EX-LEADER OF SEARCH FOR MISSING IN MEXICO CONVICTED

A former official who led Mexico’s search for the disappeared has been found guilty of sharing confidential genetic information from thousands of recovered human remains with a private company.

Roberto Cabrera was sentenced late Thursday to three years in prison after a judge said he had helped a firm that “merchandised the suffering of families” searching for their loved ones.

It was a bizarre turn in Mexico’s most acute human rights crisis: The disappearance of more than 100,000 people, most of them in the last 15 years. The staggering number reflects the explosion of violence during the U.S.-backed war on drug gangs and the growing quest by Mexican crime groups to control more territory. Criminal organizations are blamed in the kidnapping and killing of many of the victims, but others were hauled away by brutal security forces. In some instances, corrupt local or state police snatched people on behalf of cartels.

The latest scandal adds to the litany of indignities suffered by families searching for their missing loved ones. Mothers of the disappeared have banded together in recent years to form a highly visible and politically potent movement. Yet they have faced local bureaucrats who mix up human remains, slowwalk investigations and toss unidentified bodies into common graves.

When he began sharing the genetic material, in 2017, Cabrera was coordinator of strategy in the national public security system. The following year, he became the public face of the government’s effort to find and identify the missing, as the first commissioner in charge of the search for the disappeared.

Karla Quintana, a Harvard-educated human-rights lawyer, succeeded him in that role in 2019. She filed a criminal complaint after learning that Cabrera had turned over genetic material from at least 45,000 people to the biotech company ADN México.

Much of the material came from remains the government was trying to identify, although some DNA may have belonged to relatives of the disappeared who had submitted to testing, lawyers said. The firm had already acquired DNA from missing person cases in several states, via contracts with local authorities and tests sought by individual family members.

There was no allegation that Cabrera was paid to hand over the material. Yet officials discovered that ADN had outlined a potential $3.5 million contract with him in which the company would compare relatives’ DNA to the genetic material in a government database to help them identify missing loved ones. The company had already started contacting families of the missing, prosecutors said. The contract was never signed.

Judge Felipe de Jesús Delgadillo Padierna said Cabrera had misused his authority by giving sensitive genetic material gathered by officials to a for-profit business. It was not clear whether Cabrera would spend time behind bars. He was offered the possibility of a fine and community service. The judge also ordered him to make a public apology.