December, 2019
Higher Impunity
D. Johnson
This summer, Miguel Ángel Gómez Jácome, communications coordinator of the Mexican NGO Impunidad Cero (Zero Impunity), reported that 98.86% of all crimes committed in Mexico go unprosecuted. This alarming figure is the statistic for the country as a whole. As you move from state to state, the level of impunity varies.
The state with the highest level of impunity is Tamaulipas, which borders the US at Texas. Its rate sits at 99.99%. In other words, there’s a .01% chance that any given crime will be prosecuted, including rape, robbery, and murder. The statistic seems impossible, even surreal, but not to the citizens of Tamaulipas. They live in a region where the criminal justice system simply does not work, where reporting a crime is truly a waste of time, and this, in turn, leads to the underreporting of crime. According to Gómez Jácome, only 4-6 crimes out of 100 are ever reported to Mexican authorities.
Unfortunately, matters are worse than these bleak statistics show. How is this possible?
Police are finding hidden cemeteries throughout the country. The bodies they hold are murder victims, and these murders aren’t part of the official crime statistics, at least until they’re discovered and processed, meaning the level of impunity is higher than the numbers show.
In the state of Sinaloa, 1,100 hidden burial sites have been unearthed over the past 10 years, which averages out to about 100 or so annually. As of August of 2019, 71 hidden graves had been found in that state, a figure that put it in 2nd place. 1st place at that time was shared by Colima and Veracruz, where authorities had documented the existence of 96 clandestine cemeteries within each of their borders.
What this all means is there are countless uncounted homicides throughout the country that aren’t part of the official crime statistics, making the true numbers more abysmal than they already are.
Why Are There So Many Hidden Graves in Mexico?
It’s simple: If 98+% of all crimes are given a pass, then there’s no deterrent effect in play. If you want to kill someone for stealing from you, then you can do so with little to no consequences. Just be sure to bury the bodies or at least give them to someone who will do it for you.
Miguel Alemán, Tamaulipas
In 2014, unknown men began dumping bodies at the front door of a funeral home in this small town. For a good stretch of time, the killers were averaging at least one body per day, according to the owner of the funeral home. The dumping continued until some time in 2016.
Whenever a victim would show up, the owner would get on the phone and call the nearest authorities to report the occurrence. However, no action was ever taken, and he was forced to come up with a plan of his own to handle the accumulating bodies.
His solution was to do what he did best: bury them.
He went to the outskirts of Miguel Alemán and began digging. Soon, he would complete his first of three mass graves, and for a long while, he was a grave digger for at least one cartel.
He would wrap the daily deposits in plastic and take them to what was supposed to be their final resting place. After a couple of years, he had deposited approximately 500 bodies on the outskirts of town.
Those three graves are but a drop in what’s considered to be a bucket of hidden cemeteries located throughout the country, full of unrecorded statistics.
openingspress.com 