HUNDREDS OF VICTIMS UNCLAIMED, BURIED UNCEREMONIOUSLY IN JUAREZ

JUAREZ -- Hundreds of murder victims in this ravaged city are all but
forgotten.

Nobody in officialdom knows who they are. Nobody in the outside world
cared enough to claim their bodies.

They are shipped to San Rafael Municipal Cemetery. There each is awaited
by a simple wood box, a 6-foot hole in the Chihuahuan Desert and maybe a
plain metal plate with an engraved number. No cross adorns these final
resting spots, for this is where unidentified victims of the city's drug
wars are unceremoniously buried.

About 200 people who died violently last year ended up in paupers' graves
at San Rafael. They were among more than 2,600 murder victims in Juarez in
2009.

The cemetery is hidden in the sand dunes south of the city. A massive
white sign with the Juarez government's emblem and the words Panteon
Municipal San Rafael are the only distinguishable markings leading to the
graveyard.

A brush-lined, unpaved road of more than three miles splits to a junkyard
and to the cemetery. Closer to the burial grounds, vendors selling plastic
flowers, grave markers and religious statues are set up parallel to the
cemetery gate.

In one section are plots decorated with gravestones, crosses and pictures
of Catholic saints. The dead in this section are separated by just a
couple of feet.

But the middle of the San Rafael graveyard is bare. The unadorned land is
separated with bright, yellow-brick corner walls, each about 4 feet high.
They are marked "Fosa Comun," or communal grave. Small mountains of dirt
set apart the plots.

In the same general vicinity, three rows of dugout graves await more
homicide victims. Unidentified bodies are buried every three months in
mass interments, said Arturo Sandoval, a Chihuahua state attorney
general's spokesman.

From September to December, though, the attorney general's staff conducted
a mass burial every month -- sometimes twice a month -- because of the
vast accumulation of bodies at the morgue.

Juarez, population 1.5 million, had its deadliest month in August with 315
homicides. The bloodshed continued in September with 307 killings, October
with 306, November with 254 and December with 292.

By comparison, New York City, with 7 million people more than Juarez, had
466 murders in all of 2009.

The unrelenting violence in Juarez is fueled by rival gangs, reportedly
the Juarez and the Sinaloa cartels, fighting for control of the area's
drug trade.

The annual toll in Juarez rose from 1,587 murders in 2008 to 2,643 last
year. More than 140 people died in the first three weeks of 2010.

Before the beginning of the drug war in January 2008, unidentified corpses
were buried in mass graves. But Chihuahua's government changed the
interment policy for unidentified people so that unidentified corpses
would be buried in individual graves, Sandoval said.

These days, the cartel war is putting heavy pressure on police and the
morgue.

By law, Juarez officials cannot cremate the bodies of people who are
murdered. This is because the bodies might need to be exhumed and used as
evidence, Sandoval said.

"Two things happened at the same time: The system changed, and the
violence increased," he said. "We never imagined violent homicides would
increase so drastically. The system changed to have things done better and
faster."

Under the new policy, Sandoval said, a medical examiner is required to
take photographs of identifiable marks on unidentified bodies and blood
samples for DNA. The pictures and DNA information are then stored in a
database, he said.

"Now, if a person comes to us and says, 'I want to see if a person who
died is my family member,' specialized personnel show them specific
photos," Sandoval said.

"If they say one of the people in the photographs is their family member,
we don't just take their word. The next step would be to take their DNA
and compare it to the person they believe is their loved one."

The bodies of homicide victims are conserved in a refrigerated room until
they are claimed by relatives, Sandoval said. Family members, he said,
have up to three months to claim their loved ones before the mass
interments.

"Our problem is that we have a large transient population," he said.

"These are people who are not originally from here and do not have family
here. ... In the majority of cases, not even friends come forward to say,
'This is John Doe.' "