Victims of Violence in Mexico Get Help from Unique University Program Mayela Sanchez - The Seattle Globalist
go to original October 19, 2016

Liborio Villanueva’s (right) son, Isaac Jair Villanueva Yáñez, went missing in June 2011. Villanueva still doesn’t know where his son is, but the exhumation from a mass grave in Morelos state in June could provide him an answer, he says. (Mayela Sánchez/GPJ Mexico)

Oliver Wenceslao Navarrete Hernández was kidnapped and killed in 2013. He was 31 years old. Even now, his family says they don’t know why he died.

His relatives identified his body shortly after his death, but they say the body was then kept by the state attorney general’s office. That office, according to the family, was going to investigate the death.

The family expected to receive the body so that they could hold a funeral. But instead, in March 2014 it was tossed in a mass grave at a cemetery in Tetelcingo, a town in Cuautla, a municipality in Morelos state, says Amalia Alejandra Hernández Hernández, Navarrete Hernández’s aunt.

In December 2014, after the family demanded it, his body was exhumed. The family stood at the graveside as the exhumation began. That’s when they saw that there were other bodies in the grave.

They demanded that the state exhume those as well, Hernández Hernández says. They also insisted that those responsible for Navarrete Hernández’s burial there be punished.

Months later, in October 2015, the family was joined by a powerful advocate: Programa de Atención a Víctimas, operating out of the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos (UAEM), the main public university in the state. The program provides comprehensive care for people who have been victims of human rights abuses and other crimes. This care includes legal and psychological.

In May of this year, the state attorney general’s office agreed to exhume the bodies. Toward the end of that month and in early June, 117 bodies and 12 additional pieces of skeletal remains were exhumed from graves in Tetelcingo. UAEM participated in the exhumation, and the state attorney general’s office and the university are currently working independently to identify the remains.

Family members say that much of their progress is due to Programa de Atención a Víctimas.

Read the rest at The Seattle Globalist

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