DNA of the Dead: Identifying Corpse in Salinas’ Backyard

First there were the psychics: two sisters who police say led them to a chilling letter containing an alleged account of a September 1994 night when Raul Salinas de Gortari--whose younger brother Carlos was then president of Mexico--supposedly beat a lawmaker to death with a baseball bat and ordered his body stripped of fingers, teeth and heart.

Authorities say the anonymous letter, along with a pencil-drawn map of a spot in Salinas’ backyard, led police to a dismembered corpse apparently buried about two years ago--a macabre discovery that has riveted Mexicans’ attention just in time for Saturday’s annual Day of the Dead celebration.

Now, at the end of this unlikely chain of evidence, clairvoyance has given way to chemistry.

In a Mexico City police lab, government scientists and international DNA experts are comparing hairs found on the corpse with others taken from legislator Manuel Munoz Rocha’s hairbrush after he disappeared two years ago. They hope those few thin strands, along with genetic codes from the bones and other shreds of evidence, will help solve one of Mexico’s most dramatic and far-reaching murder cases.

Mexican Atty. Gen. Antonio Lozano Gracia, who promises to have the DNA test results in the next two weeks, says a positive match would bolster evidence that Raul Salinas not only killed Munoz Rocha but did so to cover up his own role as mastermind of a conspiracy to murder the ruling party’s second-ranking official, Francisco Ruiz Massieu.

Salinas has been on trial for more than a year in the Ruiz Massieu slaying. He also is charged with illegally amassing hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign bank accounts while serving as a senior government official. Prosecutors indicated that he will be charged with the killing of Munoz Rocha--who was himself indicted as a co-conspirator in the Ruiz Massieu slaying--if the DNA from the body found at the Salinas ranch proves to be Munoz Rocha’s.

Salinas, who strongly denied the charges from his jail cell, asserts that government investigators planted the skeleton, fabricated the letter and falsified other evidence taken from his sprawling property near Mexico City, which he says the government seized 18 months ago. Lozano’s response: “The era in which [federal agents] plant corpses and fabricate guilt has passed.”

But Salinas’ lawyers added that the evidence--based on an anonymous informant and the psychics--is “unbelievable,” “absurd” and “a public lynching” of their client by prosecutors. They also indicated that they will not accept the official DNA findings; they’ve hired a DNA expert from the University of Florida to perform tests on the corpse.

Although analysts say the legal process is likely to drag on, Lozano insists that the Oct. 9 discovery at Salinas’ ranch, called “The Enchanted Place,” was a breakthrough.

Munoz Rocha’s whereabouts--investigators have sought him from Mexico to Texas to the Canary Islands to Egypt and back--has been “the key piece” missing from the Ruiz Massieu case from the start, Lozano has acknowledged. And solving that case, along with the assassination six months earlier of the ruling party’s presidential candidate, Luis Donaldo Colosio, is the key to winning back public confidence in a judicial system many Mexicans view as corrupt, inept and unjust, the prosecutor added.

In both cases, gunmen have been tried, convicted and sentenced to 40 or more years in jail. So far, though, prosecutors have failed to win convictions of others charged in what many Mexicans believe were conspiracies behind both murders.

But as public focus has shifted from courtrooms to lab rooms--driven by news leaks about the skeleton, the psychics and even spiritual intrigues among Mexico’s rich and famous--the nation’s interest in the case has grown exponentially.

“The great interest in this [corpse] is very much related to the Day of the Dead . . . and the public’s reaction is very characteristic of the Mexican personality,” said Mexican author and sociologist Guadalupe Loaeza. “There are a lot of jokes about this body now, and you can really see our morbidity in it.”

While DNA experts and forensic anthropologists examine the skull and bones for clues, merchants in nearby markets are hawking chocolate skulls, candy coffins and sugary skeletons of all types and sizes. They are staples of the Mexican holiday, when millions visit the nation’s cemeteries to dine and dance amid the graves of dead relatives and friends.

The haunting real-life mystery of the corpse’s identity also is fueling public fascination with the case: If the remains are not those of Munoz Rocha, many Mexicans are asking, then who was buried in Raul Salinas’ backyard?

Dr. Jose Ramon Fernandez, director of the attorney general’s Forensic Medical Services laboratory in Mexico City, which performed the first pathological and chemical tests on the skull and bones, said his initial findings were inconclusive. The evidence did show that the corpse was male, between 40 and 50 years old, had been dead for one or two years, and that a cranial fracture was among the causes of death, he said.

Ramon said his scientists found circumstantial evidence that pointed toward Munoz Rocha--mostly through what was missing. Before burial, the killers, he said, removed the corpse’s lower jaw, all upper teeth, all 10 fingertips, the left kidney and the heart.

“From my experience, these organs were probably removed to make it more difficult to identify the body,” said Ramon, who said he believed Munoz Rocha had kidney and heart problems that would have shown up in an autopsy on those organs. “In the particular case of the person to whom these body parts are assumed to belong, well, the fact that these specific parts are missing is very suggestive.”

Ramon, a veteran of 18 years in forensic medicine, said he is confident that genetic tests will show conclusively whether the corpse is that of Munoz Rocha. The forensic anthropologists, he added, also will be able to determine whether there is substance to Raul Salinas’ allegation that federal agents planted the body on his land.

On Thursday, Lozano told reporters that “prestigious international experts” were arriving in Mexico City to assist his investigators, who are comparing not only DNA but also bone X-rays taken of the corpse and of the legislator before he disappeared.

Meanwhile, the psychic connection to the investigation--disclosed only after the body was found--also has struck a popular chord.

Mexico is not only deeply religious but also superstitious. Many prominent politicians employ private brujas, or witches, who provide spiritual advice on personal and political affairs. And most towns have at least one professional “seer” available for consultation at affordable rates.

So, few here were shocked when Lozano told a news conference that the two psychic sisters--who had been spiritual advisors to Raul Salinas, it was later learned--helped guide investigators to the burial site. But in the weeks that followed, Lozano’s office confirmed that the spiritual side of the investigation has been even broader.

In December, two Mexican investigators traveled to Spain’s Canary Islands to interview a clairvoyant whom they were told Salinas had used in the past. The visit was reported at the time by the Canary Islands newspaper Diario de Las Palmas, which stated that a former Salinas girlfriend who has testified against him in the murder trial accompanied investigators there.

In what several Mexican newspapers now call “The Canary Connection,” Lozano’s spokesman acknowledged that investigators asked the clairvoyant to describe an alleged meeting in Mexico City in which Salinas requested that she contact someone among the dead.