El Paso Times: Hundreds of murder victims in this ravaged city are all but
forgotten.
Nobody in officialdom knows who they are. Nobody in the outside world
cared enough to claim their bodies.
They are shipped to San Rafael Municipal Cemetery. There each is
awaited by a simple wood box, a 6-foot hole in the Chihuahuan Desert
and maybe a plain metal plate with an engraved number. No cross adorns
these final resting spots, for this is where unidentified victims of
the city’s drug wars are unceremoniously buried.
About 200 people who died violently last year ended up in paupers’
graves at San Rafael. They were among more than 2,600 murder victims
in Juárez in 2009.
The cemetery is hidden in the sand dunes south of the city. A massive
white sign with the Juárez government’s emblem and the words Panteón
Municipal San Rafael are the only distinguishable markings leading to
the graveyard.
A brush-lined, unpaved road of more than three miles splits to a
junkyard and to the cemetery. Closer to the burial grounds, vendors
selling plastic flowers, grave markers and religious statues are set
up parallel to the cemetery gate.
In one section are plots decorated with gravestones, crosses and
pictures of Catholic saints. The dead in this section are separated by
just a couple of feet.
