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Rosa María Apodaca has spent the past six
years looking for her eldest daughter.
Patricia Jazmín Ibarra was 18 when she left on
the morning of 7 June 2011 to go to work at a
mobile phone shop in the centre of Ciudad
Juárez.
"They stole her," says her mother, who has given
up her job to look for Patricia Jazmín.
Ms Apodaca knows that many of the young girls
who disappeared from Ciudad Juárez were
eventually found dead.
The city on the Mexican-US border is located on
a key route for drug smuggling and human
trafficking.
In the 1990s, Ciudad Juárez became infamous
for the staggering numbers of young women who
disappeared from it, and between 2008 and 2011
the city held the dubious title of murder capital
of the world.
"They never find them alive. They find only
bones, this is how they give them back to their
families," Ms Apodaca says of the many women
who have gone missing.
"You never have the certainty that it is your own
daughter."
Identifying the dead
It is people like Ms Apodaca that Dr Alejandro
Hernández Cárdenas is trying to help.
He works as a forensic doctor at the
prosecutor's office and has developed a special
technique to rehydrate corpses in order to help
identify them.
The technique is so innovative that last year the
Mexican Institute for Industrial Property gave him
a patent for his secret formula.
Forensic experts have used glycerine injections
to reconstitute fingers to get prints for over a
century. But that technique does not work for
entire bodies.
DNA testing can help, but in order to identify
bodies, samples from two direct family members
are needed for comparison.
With the rehydration process, the body can
regain most of its original condition so families
can identify it.
"I think I am doing this work because I was
affected by the idea of these bodies going to
mass graves or their families not being able to
mourn properly," Dr Hernández says.
New leads
The rehydration technique has also helped
provide key leads in criminal investigations.
When Dr Hernández rehydrated a corpse in the
state of Queretaro, in central Mexico, he
discovered unusual lesions on its skin, which
later led to an arrest being made.
The doctor was told that his help was key in
bringing the murderer to justice.
Dr Hernández, 59, says that he first thought of
becoming a forensic expert when he was 18 and
studying to be a dentist while also driving an
ambulance to help provide for his young family.
One night in 1977, he was called out to a train
accident that had killed 35 people and had left
most of the victims unrecognisable.
"When the forensic doctor arrived, he told us to
check their teeth," Dr Hernández recalls.
He helped out at the morgue for four or five
days, while the victims' families were waiting for
news outside.
While the task may seem gruesome to some, it
inspired in Dr Hernández a desire to help identify
victims of crime.
Pig skin and human fingers
After becoming a dentist and eventually joining
the forensic lab, he started experimenting with
his rehydration technique.
He used pig skin and human fingers he kept in
glass jars and checked on them daily.
One day in 2004 he was inspecting seven jars.
When he took out the finger from the fourth jar,
it looked perfect.
"It was like a new finger. I couldn't believe it," he
says.
At first he thought it was too good to be true
and suspected his colleagues of playing a trick
on him. But when he confronted them, one told
him: "We don't mess with them, they smell too
bad."
Magic formula
He had found the magic formula and four years
later managed to rehydrate a full corpse.
In recent years, Dr Hernández has been applying
his technique more and more to migrants found
dead in the border area.
Read next : Suicide in Ciudad Juárez: Where life
has little value
Ciudad Juárez is one of the main crossing points
to the US. More than 6,000 bodies have been
recovered from along the border since the
1990s.
The bodies are often found in mass graves and
are often hard to identify because they have
been mutilated or are mummified because of the
harsh weather conditions.
Because there is no investigation unit at the
forensic lab where he works, Dr Hernández has
been financing his research himself, paying for
the chemicals and working on it in his spare
time.
He hopes that someone will take an interest in
his research but ultimately wishes for less, rather
than more, work. "It's not that I am lazy, it's just
that when I have a lot of work it means that a lot
of people have died," he explains.
"I would prefer not to have found this formula - if
it meant that those people had never died."
Irene Caselli was in Ciudad Juárez as an Adelante
Latin America Reporting Fellow with the
International Women's Media Foundation .
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