Bodies Piling Up: Mexican Morgues Crowded With Drug War Victims

CNSNews.com ^ | March 09, 2009 | Julie Watson

[Man50D]

Death froze his exhausted face. The attackers lashed or punctured nearly every part of his body. Then they cut off the dead man's head, wrapped it in a plastic grocery bag and dumped it with his body between two tractor-trailers on a city street.

As with most murders in Ciudad Juarez, police found no witnesses, no weapons. Only the battered corpse on the steel coroner's table carries clues to who he was and how he died.

"Every organ speaks," says Dr. Maria Concepcion Molina, who gently removes packing tape from the head of her third decapitated victim in a week. The dead man's slack mouth and eyes still seem to pray for relief.

Bodies stacked in the morgues of Mexico's border cities tell the story of an escalating drug war. Drug violence claimed 6,290 people last year, double the previous year, and more than 1,000 in the first eight weeks of 2009.

Each bullet wound or broken bone details the viciousness with which the cartels battle a government crackdown and each other. Slain policemen lie next to hit men in the rows of zipped white bags.

Workers toil up to 12 hours a day, sometimes seven days a week, to examine the remains. When Tijuana coffin makers fell behind during the December holidays, the morgue there crammed 200 bodies into two refrigerators made to hold 80.

"There are times here when there are so many people, so many cadavers, that we can't keep up," says the Tijuana morgue director, Federico Ortiz.

In Ciudad Juarez, the border city with the most killings, Molina prepares to make a dead man talk. Investigators press each finger of the headless body on a pad for fingerprints.

Molina guesses from his face he was probably in his 30s.

She carefully lays out his bloodied clothing on a red plastic sheet. She pieces together his knife-shredded T-shirt picturing a wanted poster for Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa. She lays the tags showing the brands of his jeans and boxers flat before snapping photographs of each.

"Sometimes we show family these photos, and they'll say it's his clothing but it's not him," says Molina, a 41-year-old mother of five. "It's a defense mechanism."

Ciudad Juarez, a city of 1.3 million across the border from El Paso, Texas, has a modern, estimated $15 million morgue and crime lab thanks to international support after another notorious spate of killings -- the Women of Juarez. More than 400 women have been raped, strangled and dumped in the desert since 1993.

The morgue has seven doctors, including two hired in the last two weeks.

Still, the procession of the dead is staggering. Plans are under way to double the morgue's size next year.

Last year, 2,300 victims of violence and accidents were wheeled into the pungent, formaldehyde-infused morgue, where doctors work to Mexican love ballads and the whir of electric saws cutting through bone. More than 460 bodies arrived in January and February this year.

The morgue has stopped taking other death cases.

Nearly 40 percent of the dead last year tested positive for cocaine or marijuana. About 20 percent were never claimed by their families, many out of fear. Cardboard boxes with bloodstained cowboy boots, cell phones and bulletproof vests are stacked to the ceiling in the crime lab.

Drug traffickers know investigators use the cadavers to track killers. They have raided morgues and carted off bodies at gunpoint as shaking workers in blue smocks stood helpless.

Soldiers now guard morgues when a well-known trafficker is suspected among the dead.

Tijuana morgue workers show photographs to families identifying bodies from behind a protective window. Ortiz has asked for bulletproof glass, as well as fencing around the one-story building.

From 4:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. on a recent Tuesday, 17 bodies rolled into the Juarez morgue, including the city police force's second-in-command and three other officers.

"If this continues, we're going to have another record year easily. We're headed toward 2,000 deaths within 10 months," says Hector Hawley, the administrator of the crime analysis and forensics unit, as workers in white haz-mat suits crane-lift body bags onto steel shelves. "We need a lot more help."

In a white shower cap and blue medical robe, the bespectacled Molina checks her victim's neck, but there is no bruising. His head was cut off after he died.

"He's been decapitated, but I still have to determine the cause of his death," she says.

Her assistant, Ivan Ramos, 20, matches the head to the body. He holds it in place as Molina shoots a photograph, using a paper identifying the man by number to cover the gap in his neck. That makes it easier for loved ones who have to see the picture.

The doctor notes the rest of his injuries: broken left tibia, broken right humerus, severely bruised and cut abdomen, bruised left thigh, stabbed right thigh, sliced chin, knife punctures on lower right calf, lashes on his back. He has no distinguishable traits -- no moles, no scars, no tattoos.

Molina unwraps what appears to be a tourniquet on his left biceps. She speculates it was put there by the killers to stop the bleeding from a stab wound so he would not die before they finished their torture. His knees are bruised. He was forced to crawl at one point.

Molina holds the head on the examining table while Ramos shaves a section to measure a knife wound. He cuts the skin, saws open the skull, then photographs the brain before scooping it out and wiping away a dark pool of blood.

"That dark wine color on the brain, that shouldn't be there," Molina says. "That's a cerebral hemorrhage. Although they didn't crack his skull, he was beaten hard enough that it caused this."

Molina sees the carnage as a mound of medical evidence to be explored, a mechanism that helps her leave the gory images locked in the morgue when she heads home. Other doctors have quit after a few days.

She keeps looking, unsatisfied that the head injury caused the man's death.

Ramos drills through the rib cage to examine the organs. He started at the morgue as a volunteer when he was 17. While he couldn't eat at first, he's glad it led to a job in a recession-wracked city.

Molina examines the man's heart.

"Look, he had a heart attack," she says, pointing to white pearling on the organ. "But if I put heart attack as the cause, it will remove the responsibility from those who did this because it will be considered a natural death. So I'm going to leave that as a last resort."

She lifts each organ, noting how healthy the man was. No kidney stones, little fat, a healthy appendix, a normal-sized head.

"This could have been a productive person, and they are all like that, young men between 18 and 36 years old," she says, shaking her head.

After an hour and a half, she decides he was asphyxiated by the packing tape over his mouth and nose. His lungs are collapsed. His nails are a purplish blue.

Ramos gets a needle and twine, places the brain in the man's body cavity as standard procedure and sews up his chest. He closes the skull and replaces its skin.

"He's in good shape for being identified," Molina says.

As they zip the remains into a body bag to store in the refrigerator, the doors open and workers wheel in another slain man.

The next day, a stone-faced woman arrives among the families who gather daily outside the morgue, hoping to find missing loved ones.

A worker shows her photographs of the man's clothes. She says they belonged to her brother, 23-year-old Victor Alfonso Picaso, according to the morgue.

"She seemed to already know what she was coming for," says morgue psychologist Luis Mejia. "She just wanted to recover the body and get this over with."

[grey_whiskers]

Remember: George Bush, Mel Martinez, Lindsay Grahamnesty, all wanted open borders with this.

NO cheers, unfortunately.

[nmh]

And in the fall, Obama wants to OPEN THE BORDERS through “immigration reform”. May God help us. More crime will come here as our economy collapses.

[nmh]

This is horrific.

You read my mind.

Lock and load time as Obama strives to disarm us.

[Venturer]

Drug dealers killing drug dealers, is that a bad thing>?

[nmh]

I hope the dopes in College aren’t going there for “Spring Break”. Maybe the Dope in D.C. will legalize all illegal drugs as a source of income next.

[autumnraine]

“Still, the procession of the dead is staggering. Plans are under way to double the morgue’s size next year. “

Um, I could be way off here, but how about instead of spending the money to double the morgue for the dead, spending it on STOPPING PEOPLE FROM BEING DEAD?

[autumnraine]

They aren’t all drug dealers. In Houston, a young family man who had a promising career was mistaken for someone else was captured and killed.

[Pelagius of Asturias]

People must be pretty edgy in the area surrounding Juarez and El Paso. If that crossing is a shipment point all those places on the main highways like Las Cruces, Van Horn, and Carlsbad will probably see some spillover violence. I’m glad I don’t live there anymore.

[bcsco]

This is a ping list promoting Immigration Enforcement and Congressional Reform.
If you wish to be added or removed from this ping list, please contact me.

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[Diogenesis]

[Max in Utah]

Drug dealers killing drug dealers, is that a bad thing>?

If it were only that. These criminals use automatic weapons and grenades in their battles, which frequently take place in populated areas. Lots of "collateral damage" occurs. They also kill a lot of cops, mostly the honest ones who opposed them.

[SwinneySwitch]

Ping!

If you want on, or off this S. Texas/Mexico ping list, please FReepMail me.

[TKDietz]

“Um, I could be way off here, but how about instead of spending the money to double the morgue for the dead, spending it on STOPPING PEOPLE FROM BEING DEAD?”

They are spending a fortune trying to stop all this. They've recently just sent 7,000 more troops into Juarez. They have something like 50,000 troops nationwide who are supposedly fighting drug cartels, and that's in addition to all their police.

The problem is that these organizations are making many billions of dollars a year selling drugs. They supply most all of the cocaine and meth and heroin that comes into this country and a huge portion of the marijuana, their biggest money maker, many thousands of tons of it every year. These guys are flush with cash to hire private armies, buy whatever kind of military grade arms they need, bribe cops and government officials. The money will keep coming in as long as there is demand. If one organization is taken down another fills the void. If one leader is killed he is quickly replaced, as are all these peons who keep ending up in the morgue. We might very well be able to get rough and help calm the violence down for a while, but this stuff isn't going to stop in the long run as long as these people are making many billions of dollars a year on the drug trade. We aren't going to stop that as long as there is so much demand for drugs here, no matter how how we build the fences.

We could legalize all drugs and these organizations would turn into little street gangs, but if we legalize drugs like cocaine and meth and heroin that is going to cause us lots of problems. They make most of their money from marijuana though and run the other drugs through the existing marijuana networks. We ought to just legalize marijuana and take away most of their money and make it harder for them to get the other stuff to end consumers who will be buying from licensed shops and not from dealers that help them move their other drugs. These organizations would still exist, but when they lose the lion's share of their income they aren't going to be nearly as hard to deal with.

[DungeonMaster]

Who is in charge over there the government or the drug lords?

[HiJinx]

Ping!

[AuntB]

“As with most murders in Ciudad Juarez, police found no witnesses, no weapons”

And there is the problem we have with assimilating the modern Mexican. Absolutely NO respect for the rule of law. Another article points this out:

“Amid the spiraling violence, few suspects are detained, as less than 2 percent of the murders are prosecuted. Eyewitnesses rarely come forward, as it is usually a death sentence; even the emergency medical technicians stopped responding to calls, as the drug gangs let it be known that they would be victims if they attempted to aid someone marked for death.”

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2201987/posts?page=1#1

[AuntB]

“Drug dealers killing drug dealers, is that a bad thing>?”

There are school children trying to cross the street being shot. There have been 300 kidnappings in Phoenix recently by these drug dealing Mexican cartels. The rich leaders in Mexico have all relocated to El Paso,McAllen etc. They could care less what their people have to contend with.

[I Buried My Guns]

Here's your motivational poster, FRiend: