Wednesday 7 August 2013

Lost in the system: Unidentified bodies on the border


Over the past decade, thousands of people have died in the desert borderlands of the United States. As has been demonstrated repeatedly, the deaths are a result of U.S. border enforcement policies that have made border crossings much more dangerous than they were before the era of border militarization. But the number of deaths is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to understanding the ugliness unfolding on the border. Hundreds are unidentified, hundreds are missing, and distraught relatives are getting lost in the spaces between the various bureaucracies that can’t or won’t help.

One of these family members, Reyna, last spoke with her husband, Felix, on July 8, 2009. He called her from Altar, Sonora, to tell her that he would be crossing the border into the United States the following day. Having been deported to Mexico the previous May, he was in a hurry to get back to her, since she was struggling to make ends meet alone with two small children.

A few days after Felix’s call, Reyna got a call from his coyote, or professional smuggler. Felix didn’t make it. He had collapsed in the desert and was left behind somewhere near a road frequented by the Border Patrol near a place called Choulic.

In the summer of 2011, almost two years after Felix went missing, a friend and I visited Reyna and her children in their home in rural North Carolina. Finding her was difficult. She could not read or write or give me directions. As we drove around in circles in a rural area, we began to notice white feathers all over the grass outside the car. By the time we turned down Reyna’s road, the feathers were covering the ground and the air was thick with the stench of chemicals, manure, and blood from a nearby poultry processing plant. Reyna’s home was one of about a dozen trailers lining an unpaved loop. At the entrance to the loop was a small, dilapidated shack with a sign outside reading Tienda. The windows were covered with ads in Spanish for international calling cards.

We sat with Reyna for about an hour and a half as she described what had happened, what Felix was wearing, the color of the metal restorations on his front teeth, the fact that he’d had a bad knee and how that was what had probably gotten him into trouble in the desert. We learned that she worked for the poultry processing plant and that she and her children were undocumented. Her living conditions, likely on company land, were dire. Reyna’s children, an eight-year-old boy and a five-year-old girl, clung to her and whispered in her ear as we spoke. Her son gently pulled a small cockroach out of her hair and wiped the tears off her face as she described to us how the ordeal had affected her family:

“It has been so hard. We suffer so much. We don’t know anything. He wanted to be with his wife. He wanted to be with his kids. And they love him so much. And they need their papa. And I need him. They need new things. They say, ‘Mama, I want new clothes, I need a backpack.’ I have to work all night and into the day to pay the rent. And we have two children in Guatemala. Without knowing where he is, I don’t know what to do. I can’t do it all by myself. For two years now, we know nothing of him.”

I met with Reyna for two reasons—to collect more information about Felix so that he might be identified among the unidentified bodies at the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner (PCOME), and to inform my dissertation research on death, disappearance, and identification on the U.S.-Mexico border. Felix’s case is one of many collected from families, foreign consulates, and immigrant rights and humanitarian groups as part of the Pima County Missing Migrant Project (PCMMP), which sought, beginning in 2006, to organize all such data for southern Arizona. The project now has records for nearly 1,400 missing persons last seen alive crossing the border.

Relatives of the missing, like Reyna, are calling agency after agency for help. Some have called more than 20 different offices. Most of these calls are never returned. The calls that do come are from mysterious people claiming to have the person, willing to release them only after thousands of dollars have been wired to them. Other calls come from private investigators, promising to unearth hidden information—again for a price.

The data provided by relatives to various agencies are inconsistently shared with others, especially with medico-legal offices tasked with investigating the deaths of bodies found in the desert. Although the PCMMP has successfully organized most of these data for Arizona, border-wide, the problem continues. There is no centralized repository for all reports of missing persons last seen crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. Hence, a family could report a missing person to an office in one state, while the body is discovered in another. There is still no consistent way for these records to be connected.

This is not just a border problem, but a national one. In 2009, the U.S. Department of Justice launched the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs), an online relational database designed to match missing person reports with records for unidentified decedents found throughout the country.

Although NamUs is enormously useful, it relies on local jurisdictions to enter their own records for unidentified remains, and many medico-legal offices still do not use the system. The PCOME, an office with exemplary practices, uploads all cases of unidentified remains into NamUs. But the full potential of NamUs is not reached unless information is entered for both unidentified remains and missing persons. Until recently, NamUs could not accept reports for most missing migrants because a police tracking number was required, and U.S. police agencies usually will not take reports for missing foreign nationals. In addition, many relatives of missing migrants will not call police for fear of deportation, which could lead to further family separation.

In the summer of 2012, the PCOME became the first non-police entity authorized to enter missing person reports into NamUs. With a backlog of 1,400 cases, the data entry is taking considerable time. However, with only about 400 of the cases published, identifications are already being made, and families with whom the project had lost contact are finding their reports online, then calling and providing more information.

Despite these strides, there are problems. Although NamUs has granted the project access, coming up with funding for the work of getting the reports into NamUs is challenging, because the federal and state agencies that typically support this type of work cannot use their money on missing foreign nationals. Moreover, even when all the information is complete, NamUs will not resolve all the cases. NamUs uses non-genetic information to make connections between unidentified and missing—the date of disappearance and date of death, the clothing the person was wearing, the dental condition, scars, tattoos, and so forth. Because such a large number of the unidentified are highly decomposed or skeletal, and because there is so little information about many of the missing migrants, a large portion of the cases will never be resolved without comparing DNA taken from the body to DNA taken from relatives of the missing person.

The PCOME has taken DNA samples from all the unidentified decedents discovered over the past decade. These samples are sent to Bode Technology Laboratories in Virginia, where DNA is extracted, profiled, and entered in a database. To identify remains in this context, an identification hypothesis is first made between a particular missing person and a particular unidentified body. Then a one-to-one comparison is made using DNA profiled from the family and DNA profiled from the remains.

Thanks to the efforts of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF), a massive comparison system capable of producing blind matches is in progress. EAAF’s Border Project has the goal of creating a regional system, including Central America, Mexico, and the United States, to centralize the exchange of information about missing migrants and unidentified remains. In collaboration with governments and nongovernmental organizations, EAAF has created DNA banks for families of missing migrants in El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and Chiapas, Mexico. The DNA sequenced from these families is then sent to Bode Technology, the same lab where PCOME sends DNA sequenced from the unidentified dead. Dozens of identifications have already come out of this work.

While this is good for the PCOME and the families who live in one of the areas where EAAF has established (or will establish) a DNA bank, there are enormous challenges to addressing the problem on a border-wide, regional scale. For many cases of unidentified remains discovered in the United States, DNA data are uploaded into the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System (CODIS). But DNA samples taken from families of missing migrants cannot go into this system for comparison because by law, the DNA must be collected by a U.S. law enforcement agency, and most law enforcement agencies are not taking these reports for reasons discussed above. Also, for a variety of reasons, CODIS does not have DNA for anywhere near all cases of unidentified remains discovered along the border. Through conversations with families and officials in other counties, I have learned that some medico-legal offices are not taking samples for DNA before remains are buried as unknowns. Also, the requirements for entering DNA data into CODIS are very high, and for cases of weathered bone, which may not produce a complete profile, the data cannot be uploaded.

The point is that the DNA taken from the bodies is not being compared with DNA taken from the families on any massive scale. Those of us working toward a comprehensive system to help the families of the missing are coming up against massive bureaucratic, transnational roadblocks. The result is that hundreds, likely thousands, of family members are still waiting for word about their missing loved ones, while in the meantime the bodies are being found, examined, and buried or cremated as unknowns. Even if a family reports someone missing immediately, and even if the body is found right after death, the two events will very likely not be connected.

Reyna reported Felix missing to both the Guatemalan and the Mexican consulates; although he was Guatemalan, he used a Mexican alias and false ID. Indeed, when meeting with Reyna, I saw that there were two reports for Felix in the project list of missing persons—one in his real name and the other under his alias—but neither had the correct date of disappearance in the desert.

When I returned to Tucson from North Carolina, I searched among the unidentified dead for Felix, not expecting to find anything. It had already been two years, and it was likely that his body either had not been found or was so highly decomposed that I would not be able to find him without DNA. But when I opened the binder full of unidentified-persons reports to July 2009, there was a man, found near Choulic, Arizona, on July 9 with metal restorations on his front teeth. I recognized Felix from the photos Celia had given me. I called her in North Carolina and told her that I might have found him. She walked down the road to the tienda, called, told me the e-mail address of the person working there, and within a few minutes was looking at a photo of her husband, taken the day after he died in 2009.

Due to errors in taking data from the family, Felix had remained unidentified for over two years. His body was kept in the morgue at PCOME for nearly a year and was then released as unidentified, with a number rather than a name. He was cremated and his remains were kept in the Pima County Public Cemetery in Tucson among hundreds of others, until he was finally identified. Reyna asked for Felix’s remains to be sent to her in North Carolina, rather than to Guatemala, because, she said, it was their home and it was where he wanted his family to be. He had wanted his children to have the opportunities that growing up in the United States could provide.

For Reyna, two years of anguish were over. For me, frustration, anger, and guilt followed the phone call. Felix’s case was representative for me of the many ways my hands are tied when it comes to helping the families of the missing. If we had had NamUs as a tool at the time, the records likely would have been linked earlier. If forensically trained people rather than consular officials had been taking the information, maybe the data would have been of better quality. If we had had a DNA matching system, Felix’s family would have been able to submit DNA and probably get an answer much sooner than they did.

But Reyna did finally find out, and was able lay her husband to rest and tell her children what had happened to their father. Hundreds of others are still waiting for news. The daily experiences of exclusion that immigrants like Reyna and Felix go through are repeated in this context, where they are excluded from the technologies and systems that have been designed to address the basic human right to know what happened to a missing loved one. The poultry processing plant and Reyna’s run-down trailer are inseparable from Felix’s death and disappearance in the desert. The suffering of the families of the missing is a call not only to identify the dead but to recognize that these people too are loved, missed, and irreplaceable.

Wednesday 7 August 2013

http://nacla.org/news/2013/8/6/lost-system-unidentified-bodies-border

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New Zealand: Plan to enter Pike River mine ready to go


3 News has learned a plan to re-enter the Pike River mine is complete and ready for approval.

The plan has been developed by mine owner Solid Energy, the families and the Government. And the Prime Minister has pledged $10 million to pay for it.

For nearly three years the families of the 29 men killed in the Pike River disaster have been waiting for re-entry to the mine.

"I understand these things are being discussed and they're working through it literally right now," says Energy Minister Simon Bridges.

The joint committee has been working on a proposal to enter the mine's tunnel since February. Two sources have told 3 News it's been completed.

The plan now goes to the five-person Solid Energy board, we're told, this month. If they deem the plan safe and so does the Government's High Hazards Unit, it's rubber-stamped and sent to the Energy Minister to be taken to Cabinet.

"I won't muck around," says Mr Bridges. "I will move on that with real haste and get that to Cabinet."

Once with Cabinet, it won't take long for the Government to open its purse and fund the exploration.

"I wouldn't expect that to take more than days – certainly not weeks or months," says Mr Bridges.

Prime Minister John Key personally pledged the money to enter the mine – up to $10 million. But he says beyond the tunnel, or drift, which is blocked by rockfall, entry into the mine itself may be impossible.

"I worry about how far we'll be able to get up the drift," says Mr Key. "But going no further, they'll be close to their loved ones, but not close enough."

But this plan could still lead to bodies being recovered.

"It would probably be small numbers of men," says Mr Key.

"There is still the door for prosecutions to happen, so I think it's important we get down there and do the whole job, and number one is get the men out and answer those questions," says families' spokesman Bernie Monk.

The plan could still stall through these final stages of approval process because of safety concerns. But Mr Monk says the families are now in the best position they've been in, in the almost three years since the explosion, and they will keep the pressure on.

Wednesday 7 August 2013

http://www.3news.co.nz/Plan-to-enter-Pike-River-mine-ready-to-go/tabid/423/articleID/308011/Default.aspx

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Foreign climbers: Taliban kill officers probing massacre


Pakistan-based Taliban fighters opened fire on a group of police officers investigating a June massacre of foreign climbers, killing three, officials said on Tuesday. The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for the June 22-23 pre-dawn attack when gunmen dressed as policemen stormed a base camp on Pakistan's second-highest peak of Nanga Parbat, killing 10 foreign climbers and a local guide.

The attack shocked the international climbing community and several expeditions to Pakistan have been cancelled, depriving its starving economy of much-needed cash at the height of the climbing season. A group of officers investigating the massacre came under attack in the troubled Diamar district of Gilgit-Baltistan province late on Monday. Gunmen opened fire on their motorcade.

"Though no major arrests have been made so far related to the June 23 shooting of foreigners, these officials were investigating the killings of foreigners," a senior security official told Reuters. A Pakistani Taliban spokesman claimed responsibility for the attack on police. Victims of the mountain assault included climbers from China, Lithuania, Nepal, Slovakia, Ukraine and one person with joint US-Chinese citizenship. One Chinese climber escaped.

Nanga Parbat, one of the world's highest mountains, is popular among international mountaineers because of its challenging terrain, but growing violence has damaged the potentially lucrative tourism industry. Once-peaceful areas of northern Pakistan where the mountain is located are increasingly infiltrated by militants seeking to gain footholds beyond their traditional hideouts on Pakistan's porous border with Afghanistan.

Wednesday 7 August 2013

http://www.brecorder.com/general-news/172/1218571/

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DNA test in probe over ‘body at Arbroath cliffs’

Police probing reports of a mystery body in the sea are testing a half-eaten McDonalds meal found at the shore for DNA.

Police received a call from a member of the public saying they saw a male in the water just north of Arbroath cliffs on Saturday.

Coastguard, the local lifeboat crew and a rescue helicopter were called in to coordinate a full-scale search of the area over the weekend, but nothing was recovered.

However, officers did find a Lee Cooper cardigan and spectacles on the foreshore, as well as a “partially consumed” meal and drink, understood to be from McDonalds.

And with no reports of any missing person, police were examining the objects in a bid to establish the owner.

Inspector Graham Young said the inquiry would continue in the hands of Eastern section and take the form of land-based investigations.

He said: “The caller was very clear that they saw a body in the water.

“The Coastguard carried out a search of the water on Saturday and Sunday, but nothing was found. We have got items of clothing and background inquiries will continue.

“There are no reports of any missing persons. The partially consumed meal and drink will be taken away for DNA testing.”

Police were also looking at the possibility that the sighting of the body reported may be a seasonal worker.

Inspector Young added: “That is a real possibility and could be why nobody is aware of them, hence the reason it has not been reported.”

A spokesman for Police Scotland, Tayside Division, appealed to anyone who may have any information that would help with the inquiry to contact them.

Wednesday 7 August 2013

http://www.eveningtelegraph.co.uk/news/local/dna-test-in-probe-over-body-at-arbroath-cliffs-1.117772

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Rain, landslide kill 15, bury hundreds in Kerala’s hills


At least 15 persons have died and several were reported missing because of heavy rain, which started on the night of Sunday-Monday, and landslides in the hilly district of Idukki, south-central Kerala.

The devastation took place when a huge mound of rock and slush came crashing down at Chiyyappara in Idukki while relief work was going on.

Cochin International Airport was closed for two days after its runway was flooded and many flights were diverted or cancelled.

Many vehicles are feared trapped in the debris and the state government has sought the help of the army and the National Disaster Response Force.

The toll was likely to go up, said a senior district official. There are unconfirmed reports that some foreign tourists too are trapped.

Incessant rain hampered rescue and relief at several places and the government has asked tourists to avoid hill stations. Chief minister Oommen Chandy has called an emergency cabinet meeting to review the situation and step up relief operations. Two ministers have gone to Idukki to co-ordinate relief work.

“We have sought help from the army and navy for rescue operations. We are closely monitoring the situation. Some of the dams have already crossed the danger mark,” Chandy said.

In Idukki many houses built on the slopes of hills have been swept away in flash floods and landslides.

Since roads were blocked due to heavy landslides, many areas in the district remain isolated.

Wednesday 7 August 2013

http://www.hindustantimes.com/India-news/Kerala/Rain-landslide-kill-15-bury-hundreds-in-Kerala-s-hills/Article1-1103544.aspx

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10 people killed, 52 injured after bus falls into gorge in Himachal Pradesh


Ten people were killed and 52 injured when a state-run overcrowded bus skidded off the road and fell into a 200-metre deep gorge in Shimla district on Tuesday, an official said.

The accident took place near Nerwa in Chopal tehsil, some 120 km from Shimla, an official said. The accident spot has witnessed heavy rains.

Seven bodies were recovered from the wreckage of the bus while the injured were taken to hospitals, deputy commissioner Dinesh Malhotra said.

The bus, ferrying passengers from Shimla to Pehlog, was overcrowded, one of the survivors told police.

Witnesses said the bus driver probably lost control over the vehicle when he was trying to reverse it to make way for a vehicle coming from the opposite side.

Rescue workers said the death toll could rise. Most of the injured have been admitted to nearby hospitals.

Most victims were from nearby villages of Nerwa. The dead included two residents of Uttarakhand and one from Bihar.

Eyewitnesses said the administration had a tough time extricating the victims from the badly mangled bus.

It took hours for rescuers and police to climb down the mountain and bring up the bodies. Even the rainfall in the region hampered the rescue operation, police officials said.

The locals began rescue operations even before authorities reached the spot.

Expressing grief, chief minister Virbhadra Singh ordered a magisterial inquiry and announced a compensation of Rs. 100,000 for the next kin of the dead.

Chopal, adjoining Uttarakhand, is one of remotest places in the state and scarcity and low frequency of passenger buses often leads to overcrowding of the vehicles.

Wednesday 7 August 2013

http://www.hindustantimes.com/India-news/Shimla/8-killed-as-bus-rolls-down-a-gorge-in-Himachal/Article1-1104289.aspx

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