Mexico morgues crowded with drug-war dead
Bodies awaiting autopsies tell the story of an escalating drug war
Eduardo Verdugo / AP
updated 2 hours, 31 minutes ago

Bodies awaiting autopsies crowd a walk-in refrigerator at the morgue in the border city of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.

The death toll is spiraling throughout Mexico as a war between the country's government and the drug cartels intensifies.
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CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico - Death froze his exhausted face.

The attackers lashed or punctured nearly every part of his body. Then they cut off the dead man's head, wrapped it in a plastic grocery bag and dumped it with his body between two tractor-trailers on a city street.

As with most murders in Ciudad Juarez, police found no witnesses, no weapons. Only the battered corpse on the steel coroner's table carries clues to who he was and how he died.

"Every organ speaks," says Dr. Maria Concepcion Molina, who gently removes packing tape from the head of her third decapitated victim in a week. The dead man's slack mouth and eyes still seem to pray for relief.

Escalating drug war

Bodies stacked in the morgues of Mexico's border cities tell the story of an escalating drug war. Drug violence claimed 6,290 people last year, double the previous year, and more than 1,000 in the first eight weeks of 2009.

Each bullet wound or broken bone details the viciousness with which the cartels battle a government crackdown and each other. Slain policemen lie next to hit men in the rows of zipped white bags.

Workers toil up to 12 hours a day, sometimes seven days a week, to examine the remains. When Tijuana coffin makers fell behind during the December holidays, the morgue there crammed 200 bodies into two refrigerators made to hold 80.

"There are times here when there are so many people, so many cadavers, that we can't keep up," says the Tijuana morgue director, Federico Ortiz.

In Ciudad Juarez, the border city with the most killings, Molina prepares to make a dead man talk. Investigators press each finger of the headless body on a pad for fingerprints.

Molina guesses from his face he was probably in his 30s.

She carefully lays out his bloodied clothing on a red plastic sheet. She pieces together his knife-shredded T-shirt picturing a wanted poster for Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa. She lays the tags showing the brands of his jeans and boxers flat before snapping photographs of each.

"Sometimes we show family these photos, and they'll say it's his clothing but it's not him," says Molina, a 41-year-old mother of five. "It's a defense mechanism."

Morgue employs seven doctors

Ciudad Juarez, a city of 1.3 million across the border from El Paso, Texas, has a modern, estimated $15 million morgue and crime lab thanks to international support after another notorious spate of killings — the Women of Juarez. More than 400 women have been raped, strangled and dumped in the desert since 1993.

The morgue has seven doctors, including two hired in the last two weeks.

Still, the procession of the dead is staggering. Plans are under way to double the morgue's size next year.

Last year, 2,300 victims of violence and accidents were wheeled into the pungent, formaldehyde-infused morgue, where doctors work to Mexican love ballads and the whir of electric saws cutting through bone. More than 460 bodies arrived in January and February this year.

The morgue has stopped taking other death cases.

Nearly 40 percent of the dead last year tested positive for cocaine or marijuana. About 20 percent were never claimed by their families, many out of fear. Cardboard boxes with bloodstained cowboy boots, cell phones and bulletproof vests are stacked to the ceiling in the crime lab.

Drug traffickers raid morgues

Drug traffickers know investigators use the cadavers to track killers. They have raided morgues and carted off bodies at gunpoint as shaking workers in blue smocks stood helpless.

Soldiers now guard morgues when a well-known trafficker is suspected among the dead.

Tijuana morgue workers show photographs to families identifying bodies from behind a protective window. Ortiz has asked for bulletproof glass, as well as fencing around the one-story building.

From 4:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. on a recent Tuesday, 17 bodies rolled into the Juarez morgue, including the city police force's second-in-command and three other officers.

"If this continues, we're going to have another record year easily. We're headed toward 2,000 deaths within 10 months," says Hector Hawley, the administrator of the crime analysis and forensics unit, as workers in white haz-mat suits crane-lift body bags onto steel shelves. "We need a lot more help."

In a white shower cap and blue medical robe, the bespectacled Molina checks her victim's neck, but there is no bruising. His head was cut off after he died.

"He's been decapitated, but I still have to determine the cause of his death," she says.

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