Guatemalan family seeks return of relative's body more than a decade after he disappeared in Mexico

GUATEMALA CITY (AP) — Nearly a decade after Guatemalan authorities were told that Mexico had sent the wrong body to a Guatemalan family searching for their missing teenage relative, that unidentified body is still buried in Guatemala and the family’s relative is lying in a Mexico City morgue.

The family, which declined to comment through its lawyer, wants 17-year-old Yovanny back, but also wants the body it buried exhumed, identified and returned to their relatives.

Standing in the way appears to be Guatemala’s Attorney General’s Office.

Their Mexican counterparts requested the exhumation in April, but according to Rosmery Yax, the family’s attorney, and the Forensic Commission — a body made up of experts from Mexico’s Attorney General’s Office, the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, various civic organizations and relatives of missing migrants — there has been no answer from Guatemala’s Attorney General’s Office.

A spokesman for Guatemala’s Attorney General’s Office did not respond to a request for comment.

It is another example of the slow, often troubled process of identifying and repatriating migrants who go missing on their way to the United States, despite cooperation agreements between governments.

“This was a very serious error that jeopardized the family’s rights, the victim’s identification,” Yax said this week.

Yovanny left home in March 2011, bound for the United States where he hoped to find work to support his family, according to Yax and the Foundation for Justice, a Mexican organization pushing for better cooperation and efforts to identify missing migrants.

A week later, he told his family he was in Tamaulipas state, which sits across the Rio Grande from Texas. But Yovanny never made it to the river.

His body was found among nearly 200 others in dozens of clandestine gravesites discovered around the town of San Fernando in April and May 2011. That followed the 2010 massacre of 72 migrants in the same town. A drug cartel was carrying out forced recruitment and killing migrants that could potentially join the ranks of its rivals.

In the process of recovering the many remains, Yovanny’s were incorrectly tagged, according to the Foundation for Justice.

The following year a body was sent to Yovanny’s family in Guatemala. The family buried it in a local plot without ever being allowed to see the remains.

“With respect to Yovanny’s case, (the Forensic Commission) identified and later confirmed that the profile of the body handed over in 2012 did not coincide with his relatives,” the Foundation for Justice said. “However, it did match one of the bodies held in Mexico City.”

The family, which has remained anonymous, declined through its attorney to discuss the case.

“This doesn’t happen in these Indigenous towns, they’ve damaged the social fabric,” Yax said. "Because of its customs and traditions, the family says they not only want Yovanny to be brought back, but also that, at the same time, the other body be taken and that Yovanny occupies the site where they chose to bury him.”

Yovanny’s is not an isolated case. About a hundred victims of massacres between 2010 and 2012 have still not been identified and the process has been plagued by mistakes.

Fabienne Cabaret, deputy director of the Foundation for Justice, said that they were awaiting identification results on some remains sent to Brazil and others in Guatemala that also may have been mixed up.

She also noted that there were some half-dozen victims who had been identified, but had not been handed over to their families because the Committee for Attention to Victims, the governmental body charged with carrying out the process, lacked the resources to do so.

Still, Cabaret maintained that the work of the Forensic Commission was the best vehicle despite the many challenges of collaboration between countries.

Guatemala's government was notified of the error in 2015, but the family was not told until 2019, according to Yax and the Foundation for Justice.

The family hopes for some resolution under the new administration of President Bernardo Arévalo, but he has remained at loggerheads with the Attorney General’s Office since his election victory last year.

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AP writer María Verza in Mexico City contributed to this report.

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