U.S. and Mexican officials took a small but important step Tuesday to streamline the process of determining the identities of illegal border crossers who die in Arizona.
An official memorandum of understanding signed by the Mexican Consulate in Tucson and the Pima County Medical Examiner's Office allows each to share results of DNA tests paid for by their respective governments.
Since 2000, the Medical Examiner's Office has sent 517 DNA samples for testing - 281 of them paid for by the Mexican government and 236 paid for by a grant from the U.S. government.
Until now, the results of these tests remained in separate databases based on which government paid. The agreement will ensure both databases have all the DNA results, which increases the chances of finding a match between DNA submitted by a family and DNA taken from an unidentified crosser.
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But the agreement won't magically solve hundreds of cases, authorities cautioned. The challenge now is getting more DNA samples from families who believe their loved ones died in Arizona's desert.
"I don't think we are going to see huge results, but I think there will be a few," said Dr. Bruce Parks, chief medical examiner at the Pima County Medical Examiner's Office. "Now, we are just hoping that more families submit samples."
The challenge for the Mexican Consulate is making families aware of the shared DNA database and the importance of stepping forward to submit samples if they fear their loved ones died in Arizona's desert, said Juan Manuel Calderón Jaimes, Mexican consul in Tucson.
"This is a delicate and difficult subject, and we are trying to bring tranquility and peace to families that are looking for a loved one who, sadly, might have died while trying to find a better life," Calderón said.
Currently, the consulate in Tucson usually gets DNA samples only from families who come forward with reports of relatives missing in Arizona's desert. The consulate coordinates with colleagues in Mexico to provide those families with kits to send DNA samples.
There are no plans yet for a more widespread campaign to promote the program throughout Mexico although that would be the next step, Calderón said. But officials would have to be careful in promoting the program because they can't afford to send DNA samples from families for every case, he said. They have to analyze and choose the cases that are most likely to be solved.
DNA samples are sent to a lab in Virginia and compared to samples from the family. The Mexican government pays for DNA tests used to confirm tentative matches. U.S., state and federal grants pay for DNA samples from unidentified bodies in an effort to match them with people in the national missing-persons database.
The tests cost $800 to $3,000 each.
The Pima County Medical Examiner's Office has 640 cases since 2000 in which people remain unidentified, most of them likely illegal border crossers, Parks said. Most of those remains are found severely decomposed and without identification documents, making each case a major challenge to solve.
Since 2001, the county-funded office has identified nearly two-thirds of the nearly 1,700 illegal border crossers it has handled, but positive identification can take months, if not years.
Of the 183 illegal crossers the office has handled this calendar year through mid-September, 110 remain unidentified. Of the 194 handled last year, 87 remain unidentified.
DNA testing has solved a small portion of the cases since 2001 - 106 of the 1,097. Most are solved the old-fashioned way - through matching descriptions, fingerprints and visual confirmation from families looking at photos.
The formal agreement comes during a record-breaking year for border deaths in Arizona. The bodies of 252 illegal border crossers were found along Arizona's border from New Mexico to Yuma County from Oct. 1, 2009, to Sept. 30, 2010 (the federal fiscal 2010), the Arizona Daily Star's border death database shows. The database is based on information from Southern Arizona county medical examiners.
The fiscal 2010 total breaks the record of 234 set in 2007. It has been a deadly decade in Arizona's desert for illegal immigrants, with the bodies of nearly 2,000 men, women and children found since 2001.
Contact reporter Brady McCombs at 573-4213 or bmccombs@azstarnet.com
