(Tijuana) Martín de la Cruz Roja washes the inside of a Ford van in front of the morgue. Nobody accompanies him to fetch the corpses of the city tonight. Since he started his service at the end of the afternoon, he has already brought ten homicide victims to the morgue. It has been a year and a half since Martín’s employer, the Baja California State Attorney’s office, decided to delegate all the other levies to private funeral companies, and that for a good reason. For the past two years, the freezers of the morgue of Tijuana have been overflowing.

With the help of Caesar, who is on duty that night at the morgue, Martín lays four bodies on metal trays in the autopsy room. All of them were shot in the head with a small caliber pistol, the weapon of choice for quiet murders, and stripped of their identity papers.

Caesar searches in vain for some room in the refrigerators dedicated to “new arrivals”, but they are already full. In each compartment, at least one body out of two bears the mention “unknown” scribbled on a slate. Upstairs, Dr. Melina Moreno, deputy director in charge of mass graves in the Tijuana morgue, confirms that the rate of identification of murder victims barely reaches 50%. Caesar sighs. “Fortunately, we’re going tomorrow to the mass graves.”

With more than 1,500 violent deaths in just six months, 86% of which related to drug trafficking, this border town of a million and a half inhabitants is now one of the most deadly cities in the world. But far from the images of war and the macabre staging that Mexico has seen since the beginning of the War on Drugs in 2006, it is in the shadows that the victims of the cartels perish in Tijuana.

“Nobody, including the belligerents, has any interest in seeing the violence come to light”, says journalist Luis Alonso Perez Chavez, known to have documented the expansion of the cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG). For the past two years, this criminal organization has been trying to wrest control of the city from the hands of the Sinaloa cartel, resulting in a number of homicides never seen before.

“This cartel is known almost everywhere else for its spectacular violence, but here in Tijuana, its victims are left out, hidden, in outlying areas, and it has become even more difficult to identify them.” The next morning at the morgue, about fifteen bodies piled on the ground wait for a place in the freezers. Caesar was supposed to go home long ago. Instead, he was requisitioned to bring forty corpses to mass graves. It is the third excursion of this kind in only two weeks.

“We would like to make more room by increasing the number of burials in mass graves, but the State attorney is slowing us down, as if he was trying to lower homicide statistics,” says Dr. Melina Moreno, deputy director in charge of mass graves in the Tijuana morgue, as she climbs into the van loaded with corpses.

The victims Melina and her colleagues were carrying were killed three or four weeks ago. Since it takes too long for the State attorney’s Office to deal with the administrative procedures, the morgue’s personnel do them on the go. In the sweltering heat of July, the stench of putrefaction spreads at every stop. Three hours later, the team finally reaches the 12th Tijuana Municipal Cemetery, a gigantic site inaugurated in 2004, already populated by 30,000 dead.

For lack of means and personnel, the employees of the mortuary have to dig the pits with shovels under the blazing sun. The bodies are then piled up at the bottom of the trench, a dozen per section. All around them, a myriad of nameless white crosses covers several hills. In each of the 495 pits opened in Tijuana since September 2015, more than 3,000 individuals lay anonymously. In 23 of them, “only the heads and babies” are buried.

Back at the morgue, Maria, a secretary, presents her records for the month of July. In fifteen days, only ten murder victims have been identified. Mélina and her colleagues will have to keep going to the mass graves, but the procedure remains slow, lasting one month on average.

Unidentified bodies often stay in the freezers for more than six months before being buried. The body of a Guatemalan citizen even congested the main freezer for a year because of endless DNA data round-trips between Mexican and Guatemalan authorities.

“There is no systematic sharing of genetic information, both nationally and with neighboring countries”, says Fernando Ocegueda, president of “United for the Disappeared”, the main regional collective searching for missing persons, “Many deaths are not identified simply because they come another country or from another region of Mexico.”

President-elect Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador, due to take office in December, has made justice for the victims of criminal violence a national reconciliation issue. His office has organized “listening forums” for relatives of missing people in violence stricken cities.

Olga Sanchez Cordero, who has been appointed to take up the post of Minister of Justice, has sworn to bring out the “truth” for every case of disappearance, but healing this national trauma is a titanic task. 37,000 are currently still missing in the country, and the list is growing day by day.

The difficulty lies in the lack of resources put into action, but also in the identification of the oldest missing persons, whose relatives are sometimes no longer there to put a name on the rare remains. According to Jan Jarab, who represents the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in Mexico, this problem is structural, and concerns the entire country.

“Despite some efforts, the results have been insufficient to cope with the need to identify victims and investigate criminal violence”, he says. “There is a need for investment to hire more staff, improve infrastructure and training, adopt new procedures and enshrine the autonomy of forensic experts. For that, Mexico should think of other solutions, including international cooperation.”

However, Tijuana’s case might prove even more desperate than that of other Mexican cities, due to the extreme techniques used by local criminals to get rid of the bodies. At the top of the hill in the Maclovio Rojas district, in the eastern part of the city, Fernando Ocegueda returns once again to the Gallera, a former rooster-breeding farm where the Arellano-Felix cartel used to liquify its victims in caustic acid.

At the height of the war between this criminal group and the Sinaloa cartel in the mid-2000s, dozens of facilities like this one worked day and night for the sole purpose of dissolving corpses. “The bodies were dissolved, and the body fluids buried”, says Ocegueda, pointing to two large underground tanks discovered in 2009. “In each of the two pits, we found 9000 liters of organic emulsions, and a total of 20,000 bone fragments and teeth.”

In 2011, all the remains discovered were sent for forensic analysis to Mexico City, but the acid is so damaging that only a handful of victims have been identified so far. Among them, the son of Fernando Ocegueda, gone missing at the age of 23. For him and the other victims of the Arellano-Felix cartel, the “United for the Missing” association has begun the construction of a memorial on the Gallera but the macabre discoveries keep postponing the time of mourning.

“According to a report, dissolved victims were also buried on this hill in front of us, but we haven’t had the time to go search the premises yet,” says Fernando Ocegueda, “there would also be under the small garden of palm trees, at the entrance of the building “. In 2017 only, more than 37,000 additional bone fragments were discovered in 27 different pits at the Gallera.

L'articolo Ghosts of Tijuana proviene da InsideOver.

(Los Angeles) – In June 2017, Robert Ford sat in a taxi and stalled against him the bag containing his few belongings. As the car headed downtown, he observed the colorful signs, the glare of the sun on electric cars, the smartphones held by blue-haired passersby, and all the changes that had occurred in the largest city on the West Coast in the last 30 years, while he was in prison. Free at last and aged 65, Robert Ford had nowhere to go. That is why, sitting in the back of the taxi, he clung to the address his probation officer had left him.

“Los Angeles Mission, 303E on 5th Street”, he told him. “It’s a Christian mission in Skid Row, they have a program for people like you.”

But what Robert found when he arrived at the parvise of the housing center shocked him so much that he ordered his taxi to bring him back at his motel. In front of the Mission and in the surrounding streets, hundreds of homeless people huddled on the sidewalks strewn with filth, some yelling in the void or leaning to defecate against walls corroded by urine. Dense rows of tents and makeshift shelters stretched block after block. Robert Ford recognized the smell of crack cocaine and methamphetamine.

“For Christ’s sake, what the hell was that?” he asked his probation officer on the phone that evening.

– I’m sorry,” he answered, “I should have warned you. ”

Indeed, the officer had not told Robert that over the last thirty years, a shortage of affordable housing had slowly fermented in California, and that the streets of Skid Row were now the most important fixation point for homeless people in the entire United States. On this area of barely one square kilometer, up to 2,000 homeless people try to survive on pieces of cardboard, in tents or in housing centers.

“We are overwhelmed, we will still leave many people in the streets tonight”, says Nadia, a volunteer at the Los Angeles Mission, observing the hundred people queuing in front of the center in the summer heat, hoping to spend the night here. “Skid Row has always had a bad reputation, but lately it has gone completely out of control”, she laments. In just six years, the number of homeless people in Los Angeles County has jumped from 32,000 to 57,000.

“This problem has only gotten worse since I started working here”, explains Chaplain Dwight Lewis in his cramped office on the ground floor of the housing center. It was fifteen years ago. On the walls, photos show him baptizing residents, or handing them diplomas marking the stages of advancement within the one year long rehabilitation program offered by the Mission. “The services offered by missions like ours explains why homeless people flock to Skid Row”, he says. It is a place of insane violence and the final destination: the neighborhood where the homeless go when they have exhausted all their recourse, when they have no one left to lean on. That is why, after overcoming his initial revulsion, Robert Ford also returned to Skid Row.

For over a year now, he has been a member of the Los Angeles Mission program and lives in the housing center, sharing his time between work and study of the Bible. “People here have been great to me”, he says, sitting on a loading dock at the back of the building. “They assist me with my paperwork. I will soon get my veteran pension and find a job”. In front of the Mission, the Joshua House Clinic treats his hepatitis C and gives him free access to dental and ophthalmic care. Between the two buildings, in a little-frequented street, men in rags crack open parking meters to collect some coins. “We join this Mission to follow a healthy life and the will of the Lord, but as soon as we step outside we see this hell, madness and drugs”, Robert says. “Last week, we organized a wake for Terry Green, a pensioner who died of drug and alcohol poisoning. Not long ago, four of our pensioners died in just six weeks”.

In the hell of Skid Row, the housing centers emerge here and there as islands of sanity. Impeccably coiffed, Joey Weinert, 37, leads the visit in the Midnight Mission, Skid Row’s oldest charity. “This home was founded in 1914 to distribute food, and in more than a century we have never missed a meal”, he says. “It was at the end of the 19th century that this district gained its shady reputation, when many miserable hotels opened to welcome seasonal workers passing through Los Angeles. Soon, alcoholics and homeless people of Los Angeles poured in, and the opening of housing centers to help them attracted more and more people in need.”

At noon, 600 people gather in the cafeterias on the ground floor. Aged 25 and addicted to methamphetamine, David Mesa forces himself to eat at least once a day. “Meth cuts hunger and is cheaper than food”, he says. “With crystal, you can stay awake several days in a row. If you sleep, you get mugged.” At the end of the table, 54-year-old Larry nods in approval. An employee of the Midnight Mission, he supervises the pensioners of the program that took him out of the street in 2014. “Walk in Skid Row, and you’ll see that people are divided according to the same two criteria as in prison: their drug of choice and their race”, he says. “That’s exactly what this neighborhood is, an open air prison.”

Unfortunately, none of those criteria are of any help if you are a woman in Skid Row. In the courtyard of the center, about fifty women are allowed to stay for the night. They will not have a warm bed, but will at least be able to enjoy a safe place to sleep. “Women often sleep together to avoid problems”, says Linda, 40. “We take turns to sleep or stand guard, and try to never be alone in Skid Row.” Beside her, 45-year-old Rochelle also came to sleep here for fear of sexual assault. “We must be constantly vigilant to not be raped when we urinate on the street, when we change our clothes, or when we wash ourselves”, she mumbles. Swaddled in filthy clothes, her left leg spreads a mephitic stench. “Our bodies are polluted”, says Linda. “Everyone gets sick from wading through shit and urine”.

Skid Row’s hygiene problem could hardly be more urgent. The district has only nine public toilets accessible by night: one tenth of the minimum requirements set by the UN for refugee camps. Despite regular cleanup operations by the municipality, the streets of Skid Row are littered with excrement, and diseases spread, not sparing the social workers who roam the neighborhood. In 2015, Reverend Andy Bales, president of the Union Mission, had his right foot and part of his chin amputated after contracting E. Coli.

In an attempt to curb this situation, residents of the Los Angeles Municipality approved in November 2016 a $ 1.2 billion plan to build 7,000 new affordable housing units by 2026. In addition, the County of Los Angeles voted in March 2017 to raise hundreds of millions of dollars to help the homeless and increase emergency shelter capacity. The charities of Skid Row have welcomed a change of attitude of the authorities, from a repressive security policy to a socio-economic consideration of the homeless. Many, however, deplore the inadequacy of the measures in view of the magnitude of the problem.

“This debate is completely foolish”, argues Chris Mack, a local agent of the Wesley Health Center. “By building 7,000 new homes, we will at best reduce to 48,000 the number of homeless in Los Angeles, and that in only ten years! It does not change the root of the problem”. And the root is deep. California has been experiencing a chronic shortage of affordable housing since the 1960s. While incomes have stagnated for twenty years, the increase in rents continues at an alarming rate. Far from being confined to the gentrified neighborhoods of the Silicon Valley, this inflation affects all of California: 10% increase from 2017 to 2018 in Los Angeles for a one bedroom apartment, 12.4% in Oakland, 15% in Long Beach and Anaheim, 11.5% in San Diego.

“Los Angeles County lacks at least half a million affordable housing units”, says Alisa Orduna, who was in charge of homelessness policy in LA Mayor Eric Garcetti’s office from 2015 to 2018. “The homeless are just the most visible part of a bigger problem: in California, rents have become so expensive that we are both the wealthiest State in the nation and the one where standard of living is the lowest”, she says on the terrace of a Starbucks Coffee in Santa Monica. She recently moved to this coastal city with superb beaches to take up her new job, always at the service of the homeless, hoping to be able to make things change at last. With regard to Los Angeles and Skid Row, she fears that it is already too late.

L'articolo Surviving in Skid Row proviene da InsideOver.