SHOULD THE GOVERNMENT ACT LIKE THE CARTELS, TOO?

 “WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY AND HE IS US.”

Pogo

By Juan Montoya
The whole family knew that Tio Alberto andaba en malos pasos, said Lupita.
Lupita (not her real name) is one of hundreds of Matamoros residents who works in a low-paying service job in downtown Brownsville.
Her uncle Alberto (also not his real name) was one of the hundreds of gunmen killed in daily shootout with the Mexican military in the streets of Matamoros.
A friend of the family told them that Mexican marines had shot Tio Alberto a day or two earlier near the Buena Vista colonia and his body had been hauled off to the state police headquarters that also serves as a morgue on the road to the Matamoros airport. His mother and sisters accompanied his brother to retrieve the body and give him a proper burial.

"A bout half a block away they noticed a horrible smell, like death," she said her mother told her over the telephone. "Then they were allowed to go in and identify him. He was stacked like firewood with other bloody bodies of the dead. There was sticky fluids on the floor and flies buzzing everywhere. It was horrible."
Even though their uncle died fighting the government, Lupita and her family say that the way they military officials and the state government treated his body and subjected the  family to endure the horror of seeing his and other corpses literally rotting in an unrefrigerated concrete warehouse makes them no better than the criminals.
"We know he was committing a crime, but what fault did his family have to be made to go through that?," she asked. "We thought that there would be a place where they could keep the bodies to prevent them from decomposing in the heat."
Sources in Matamoros say that the pace of the killing on Matamoros streets has outpaced the availability of refrigerated morgues available. As a result, they say that the families of those dead (whether combatants of bystanders caught in the crossfire) suffer the experience of seeing their dead in those conditions.
"The government does not want to admit that the numbers of dead is in the hundreds," said a Matamoros resident who works for the state. There are firefights every day in Matamoros and around the region. If they built more refrigerated morgues, it would be like admitting the problem is of those proportions."
Lupita's family still remembers claiming their Tio Alberto's body and the nauseating stench of the place where his body was stored. It's an experience they say many other city residents have also endured.
"The way they treat the families who are looking for their relatives make them seem just as bad as the criminals," she said. "They have absolutely no respect for them. It's not their fault if their relative was involved in crime. The common people are not to blame.