The collective Buscando a Nuestros Desaparecidos y Desaparecidas Veracruz continues to carry out searches at the State Police Academy in El Lencero and will not stop doing so despite the fact that to date there are no positive results, said María Elena Gutiérrez.
It is from the La Guapota property, in Úrsulo Galván, where they have had the greatest number of remains recovered
Collective Buscando a Nuestros Desaparecidos y Desaparecidas Veracruz
She said that the work of the collectives has not stopped and this has forced the authorities to join the searches.
“The evaluation of the collectives in this period is positive, but I am evaluating the collectives, not the officials, because we were able to pressure, we were able to demand, to find the way to force the authorities to search, and I think that it is the worst job, the worst actions to search, especially searching in clandestine graves,” she said.
Clandestine graves, the saddest thing for searchers
He pointed out that the saddest thing is not not having the facilities for the search, but the search itself, because they would not have to be doing those tasks.
“We would not have to go looking, there should not be clandestine graves, the level of violence in Veracruz has not decreased, maybe in relation to last year there is a difference, but it is not relevant, we are still a state full of clandestine graves.”
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He pointed out that as a collective they are carrying out search work in La Guapota, in the Barranca de la Aurora and at the Police Academy.
“We are still in the academy, in the organization, the plan to intervene in the Academy is to do it all, the whole Academy. We still haven’t found anything, we think it’s quite naive, but it’s our obligation to search, maybe they removed everything, because it seems to me that the Police Academy is not going to lend itself to the idea that if they know, if we are going to find something, they will allow it, then we are facing a monster.”
He maintained that they have the authorization to search in any space in this place, “we enter and we don’t tell if we are going to make a hole here or a hole there, we have permission from the authorities to search anywhere and make holes, we have entered the Academy up to the director’s office, with georadar, on that side we have no complaints, but it is implicit that if they know that we are going to look in a place, they can go ahead so that when we arrive there is nothing.”
Collective for the Search for Missing Persons
Searches in the Barranca de La Aurora
He explained that on average they go to the barraca de La Aurora every two months, and those who go down always come up with remains. “The barraca de La Aurora is still not fully recovered, because it is very difficult to recover remains, and every time they return, they return with remains.”
However, he insisted that there is a crisis in the identifications because the remains accumulate, but there is no identification. “From our group, they have not delivered any, in fact there are very few in deliveries. It is very difficult in a pit that has already been exposed, in short, to identify.”
186 remains found in La Guapota property
Brenda Natividad Hernández, also from the group Buscando a Nuestros Desaparecidos y Desaparecidas Veracruz, explained that in the last five years, 186 remains have been recovered from the La Guapota property in the municipality of Úrsulo Galván, according to the latest report.
“There are 186 recovered in the graves and only 13 people have been notified and are in process, those who have not been matched are around 100 and the rest are in the process of being matched, that is what is currently being taken from the La Guapota property.”
He recalled that work began in this place in March 2019 and has been going on since 2024. In addition, most of the identifications have been from families from Boca del Río, La Antigua and Veracruz port.
“This is information up to about a month ago when the meeting was held, because every two months they have given us an extraordinary prior meeting to give us what has been recovered in the processed graves, if there have been notifications in that time and all the people have been notified.”
He explained that the notifications are to those people or bone remains that match with relatives and then the families are notified and they are delivered.
The operation carried out by elements of the Ministerial Police was to arrest the elements of the SSP
The temporality of La Guapota, he recalled, is between 2015 and 2019, so one of the identifications is of a person who disappeared on February 19, 2019 from La Antigua and another from Boca del Río.
“You can say that it is a long time but the work is very precise. The work that the multidisciplinary team is doing with a lot of dignity, the recovery and above all for the terrain that we are talking about because, so to speak, it is not the same context of the La Aurora ravine because it is said that they threw them and then obviously we are not going to find a body like in a pit in La Guapota and there they cannot be associated, here they do associate.”
“In Playa Vicente there is still no very precise data because work has just begun. It was returned after so much time that it was left, it has just started to work and there is no precise data,” he stressed.
Missing
Veracruz, a state riddled with clandestine graves
In Veracruz, according to the Citizen Platform for Clandestine Graves, a collaborative effort between the organizations Data Cívica, Article 19 Mexico and the Human Rights Program of the Ibero-American University, the municipalities with the highest number of graves found are:
Veracruz, with 100 graves
Úrsulo Galván, with 73
Córdoba, with 28
Tihuatlán, with 23
Alvarado, with 17
Veracruz ranks second in the country with 548 clandestine graves discovered between 2006 and 2023
According to the platform, Veracruz is also among the states most affected by the issue of exhumed bodies, with 546 bodies recovered from clandestine graves.
Source: oem
