DNA Will Not Solve Mexico’s Unidentified-Body Crisis

On Sept. 16, the image of a refrigerated trailer box made national headlines in Mexico. It was discovered on a lot in a housing complex under development after the intense smell of decomposing bodies alerted the neighbors. It turned out that the box, containing 157 corpses (some say 273), had been rented by the Attorney General’s Office of the state of Jalisco after the refrigerated chamber of the local morgue, which is capable of storing up to 200 bodies, ran out of space. The bodies had been placed in the trailer box in July and stored for three months in a warehouse in La Duraznera, a neighborhood not far away from Guadalajara’s city center, in Tlaquepaque, Jalisco. After people complained about the smell, the mayor of Tlaquepaque requested that the trailer box be relocated, which led to its September sighting on the lot. National newspapers described it as the wandering “death trailer.”