America's Shocking Mass Graves

Mass graves where refugees and asylum seekers cross into Texas have shocked recently investigators, who found some of the bodies in trash bags, sometimes with more than one per pag, and some not in containers.

This month, for the second successive year, scientists and students from Baylor University and University of Indianapolis spent days exhuming remains of unidentified refugees and assylum seekers from a cemetery in Falfurrias.

They found mass graves with remains in rubbish bags, shopping bags, or even not in containers at all, according to the Corpus Christi Caller-Times. 

In one case, a single body bag contained the bones of three people. “To me it’s just as shocking as the mass grave that you would picture in your head, and it’s just as disrespectful,” Dr Krista Latham, a forensic anthropologist at the University of Indianapolis, told the Caller-Times.

The total number of people buried was unclear due to the remains intermingled. 

“You can see the bodies are stacked upon the bodies with other bodies,” explained explains Baylor University’s Lori Baker, who heads a team of more than 30 archaeologists and forensic students. “We’ve seen that in several areas. It’s discouraging…it’s not how you want your loved ones to have their final resting place.”

“I was pretty upset at the end, because this isn’t the way to be interred,” Baker told the Los Angeles Times.

“The idea that all along the border there are these people buried anonymously is horrible. This isn’t even the worst we’ve seen and it has to stop.” Eddie Canales, an activist with the South Texas Human Rights Center, believes the deaths are part due to the US government’s push to tighten up the border,. He says that led migrants to attempt riskier paths in their efforts to evade detection and encouraged them to pay smugglers who often have links to criminal gangs.

Canales is working with local ranchers to place 20 water stations in about a dozen locations, hoping migrants will come across them and be able to avoid the deadly consequences of severe dehydration.

 “More people are getting lost,” he told DMN. “Migration is down but the deaths are increasing. “Because of the policy to apprehend as many as you can, you’re forcing people to cross into areas that are very dangerous … we’re letting migrants support the cartel business of smuggling.” 

The anthropology researchers who exhumed the bodies earlier this month include professors and students from Baylor and the University of Indianapolis who are working on the Reuniting Families project. That multiyear effort attempts to identify the bodies of the hundreds of refugees and assylum seekers who died crossing the Texas-Mexico border over the last few years. 

The numbers are climbing. Last year 87 bodies were discovered, and 129 in 2012. Many are still unidentified.

Some get lost and fall ill and here their journeys end, dying somewhere in the mostly-shadeless expanse of nearly 1,000 square miles that makes up Brooks County, Texas.

Because the county is 70 miles from the border, it doesn’t receive federal funding to help with immigration issues.  

“They’re so overworked,” Baker said. “Trying to keep people alive who are in distress is the county’s No. 1 priority, so they haven’t been able to make the remains one.”

Sources: LA Times, DMN

Image credit: Zeitgeist777