Relatives of missing persons in Acapulco began their eighth search on Tuesday for loved ones’ remains in the Alta Cuauhtémoc neighborhood, this time finding human bones in El Veladero National Park.

It brings to a total of 83 bodies found in makeshift graves all around the port city this year by the Families of the Disappeared and Murdered Collective. President Guadalupe Rodríguez said the search and recovery operation, like the other seven, was undertaken without official assistance.

“No one has looked for our disappeared relatives, and the highest levels of the federal government have made us give up all hope of finding them. They have all the information they need, but to date they have not dealt with the families, and we so cannot identify [our loved ones],” Rodríguez said.

She said nothing has been done with genetic samples the families have supplied to authorities for uploading to a database in order that DNA of discovered remains can be matched to the missing.

The relatives are basically on their own, she said, which has been the same experience reported by other, similar search collectives around the country.

“They halted the roundtable meetings with our federal prosecutor’s office to review the progress of all the investigations,” she said. “They also stopped assistance to help the orphaned children [of the disappeared], who are dying of hunger.”

In addition, she said, the group had meetings scheduled for November 25 with the Executive Commission for Attention to Victims (CEAV) and the Minister of the Interior, but they had been canceled without explanation.

In the past, Rodríguez said, relatives would have been helped financially with the costs of travel to the digging sites and with transport of the remains, but that source dried up when the government eliminated more than 100 public trusts last month.

She did acknowledge that the group had been informed that members would receive financial support from the Federal Tax Administration (SAT) but the families did not have any sense of when that money would be forthcoming.

Source: Milenio (sp)