Mexico rights agency: 30,000 unidentified bodies in 'crisis'

Mexico's National Human Rights Commission says there are more than 30,000 unclaimed and unidentified corpses and skeletons piling up at morgues across the country. The governmental commission said Thursday that is a "crisis in the area of forensic identification," because morgues lack funds, personnel and equipment to properly examine bodies.

Mexico's mounting wave of homicides over the last decade has also contributed to the huge backlog of corpses. In 2018, residents of the western Mexico city of Guadalajara complained about the smell coming from a refrigerated trailer that was found to hold 273 unidentified corpses.

The local morgue in western was so overcrowded and poorly run that some unidentified bodies were left to rot for two years before being autopsied.