’s Fifth Judicial District.
The new facility, located in a spare room at the municipality’s Civil Protection and Fire Department base on the Libramiento bypass, is designated as a temporary local branch of the state’s Institute of Forensic Sciences (IJCF). The city government is in the process of finding a large plot of land to be donated to IJCF for the construction of a complete cutting-edge forensic lab, ready for operation in November 2015.
In the meantime, the provisional venue is in service for performing autopsies on victims of fatal highway accidents, homicides and other incidents that require forensic examinations to determine the cause and circumstances of death.
Chapala Medical Director Miguel Angel Ruiz Morales has been trained and certified to practice the post-mortems. He will be available to carry out autopsies on cadavers collected in the immediate Chapala area and several neighboring municipalities, eliminating long waits for IJCF vehicles and personnel to arrive at the scene and retrieve bodies for transport to the regional morgue in Ocotlán.
Local attention will come as a relief to families who are prone to hardships in recuperating a dead relative for funeral and burial services, on top of the grief of losing a loved one. In response to that problem, the Chapala government has been pursuing the establishment of a municipal morgue through a cooperative pact with state authorities signed 12 years ago.
During his appearance at this week’s opening of the autopsy theater, IJCF General Director Marco Antonio Cuevas Contreras pledged to assign additional forensic experts to Chapala ensure round-the-clock service.
He stressed that the operation of a permanent and fully staffed Chapala-based IJCF offshoot will facilitate prompt crime scene investigations and practices of a full range of forensic exams, such as collection of fingerprints, blood and DNA samples, ballistic tests and other evidence vital to solving crimes and identifying perpetrators.
As the state moves toward implementation of the new judicial system, including oral trials, Chapala is also posed to house a multi-faceted regional justice center that will handle cases for nearly 400,000 inhabitants of the lakeshore region.