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The relatives of missing persons in Mexico have denounced the slowness with which a court prosecution file is created by the justice administration system. Theoretically, the search is immediate, but many cases must wait 72 h to build an investigation folder as a legal criterion. This standard has been copied from the UK and Australian police reports without adapting to the Mexican context. The analysis of disappearance reports between 2006 and 2018 shows that this timing criterion in Mexico is not supported. The analyzed database (the National Center for Planning, Analysis, and Information to Combat Crime, CENAPI) showed that in the 72-h range, only 34.53% of the people had been found alive or dead; figure far from 50% to 80% of Europe or Australia. This fact shows that those searching officers or the judicial bureaucracy can act as a factor that limits the search for missing persons. Additionally, there is a random pattern in the geospatial distribution of disappearance, with non-homogeneous frequencies per year. Results highlight the participation of families, the adoption of an evidence-based model, and the generation of geospatial forensic intelligence analysis to generate evidence-based public policies. The social demand of families to the government for not considering them takes relevance in forensic practice in Mexico, and the disappearance data support this assertion.

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We have genotyped the 58 STRs (27 autosomal, 24 Y-STRs and 7 X-STRs) and 94 autosomal SNPs in Illumina ForenSeq™ Primer Mix A in a sample of 248 men and 143 women from El Salvador, Central America. Regional division (Centro, Oriente, Occidente) showed in almost all cases FST values not significantly different from 0, and further analyses were applied only to the undivided, country-wide population. The overall random match probability (RMP) decreased from 6.79 × 10-31 in length-based genotypes in the 27 autosomal STRs to 1.47 × 10-34 in repeat-sequence based genotypes. Combining the autosomal loci in this set, RMP reaches 2.97 × 10-70. In a population genetic analysis, El Salvador showed the lowest FST values with US Hispanics both for autosomal and X-STRs; however, it was much closer to Native Americans for the latter than for the former, in accordance with the well-known gender-biased admixture that created most Latin American populations.

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Santa Catarina is a small, developed, and relatively safe state in South Brazil. Despite having positive social economic indicators, it still faces multiple challenges regarding forensic practices for personal identification. The objective of this paper is to discuss the recent advances and current challenges in the region, from the perspectives of anthropological and dental postmortem human identification, missing persons, and disaster victim identification (DVI) from 2019 to 2021. The recent creation of a Forensic Anthropology Sector (SAF) in the state's official forensic institution (Polícia Científica-PCI) has significantly improved identification of unidentified remains and optimised resources available for DNA analysis. However, SAF is still quite understaffed, which negatively affects the recovery of skeletal material, its preparation, and the time needed for filing reports. Santa Catarina has passed legislation for missing persons in 2015, 4 years prior to the sanction of federal laws implementing the national policy for the disappeared. Nonetheless, a lack of integration between stakeholders remains a problem that PCI has tried to circumvent with the Conecta Programme, a multidisciplinary and integrated initiative between families of the missing persons, police agencies, and the Public Ministry. The programme aims to collect not only reference DNA samples, but also relevant anthropological and dental data. It also offers facial progression services in cases of disappearances that occurred many years ago. Despite a history of disasters in the state, PCI still needs to implement international DVI standards at an institutional level. Recent training on Phase 1 DVI procedures, integrated with other responding institutions, indicates better preparation for future disasters. There are many challenges ahead for Santa Catarina's forensic institution and professionals that have yet to be addressed, but the overall situation on routine personal identification, missing persons initiatives, and DVI has improved over the last 2 years.

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Forensic investigations, especially those related to missing persons and unidentified remains, produce different types of data that must be managed and understood. The data collected and produced are extensive and originate from various sources: the police, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), medical examiner offices, specialised forensic teams, family members, and others. Some examples of information include, but are not limited to, the investigative background information, excavation data of burial sites, antemortem data on missing persons, and postmortem data on the remains of unidentified individuals. These complex data must be stored in a secured place, analysed, compared, shared, and then reported to the investigative actors and the public, especially the families of missing persons, who should be kept informed of the investigation. Therefore, a data management system with the capability of performing the tasks relevant to the goals of the investigation and the identification of an individual, while respecting the deceased and their families, is critical for standardising investigations. Data management is crucial to assure the quality of investigative processes, and it must be recognised as a holistic integrated system. The aim of this article is to discuss some of the most important components of an effective forensic data management system. The discussion is enriched by examples, challenges, and lessons learned from the erratic development and launching of databases for missing and unidentified persons in Brazil. The main objective of this article is to bring attention to the urgent need for an effective and integrated system in Brazil.

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Colombian forensic investigators required assistance locating clandestine burials of missing persons related to human right atrocities from 14 years ago. Geoscientific search methods were trialled, including a predictive spatial statistical model, using various input and database information, to select the most likely grave locations in difficult mountainous terrain. Groundwork using forensic geomorphology, near-surface geophysics (ERT) and subsequent probing identified suspect burial positions. One site was in mountainous terrain and the other in former school grounds, both difficult to access and in poor weather conditions. In the mountainous area, a negative resistivity anomaly area was identified and intrusively investigated, found to be a buried rock. In school grounds, after MESP and intelligence were used to identify a burial site, surface depressions were identified, and ERT datasets collected over the highest priority depression; intrusive investigations discovered a hand-dug pit containing animal bones. This approach is suggested for Latin American searches.

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The problem of the missing persons phenomenon in Brazil in the 21st century has become apparent, and the responses to the issue are still under development. The relatively new field of forensic anthropology and its trained professionals occupy an essential place in the investigation of cases of missing and unidentified individuals. The development of forensic anthropology in Brazil is unique among Latin American countries, who improved their expertise during the investigations of political crimes that occurred between the 1960s and 1980s in most places. The qualifications and the paths to become a forensic anthropologist in Brazil are different from other professionals who work in the field worldwide. This article addresses the issue of missing person investigations and details the work of forensic anthropologists in such cases in Brazil.

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Methods and implementations of DNA-based identification are well established in several forensic contexts. However, assessing the statistical power of these methods has been largely overlooked, except in the simplest cases. In this paper we outline general methods for such power evaluation, and apply them to a large set of family reunification cases, where the objective is to decide whether a person of interest (POI) is identical to the missing person (MP) in a family, based on the DNA profile of the POI and available family members. As such, this application closely resembles database searching and disaster victim identification (DVI). If parents or children of the MP are available, they will typically provide sufficient statistical evidence to settle the case. However, if one must resort to more distant relatives, it is not a priori obvious that a reliable conclusion is likely to be reached. In these cases power evaluation can be highly valuable, for instance in the recruitment of additional family members. To assess the power in an identification case, we advocate the combined use of two statistics: the Probability of Exclusion, and the Probability of Exceedance. The former is the probability that the genotypes of a random, unrelated person are incompatible with the available family data. If this is close to 1, it is likely that a conclusion will be achieved regarding general relatedness, but not necessarily the specific relationship. To evaluate the ability to recognize a true match, we use simulations to estimate exceedance probabilities, i.e. the probability that the likelihood ratio will exceed a given threshold, assuming that the POI is indeed the MP. All simulations are done conditionally on available family data. Such conditional simulations have a long history in medical linkage analysis, but to our knowledge this is the first systematic forensic genetics application. Also, for forensic markers mutations cannot be ignored and therefore current models and implementations must be extended. All the tools are freely available in Familias (http://www.familias.no) empowered by the R library paramlink. The above approach is applied to a large and important data set: 'The missing grandchildren of Argentina'. We evaluate the power of 196 families from the DNA reference databank (Banco Nacional de Datos Genéticos, http://www.bndg.gob.ar. As a result we show that 58 of the families have poor statistical power and require additional genetic data to enable a positive identification.

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Resumo Analisou-se a evolução de taxas das categorias homicídio doloso, latrocínio, lesão corporal seguida de morte, homicídio por auto de resistência, policial morto, pessoa desaparecida e encontro de cadáver, no Estado e na cidade do Rio de Janeiro e na Área Integrada de Segurança Pública 16 (AISP 16). Para tanto, foi realizado estudo ecológico, no período de 2002 a 2013, utilizando os dados do Instituto de Segurança Pública. Para análise da evolução temporal e tendência das taxas de homicídio doloso, de autos de resistência e de pessoas desaparecidas foi realizada regressão Joinpoint, considerando como variável dependente as referidas taxas e como variável independente o ano calendário. Para as demais categorias analisou-se apenas a evolução temporal das taxas a partir do cálculo da variação relativa destas no início e no final do período. Houve queda de taxas em todas as categorias, com exceção de pessoas desaparecidas. A taxa de homicídio doloso apresentou tendência significativa de decréscimo nas três localidades. Os resultados contribuíram para descrever o padrão da violência nas três localidades a partir do diálogo entre as ciências sociais, saúde e segurança pública, o que permitiu contemplar aspectos subjetivos e objetivos ligados aos achados do estudo.

Abstract The evolution of rates were analyzed for the following categories: murder, larceny, bodily harm followed by death, homicide for resistance to police resulting in death, policeman killed, missing persons and dead bodies found in the state and city of Rio de Janeiro and in Integrated Public Security Area 16 (AISP 16). An ecological study was conducted for the period from 2002 to 2013, using data from the Public Security Institute. To analyze the time trend and evolution of murder charges, resistance to police resulting in death and missing persons rates, Joinpoint regression was performed, using these rates as the dependent variables and the calendar year as the independent variable. For the other categories only the time trends of the rates were analyzed for the relative change in rates at the beginning and end of the period. There were falls in rates in all categories, except for missing persons. The murder rate showed a significant downward trend in the three locations. The results contributed to definition of the pattern of violence in the three locations based on the dialogue between the social sciences, public health and safety that made it possible to establish subjective and objective aspects linked to the study findings.

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Armed conflict in Colombia has played an important role in the missing people phenomenon, in which the Government has the duty to identify, recover and investigate the crime in the process of the victims' reparation. However, identifying missing people is a complex process because of the huge amount of time it consumes and the lack of information regarding the identity of the missing people, which is the norm in most of the cases. In such cases in which there is little information on the identity of missing people (including data of their relatives), DNA analysis and databases are of key importance in the identification process. This is why we present two cases that exemplify the role of DNA databases in the successful identification of missing people.

En el marco del conflicto armado que se ha presentado durante los últimos años en el territorio colombiano, el Estado ha llevado a cabo la labor de investigar, recuperar e identificar los cuerpos de personas desaparecidas en el proceso de reparación a las víctimas. La identificación de personas fallecidas y desaparecidas en la mayoría de los casos es un proceso largo y complejo, en el que es frecuente contar con muy escasa información sobre la posible identidad del individuo y sin ninguna información sobre los familiares. Es aquí donde el análisis de ADN y las bases de datos relacionadas juegan un papel importante en este proceso. Se presentan dos casos en los que se logra la identificación de dos individuos previamente reportados en condición de no identificados (individuos CNI); esto se da años después mediante la búsqueda y comparación de perfiles genéticos en la Base Nacional de Perfiles Genéticos de Aplicación en Investigación Judicial CODIS (Combined DNA Index System por sus siglas en inglés) y haciendo una ampliación del análisis genético en ambos casos para su confirmación.

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