Recently, construction work on a forensic cemetery in Tijuana for the burial of unidentified people and their remains got underway. The project is slated to be completed in seven months.
As per Cesar Gonzalez Vaca, the director of Baja California Forensic Services, the cemetery would initially be able to accommodate 2,000 remains.
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Unclaimed bodies will be taken to the Forensic Cemetery when the memorial park is completed. They will be placed in large chambers and niches rather than in regular graves, he added.
According to Gonzalez Vaca, in the case that tissue samples were required for further investigations, they would be kept in a database run by the office of the attorney general. Bodies would be delivered there already embalmed and registered using a genetic profile.
Seven years had elapsed since the cemetery’s conception. Several private groups that search for and identify missing persons all over the state had significantly supported its construction.
The head of the Baja California Missing Persons Movement, Jose Fernando Ortigoza, expressed a great deal of satisfaction. He pointed out that they had been battling for this for a long time.
Approximately forty acres of land are being provided for the site to build the forensic cemetery by the city of Tijuana. It is said that the forensic cemetery will be constructed in four phases. It will eventually have the capacity to hold 12,000 bodies.
How much will the Tijuana forensic cemetery cost to establish?
The total cost to carry out the entire project is estimated at 60 million pesos, which is approximately $3.5 million.
According to Gonzalez Vaca, the remains that will be moved to the new cemetery will be those that will be taken to the medical examiners’ offices as well as remain unidentified in the future since it is impractical to exhume 13,000 remains from common graves at this time.
He also noted that the annual tally is likely between 1,200 and 1,400 bodies.
