Struggling to ID its dead, Mexico turns to Tennessee’s Body Farm
KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — On a chilly fall morning here in western Tennessee, Raul Robles crouched alongside an open grave, surveying the bones his team had just unearthed.
He was unusually relaxed, bobbing his head to salsa music playing from his cellphone as he helped measure and map the assemblage of dirt-stained ribs and vertebrae.
Robles, 41, is used to much more harrowing conditions. Back in the Mexican state of Sinaloa, where he has excavated at least 500 clandestine graves during his 15 years as a crime scene investigator, he sometimes digs under surveillance from a drug cartel.
"The lookouts come on their motorcycles with no plates, with their lights turned off, and say, 'You have two more hours to finish, or else,'" he said.
When that happens, he has little choice but to scoop the contents of the gravesite onto a tarp, throw it in his truck and finish his work back at the laboratory.
More than 93,000 people across Mexico are officially classified as missing — a staggering total that points to a crisis of not only violence but also forensics.
In recent years there has been a growing recognition that many of the missing may be in
