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A30 world news
Diamars 1 maart 2022

Mexico’s efforts paltry in face of nearly 100,000 missing

(AP) — For the investi- Nuevo Laredo. If noth-
gators, the human foot ing else, there is the hope of The official total of the miss-
-- burned, but with some helping even one family find ing stands at 98,356. Even
fabric still attached -- was closure, though that can take without the civil wars or
the tipoff: Until recently, years. military dictatorships that af-
this squat, ruined house flicted other Latin American
was a place where bod- That’s why a forensic tech- countries, Mexico’s disap-
ies were ripped apart and nician smiled amid the dev- peared are exceeded in the
incinerated, where the re- astation on a recent day: She region only by war-torn Co-
mains of some of Mexico’s had found an unburnt tooth, lombia. Unlike other coun-
missing multitudes were a treasure that might offer tries, Mexico’s challenge still
obliterated. DNA to make an identifica- has no end: authorities and
tion possible. families search for people
How many disappeared who disappeared in the 1960s
in this cartel “extermina- The phenomenon of Mexi- and those who went missing
tion site” on the outskirts of co’s disappearances exploded today.
Nuevo Laredo, miles from in 2006 when the govern-
the U.S. border? After six They are sent off to the fo- Youtube video thumbnail ment declared war on the President Andrés Manuel
months of work, forensic rensic lab in the state capital And people continue to dis- drug cartels. For years, the López Obrador’s govern-
technicians still don’t dare Ciudad Victoria, where boxes appear. And more remains government looked the other ment was the first to recog-
offer an estimate. In a single of paper bags wait their turn are found. way as violence increased and nize the extent of the prob-
room, the compacted, burnt along with others. They will families of the missing were lem, to talk of “extermination
human remains and debris wait a long time; there are “We take care of one case and forced to become detectives. sites” and to mount effective
were nearly 2 feet deep. not enough resources and too 10 more arrive,” said Oswal- searches.
many fragments, too many do Salinas, head of the Tam- It wasn’t until 2018 -- the
Uncounted bone fragments missing, too many dead. aulipas state attorney gener- end of the last administra- But he also promised in 2019
were spread across 75,000 al’s identification team. tion -- that a law passed, lay- that authorities would have
square feet of desert scru- At the Nuevo Laredo site -- to ing the legal foundations for all the resources they needed.
bland. Twisted wires, appar- which The Associated Press Meanwhile there is no prog- the government to establish The national commission,
ently used to tie the victims, was given access this month ress in bringing the guilty to the National Search Com- which was supposed to have
lie scattered amid the scrub. -- the insufficiency of inves- justice. According to recent mission. There followed lo- 352 employees this year, still
tigations into Mexico’s nearly data from Mexico’s federal cal commissions in every has just 89. And Macías’ state
Each day, technicians place 100,000 disappearances is auditor, of more than 1,600 state; protocols that separated commission has 22 positions
what they find -- bones, but- painfully evident. There are investigations into disappear- searches from investigations, budgeted, but has only filled
tons, earrings, scraps of cloth- 52,000 unidentified people in ances by authorities or cartels and a temporary and inde- a dozen slots. There the issue
ing -- in paper bags labeled morgues and cemeteries, not opened by the attorney gen- pendent body of national and isn’t money; the difficulty is
with their contents: “Zone E, counting places like this one, eral’s office, none made it to international technical ex- finding applicants who pass
Point 53, Quadrant I. Bone where the charred remains the courts in 2020. perts supported by the U.N. background checks.a
fragments exposed to fire.” are measured only by weight. to help clear the backlog of
Still, the work goes on at unidentified remains.

In Somaliland, COVID bringsg ‘cutters’ door to door for girls

(AP) — Safia Ibrahim’s cumcision, learned at the age there’s no medical or even ents to give their daughters Tanzania, Sudan and Soma-
business was in trouble. of 15, performed hundreds of religious reason for the re- in marriage, for which FGM lia.
COVID-19 had taken times and now being passed moval of external genitalia, often remains a cultural ex-
hold in Somaliland, in along to her daughters. She which can cause excessive pectation, if not a demand. Sadia Allin, Somalia direc-
the Horn of Africa. The congratulates young girls bleeding, problems with uri- tor for the Plan International
50-year-old widow with upon completing the proce- nation and childbirth, infec- In the early months of the nongovernmental organiza-
10 children to support set dure: “Pray for me, I’ve made tions and even death. But it pandemic, the U.N. Popula- tion, said she was alarmed
out door to door on the you a woman now.” remains legal in Somaliland, tion Fund warned that dis- when an FGM practitio-
capital’s outskirts, a razor so Ibrahim will continue un- ruptions to prevention pro- ner came asking about her
at hand, taking advan- She believes her work keeps til authorities tell her to stop. grams could lead to 2 million daughters in Somaliland’s
tage of the lockdown to girls pure for marriage. “This cases over the next decade capital, Hargeisa.
seek work with a question: is our Somali culture. Our Her story echoes through that otherwise might have
Have your daughters been great-grandmothers, grand- Muslim and other commu- been averted, and that prog- “I asked her what she wanted
cut? fathers — all of them used nities in a broad strip across ress toward the global goal of to do with the girls. She said,
to practice,” she said, even Africa south of the Sahara, ending FGM by 2030 would ‘I want to cut them,’ and that
Her business is female cir- though she now knows as well as some countries in be badly affected. was the shock of my life,”
Asia. In many places, CO- Allin said. “I did not expect
VID-19 brought stark chal- Hard data are lacking on the that something like that can
lenges to efforts by health increase in FGM cases, but happen in this age and time,
workers and activists to stop officials point to anecdotal because of the awareness and
what they along with the evidence, local surveys and the work that we have been
United Nations and others the observations of medical doing.”
call female genital mutilation. and advocacy groups. In So-
maliland, an arid region that She said their survey found
Government officials, health separated from Somalia three that 61% of residents of
workers and advocates say in- decades ago and seeks rec- Hargeisa and Somaliland’s
stances of FGM rose alarm- ognition as an independent second-largest city, Burao,
ingly during the pandemic in country, community assess- believed that FGM was in-
Somaliland and other parts of ments by government work- creasing under the lockdown.
Africa as lockdowns kept girls ers and aid groups found that
out of school, making them FGM rose during the six- Mothers give in and allow
vulnerable to “cutters” like month pandemic lockdown. their girls to be cut, Allin
Ibrahim, and economic pres- Advocacy groups say they’ve said, “because the social pres-
sures led impoverished par- also seen increases in Kenya, sure is greater than the pain.”