Mexico's morgues crowded with mounting drug war dead

By Julie Watson

CIUDAD JUREZ, Chihuahua — Death froze his exhausted face.

The attackers lashed almost every part of his body before dumping it on a city street.

As with most slayings in Ciudad Juárez, police found no witnesses and no weapons. Only the body on the steel coroner's table carried clues to who he was and how he died.

"Every organ speaks," Dr. Maria Concepcion Molina said.

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 illustrates the brutality with which the cartels are battling a government crackdown and one another. In the rows of zipped white bags, slain police officers lie next to hit men.

Workers labor for as many as 12 hours a day, sometimes seven days a week, to examine the remains. When coffin makers in Tijuana, across the border from Southern California, fell behind during the December holidays, the morgue crammed 200 bodies into two refrigerators that were made to hold 80.

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

Juárez, across the border from El Paso, is the border city with the most killings. In the morgue, Molina prepares to make a dead man talk. Investigators take fingerprints from the body. Molina guesses from his face that he was probably in his 30s.

She carefully lays out his clothing on a plastic sheet. She pieces together his knife-shredded T-shirt that pictures a wanted poster for Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa. She lays the tags showing the brands of his jeans flat before snapping photographs of them.

"Sometimes we show family these photos, and they'll say it's his clothing but it's not him," said Molina, 41. "It's a defense mechanism."

Juárez, a city of 1.3 million, has a modern morgue and crime laboratory, with an estimated worth of $15 million, because of international support that the city received after a different spate of killings: More than 400 women have been raped, strangled and dumped in the desert since 1993.

The morgue has seven doctors, including two who were hired recently.

The procession of the dead is staggering, and plans to double the size of the morgue are under way.

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.

Last year, almost 40 percent of the dead tested positive for cocaine or marijuana. About 20 percent were never claimed by their families. 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 cadavers to track killers, and they have raided morgues and carted off bodies at gunpoint. Now, soldiers guard morgues when a well-known trafficker is thought to be 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 to 9 p.m. on a recent Tuesday, 17 bodies rolled into the Juárez 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," said Hector Hawley, administrator of the crime analysis and forensics unit. "We need a lot more help."

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.

In a white shower cap and blue medical robe, Molina examines her victim carefully with the help of her assistant, 20-year-old Ivan Ramos. Ramos started at the morgue as a volunteer when he was 17. At first, the work made it difficult for him to eat, but he is glad that it led to a job in a recession-wracked city.

Molina examines the man's organs, noting how healthy he was: no kidney stones, little fat, a healthy appendix, a normal-size head. "This could have been a productive person, and they are all like that, young men between 18 and 36 years old," she said.

After an hour and a half, she decides that the cause of death was asphyxiation.

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