HWH Comment:
“Never forget, lest it happen again”? Where were the Jews in Mexico, Central and South America when this Holocaust took place right under their noses? eh?
How would they know? How could they not know?
Sound familiar?
Where Jews move they know everybody’s business. I know. I lived for seven years among the Hasidic Jews in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. Have to say, they’re a bitter bunch, the women especially. The men are more outgoing, not by much. The women’s liberation movement didn’t seem to affect the women in religious separatist groups. Though the modern Jews played a big part. The few Muslims I’ve encountered while living elsewhere in Cleveland share that bitterness. Low on patience. Preoccupied, frustrate easily. Self-conscious of every movement they make, not necessarily how they look.
One hundred thousand Mexicans exterminated in Mexico. And the Jews didn’t know? They couldn’t use that sixth sense of theirs always looking for incoming, to notice an extermination camp in their midst? People disappeared and nobody in law enforcement wanted to look for fear of what they might uncover?
Sound familiar?
I’m sure they never imagined the scope when they did uncover the proof of the truth being all those corpses. I don’t know if 100,000 dead included those destroyed by acids which wouldn’t leave a trace. They claim the cartel workers burned them with acids in places where burials would make people suspicious and alert the authorities.
Sound familiar?
Nobody forgot the Jewish Holocaust and it happened again. The dead only know where all the other sites are, or maybe they’re already known and fear keeps authorities from approaching – maybe now they’re booby trapped. Be careful.
Why did the USA allow cartel workers unfettered access to the USA grounds and markets?
It was too difficult to squash the cartels in Mexico, so they move them to the USA and be squashed here? But they’re not squashed. They proliferate with impunity. The government claims to know where they all are located, and are keeping an eye on them, but what else? That’s it? We know you’re here, behave yourselves? Why murder them in Mexico, then tell the leftovers to come to America and ‘we’ll keep you safe and you won’t have to pay off any politicians or law enforcement’?
Ops, I think I got that last one wrong. That’s why cartels are allowed to set up and run operations with impunity in America, because they’re paying to do it. Lots of money. They move the money in Ryder trucks and other moving vans, even use live animals going to slaughter trucks. A wide awake dream told me while it slept. (it, not I)
Please note that a certain percentage of Mexicans have no problem with cutting up bodies – dead or alive. Some of them enjoy it. These are the people allowed safe passage over our southern border by the USA government – anyone cartel related gets a free pass. The proof is that they’re here and growing huge profitable drug businesses.
These are the politicians in congress who won’t legalize marijuana, but they bring cartel workers across the border unharmed to set up profitable drug businesses. These are the politicians already making money from the cartels, much more than they’d make if legalizing pot in America. Those are the politicians holding back.
Hey, I’m not in favor of torturing and killing these people who commit atrocities to terrorize people into silence or to stop a breadcrumb trail to them. Not in Mexico do I approve and not in the USA do I approve. But if you’re going to murder cartel heavyweights in Mexico then let them operate freely in Chicago or Los Angeles that reeks of corruption on the USA side.
Even if some of the people reported missing relocated themselves elsewhere to stay hidden from the cartels, the bones, teeth, clothes, trinkets tell a frightful, chilling story of a Holocaust in Mexico.
The question that remains unanswered is why the Jews living in those countries who spy on everybody didn’t report this to the authorities? If others suspected for a long time, then they had to get wind of it, which means they turned the same blind eye that was turned on them in Europe during World War II.
So that little ditty about neverforgettinglestithappenagain? It’s an excuse to keep what happened to Jews at the forefront of the world’s collective mind, so when it does happen elsewhere, nobody notices. There is only one Holocaust according to the orthodox Jews who appear to run the world in areas of who and what is important to remember and that is the Jewish Holocaust. Lest it happen again.
Well, there’s something questionable about accepting wrongs in the world as natural occurrences when people make lots of money by allowing those wrongs to exist and then to allow the continuance and proliferation of those wrongs unrighted.
Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House once said about the horrific murders in Chicago that they didn’t matter, because they were cartel-related. Bad guys committing atrocities against bad guys was okay by her. She gave the political green light, that accompanied her ‘don’t forget me on pay day’ requirement for that endorsement of cartel-related atrocities.
My searing thought-question at hearing her speak those words as if it was a no-brainer was, ‘you mean Chicago has cartels’? How could that be? How would she seem so accepting of the fact, then much later in time call for the dissolution of DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency)? So now there is no war on drugs are we to assume? So why not legalize marijuana? Too many fat-cats from the tobacco industries want to create a monopoly and they’re digging their heels in to prevent a free for all swarm of mom and pops sprouting up all over the USA.
Well, I think a swarm of mom and pops growing and selling marijuana may not be such a bad idea given the pandemic we’re still in and the work force diminishing due to unbearable work conditions that make people want to branch out on their own, creating a personal survive and thrive space. I don’t see anything wrong with it, and frankly a lot right with it.
If I were running this country I’d say let ‘er rip…Back to the basics. If our own government allows cartels to survive and thrive, then we’ve become a nation of hypocrites supporting the criminal we once murdered when they were in somebody else’s country. Here, in the USA we let them live, set up farms, conduct business and otherwise survive and thrive.
No holocaust is more or less important than anyone else’s. It is discriminatory to even claim ownership of a holocaust. Many other people, besides Jews, were holocausted in Adolf Hitler’s factories/camps. But the Jews insisted on “in our name only”. It makes one wonder if further generations were in the plan to benefit from it as they obviously have.
One must wonder why Adolph Hitler gave the Jews enough pens/ink paper to document the lives of six million Jews whom they claim he murdered and then give them places to store all those documents. Over a span of how many years? Their memories aren’t that good.
There’s something missing from their stories. To them, ‘what does it matter, we’re all dead”. But it does matter. It matters that when atrocities are committed or reported that they be done accurately. How often does accurate happen in the reporting of any war, that doesn’t become sanitized after the fact by governments wanting to project a certain image to the world?
Still, the bones, teeth, clothes, trinkets tell the story of a Mexican Holocaust. So, let’s forget it and it won’t happen again? Nobody was thinking about a Jewish Holocaust when these bodies were desecrated for purpose of hiding what needed to be hidden – a person who talks. I doubt the Mexicans will be exploiting their deaths for profit and political gain. Therein lies the difference between the Spanish and the Jewish.
Maybe a Mexican Holocaust Museum to commemorate all the people who died during the war on drugs. Lest the war on drugs decides to revitalize itself.
The Jews blamed all the world for not knowing what was happening to them. How could they not know? Then they consequently punished each and every country, each and every citizen for not believing once they were told and then not acting fast enough to save them.
And to this day they’ll ruin the life of any person who to them trivializes their holocaust, by asking questions, labeling them for life.
Well where were the Jews when it was happening to the Mexicans? They live in the same country. They knew people were disappearing. Why did they not ask questions when it was somebody else?
By MARÍA VERZA
28 February 2022
NUEVO LAREDO, Mexico (AP) — For the investigators, the human foot — burned, but with some fabric still attached — was the tipoff: Until recently, this squat, ruined house was a place where bodies were ripped apart and incinerated, where the remains of some of Mexico’s missing multitudes were obliterated.
How many disappeared in this cartel “extermination site” on the outskirts of Nuevo Laredo, miles from the U.S. border? After six months of work, forensic technicians still don’t dare offer an estimate. In a single room, the compacted, burnt human remains and debris were nearly 2 feet deep.
Uncounted bone fragments were spread across 75,000 square feet of desert scrubland. Twisted wires, apparently used to tie the victims, lie scattered amid the scrub.
Each day, technicians place what they find — bones, buttons, earrings, scraps of clothing — in paper bags labeled with their contents: “Zone E, Point 53, Quadrant I. Bone fragments exposed to fire.”
They are sent off to the forensic lab in the state capital Ciudad Victoria, where boxes of paper bags wait their turn along with others. They will wait a long time; there are not enough resources and too many fragments, too many missing, too many dead.
Who knows if the 100k figure is accurate within an acceptable margin of error.
Maybe a lot of people that went missing immigrated to other countries without leaving a trail or saying good bye to their families.
And people continue to disappear. And more remains are found.
“We take care of one case and 10 more arrive,” said Oswaldo Salinas, head of the Tamaulipas state attorney general’s identification team.
Meanwhile there is no progress in bringing the guilty to justice. According to recent data from Mexico’s federal auditor, of more than 1,600 investigations into disappearances by authorities or cartels opened by the attorney general’s office, none made it to the courts in 2020.
Still, the work goes on at Nuevo Laredo. If nothing else, there is the hope of helping even one family find closure, though that can take years.
That’s why a forensic technician smiled amid the devastation on a recent day: She had found an unburnt tooth, a treasure that might offer DNA to make an identification possible.
___
When Jorge Macías, head of the Tamaulipas state search commission, and his team first came to the Nuevo Laredo site, they had to clear brush and pick up human remains over the final 100 yards just to reach the house without destroying evidence. They found a barrel tossed in a trough, shovels and an axe with traces of blood on it. Gunfire echoed in the distance.
Nearly six months later, there are still more than 30,000 square feet of property to inspect and catalog.
The house has been cleared, but four blackened spaces used for cremation remain. In what was the bathroom, it took the technicians three weeks to carefully excavate the compacted mass of human remains, concrete and melted tires, said Salinas, who leads work at the site. Grease streaks the walls.
Macías found the Nuevo Laredo house last August when he was looking for more than 70 people who had disappeared in the first half of the year along a stretch of highway connecting Monterrey and Nuevo Laredo, the busiest trade crossing with the United States.
Full Coverage: Photography
The area was known as kilometer 26, a point on the highway and the invisible entrance to the kingdom of the Northeast cartel, a splinter of the Zetas. There are small shops with food and coffee. Men sell stolen gasoline and drugs. Strangers are filmed with cell phones. The power poles lining the highway farther north have been blasted with large-caliber weapons.
Most who disappeared here were truck drivers, cabbies, but also at least one family and various U.S. citizens. About a dozen have been found alive.
Last July, Karla Quintana, head of the National Search Commission, said the disappearances appeared to be related to a dispute between the Jalisco New Generation cartel, which was trying to enter the area, and the Northeast cartel, which wanted to keep them out. It’s not clear if the victims were smugglers of drugs or people, if some were abducted mistakenly or if the goal was simply to generate terror.
The phenomenon of Mexico’s disappearances exploded in 2006 when the government declared war on the drug cartels. For years, the government looked the other way as violence increased and families of the missing were forced to become detectives.
It wasn’t until 2018 — the end of the last administration — that a law passed, laying the legal foundations for the government to establish the National Search Commission. There followed local commissions in every state; protocols that separated searches from investigations, and a temporary and independent body of national and international technical experts supported by the U.N. to help clear the backlog of unidentified remains.
The official total of the missing stands at 98,356. Even without the civil wars or military dictatorships that afflicted other Latin American countries, Mexico’s disappeared are exceeded in the region only by war-torn Colombia. Unlike other countries, Mexico’s challenge still has no end: authorities and families search for people who disappeared in the 1960s and those who went missing today.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s government was the first to recognize the extent of the problem, to talk of “extermination sites” and to mount effective searches.
But he also promised in 2019 that authorities would have all the resources they needed. The national commission, which was supposed to have 352 employees this year, still has just 89. And Macías’ state commission has 22 positions budgeted, but has only filled a dozen slots. There the issue isn’t money; the difficulty is finding applicants who pass background checks.
___
Disappearances are considered the perfect crime because without a body, there’s no crime. And the cartels are expert at ensuring that there is no body.
“If a criminal group has total control of an area they do what we call ‘kitchens,’ because they feel comfortable” burning bodies openly, Macías said. “In areas that are not theirs and where the other side could easily see the smoke, they dig graves.”
In 2009, at the other end of the border, a member of the Tijuana cartel confessed to having “cooked” some 300 victims in caustic lye. Eight years later, a report from a public university investigation center showed that what officially had been a jail in the border city of Piedras Negras, was actually a Zetas command center and crematorium.
Perhaps the largest such site was yet another border setting near the mouth of the Rio Grande called “the dungeon,” in territory controlled by the Gulf cartel. The memory still stirs Macías. The first time he went he saw “pelvis, skulls, femurs, everything just lying there and I said to myself, ‘It can’t be.’”
Authorities have recovered more than 1,100 pounds of bones at the site so far.
According to the Tamaulipas state forensic service, some 15 “extermination sites” have been found. There are also burial sites: In 2010, graves containing 191 bodies were found along one of the main migratory routes through Tamaulipas to the border. In 2014, 43 students disappeared in the southern state of Guerrero. Only three have been identified from pieces of burnt bones.
Most of the extermination sites have been found by family members who follow up leads themselves with or without the support and protection of authorities. Such search groups exist in nearly every state.
For the families, the discoveries inspire both hope and pain.
“It brings together a lot of emotions,” said a woman who has been searching for her husband since 2014 and two brothers who disappeared later. Like thousands of relatives across Mexico, she has made the search for her loved ones her life. “It makes you happy to find (a site), but at the moment you see things the way they are, you nosedive.”
The woman, who requested anonymity because of safety concerns, was present for the discovery of two sites last year. When she entered the Nuevo Laredo location with Macías, she could only cry.
A few months earlier, she had found the site in central Tamaulipas where she believes her loved ones are. That day, accompanied by the state search commission and escorted by the National Guard, they entered the brush in search of a drug camp.
“I’m not well psychologically after that,” she said as she showed photos of the deep graves where burnt remains were buried, some wrapped in barbed wire. They recovered around a thousand teeth, she said.
___
On a recent day in Nuevo Laredo, gloved hands sifted through the dirt, separating out bits of bone: a piece of a jaw, a skull fragment, a vertebra.
The work is hard. The forensic technicians clear brush and then dig. Some days the temperature hovers around freezing, others it’s above 100 degrees. They wear head-to-toe white protective suits and are constantly guarded.
Security is a concern, and so authorities have separated the search function from the investigations — the cartels appear less concerned with those just looking for bones, though anything they find could eventually become evidence in a prosecution. Each day before dusk, they are escorted to a safe house and don’t leave except to return the next day to the site.
When cartel violence exploded in Tamaulipas in 2010, the capital’s morgue had space for six bodies. In a single massacre that year, a cartel killed 72 migrants. In those days, the Interamerican Commission of Human Rights denounced serious negligence in Tamaulipas’s forensic work.
Pedro Sosa, director of the state’s forensic services, said that their way of working changed radically in 2018 with the establishment of the identification team. But it’s not enough. “A single forensic anthropologist in the whole state is not compatible with all of this work.”
It can take four months for the Nuevo Laredo remains to be cleaned, processed and arrive to the genetic lab. It can take longer if something urgent emerges like in January of last year, when nearly 20 people — mostly migrants — were incinerated in an attack near the border.
Even if they manage to extract DNA, identification isn’t assured because the profile will only automatically be crossed with a state database.
It could be years before the profile is added to one of the national databases. In 2020, the federal auditor said that that system had only 7,600 registered disappeared and 6,500 registered dead.
Though the federal law calls for a system in which various databases can interact, that doesn’t exist, said Marlene Herbig, of the International Committee of the Red Cross. Each state or federal database of fingerprints or genetic profiles is like an island, despite calls for bridges to connect them.
No one can estimate how much money is needed or how many years it could take to see significant results in Mexico’s efforts to locate and identify the disappeared.
Herbig offered a clue: A similar effort mounted on the island of Cyprus took 10 years to identify 200 disappeared in the conflict between Greece and Turkey during the latter half of the last century. And there are many thousands more missing in Mexico than there were in Cyprus.
“This issue is a monster,” Macías said.
__
AP writer Alfredo Peña in Ciudad Victoria contributed to this report.
ARTICLE: https://apnews.com/article/europe-mexico-caribbean-forensics-4248edf042a13cce16801d58ee6ffea2
HAPPY WHITE HORSE™ 