The cardboard box was light, not big enough for an athletic 26-year-old. However, Diego Fernando Aguirre saved Pantaleo, or at least his remains, excavated from a mass grave in the desert of northern Mexico.
His family does not know how he ended up in the cemetery in the state of Coahuila. Authorities said he was abducted on graduation day in 2011 along with six other classmates who had pledged to join a new specialized police force trained to fight organized crime in Coahuila. Armed men broke into the bar where the young policemen were celebrating and took them away.
“We were all dead in life,” Mr. Aguirre Pantaleo's father, Miguel Ángel Aguirre, 66, said of his family. After his son's disappearance, he sleeps on the couch in the living room, waiting to hear his son's footsteps.
It took 12 years – until February 2023 – for his son's remains to return home in a box. His parents refused to look inside. Scientists said that his body was cremated.
It was a tragic but unusual decision in a country where more than 120,000 people have disappeared since the 1950s. government dataleaving his relatives desperate for clues to his fate. Until recently, hundreds of families in Coahuila faced the same uncertainty. But in a unique partnership, search volunteers, scientists and government officials have begun to change that.
From this union, a specialized research institute – the Regional Center for Human Identification – was created for the first time in the country. He has an almost impossible task: find the remains of the missing and send them home.
“Dignity and human rights do not end with death,” said Yezka Garza, chief coordinator of the center in Saltillo, an industrial city in the Coahuila desert. “What we're looking for is that those bodies are never forgotten again.”
The center, built next to the Saltillo morgues, opened in 2020, with financial support from the state government, Mexico's federal search commission and the United States. US Agency for International Development. It has about 50 employees – the families of the missing have asked for several of them to be recent graduates, seeing their young age as a sign that they are not spoiled.
They work almost every day to find, detect, classify, preserve and identify human remains.
Since 2021, researchers have uncovered 1,521 unclaimed, unidentified, or undiscovered human remains from extensive searches of state morgues, mass graves, and secret burial sites. Through genetic and forensic examination, they gave names to 130 of those bodies, and most of them, 115, were returned to their families.
Many of the dead are likely victims of intense violence at the hands of Coahuila's Los Zetas cartel and allied security forces, with killings peaking in 2012. Although the cartel's grip on Coahuila has since weakened and the state is now one of the most peaceful in Mexico, more than 3,600 people remain missing.
Memories of shootings, disappearances and bodies hanging from bridges remain fresh for residents to this day.
“A lot of my friends in high school went off the rails and got involved in organized crime,” said Alan Herrera, 27, a lawyer and detective at the center. “They went on for a month and they killed them – 12, 13-year-old kids.”
Mr. Herrera's soothing voice is useful in his work: making the first contact with people looking for loved ones. In November, he visited the home of 65-year-old Jorge Bretado in Torreon, another industrial town west of Saltillo. The men sat down in a narrow living room and the interview began.
Who was he looking for? Son and ex-wife.
What happened? In 2010, the municipal police took them away; he never saw them again.
Did he report to the police? “No,” Mr. Bretado replied nervously. At that time, there was no law, but a cartel. “And they told us that if we report, they will kill the whole family,” she said.
“I hope your relatives are not with us,” Mr. Herrera said after the interview.
He then donned blue gloves and pricked Mr Bretado's finger to collect his blood, which researchers would use to match DNA in a growing database. If his son's body was in one of the center's refrigerated cabinets, Mr. Bretado would have known about it.
It is not always easy to identify the remains of victims in Coahuila – the Zetas made sure of that. Mónica Suarez, the center's lead forensic geneticist, said the cartel's goal was to make sure “there is absolutely nothing left of the person.”
If there are remains, they are often pieces of bone blackened by fire or eaten away by acid. Anthropologists spend months sorting them out like a puzzle. To a geneticist, these fragments, which are too small or distorted to contain DNA, are not useful.
Mr. Aguirre Pantaleo's family is among hundreds in Coahuila seeking some kind of closure.
On a recent afternoon, Mr. Aguirre and his wife, Blanca Estela Pantaleón, 61, visited their son's grave at a church in Saltillo. “I think it's a miracle we found him,” she said, placing her hand on the cold stone carved with her son's name. “They hardly find any here in Mexico.”
When Sylvia Yaber heard that Mr. Aguirre Pantaleo's remains had been found in a mass grave, she wondered if her nephew, Victor Hugo Espinoza Yaber, another police graduate who was abducted the same night, might also be there. He asked scientists to exhume the remains and take DNA samples from seven of his relatives, including Mr. Espinoza Yaber's mother and his sister, who died of kidney failure.
“I never stopped looking for him,” said Ms. Yaber, 66. He even went to cartel hideouts and scoured the hills for any sign of his nephew. In August, she received news of a genetic match. His nephew's remains were exhumed from the same grave.
Recently, Mrs. Yaber went to the cemetery in Saltillo with two bouquets of flowers. He laid flowers on his family's grave. Cement was used to seal it again – this time with the remains of Mr. Espinoza Yaber inside.
“Your son is here now,” he remembers telling his late sister as she added his remains to the burial plot.
Later, he asked the prosecutors to close the case. “This is not justice,” he said, sitting on the grave and lighting a cigarette. “But I found it, buried it – and that's it for me.”
The search for missing persons continues elsewhere in the state of Coahuila.
Patrocinio, a vast desert about an hour east of Torreon, has become the focus of a recent effort led by volunteers and scientists. Among the sand dunes, bushes and mesquite bushes, members of Los Zetas cremated victims and dug hundreds, if not thousands, of graves, searchers and families believe.
For two consecutive weeks in November, a large group of archaeologists, prosecutors and relatives of the missing came to Patrocinio to uncover as many remains as they could find.
It smells like diesel death here. Its smell tells you you've come across a secret grave, said identification center archaeologist Ada Flores Netro, who is overseeing her colleagues' work in the newly excavated pit, where they will later find rusty shackles and bone fragments.
Many of the unmarked burial sites are usually near large bushes, Ms. Flores Netro said: Cartel members apparently sought shade as they burned and buried their victims.
Rocío Hernández Romero, 45, a member of the Grupo Vida search team, made the discovery not by scientists with sophisticated equipment such as drones and thermal cameras, but by volunteer searchers with years of experience and training. his brother Felipe.
Ms. Hernández Romero had found at least five burial sites in the previous days. Describing his technique as more “primitive,” he knelt beside a barbed brush and dragged a spatula across the floor to detect discoloration or other irregularities.
“Ugly himself,” he said, “sometimes talks to you.”
Sheltering from the sun under a tent, geophysicist Isabel García said the constant dialogue with searchers like Ms. Hernández Romero has taught her to look for better clues about burial sites.
Ms Garcia, 28, said: “We couldn't do anything without them.
He then flew a giant drone equipped with cameras to map the graves discovered that day.
A few feet away was an area dotted with holes where archaeologists and volunteer searchers exhumed the remains of 19-year-old Sandra Yadira Puente Barraza last year. She and her friend went missing in 2008 after the police officers stopped the taxi they were traveling in. a trip to shop.
When DNA tests matched Ms. Puente Barraza's remains, her mother, another searcher, placed a wooden cross with pink plastic roses at the site where she was found.
“It was a tough day,” said Silvia Ortiz, head of the search team, as she dragged buckets through a net to remove bones and teeth. “It's a good feeling that you found him. But it hurts a lot.”