By Marina E. Franco, Noticias Telemundo

MEXICO CITY — In a country with around 110,000 people reported as missing, presumably dead, locating them could be just a few clicks away.

That is the hope behind Angelus 2.0, a computer program developed by the Mexican government in an effort started four years ago.

While many relatives of the missing people have had to take it upon themselves to find traces or remains of their loved ones, Angelus conducts the search from an office south of Mexico City. The software is able to process thousands of documents and databases and find connections and patterns that elude the human eye.

“We are producing relevant evidence for the location of tens of thousands of disappeared people,” said historian Javier Yankelevich, a soft-spoken 34-year-old who at times got emotional during his interview with Noticias Telemundo.

“This is the type of response that is needed,” said Yankelevich, who leads a team that has been working with the Angelus program for about three years, within the country’s National Search Commission together with academics from the National Council of Science and Technology (Conacyt).

Angelus is currently focused on reviewing facts about people who were forcibly disappeared between 1964 and 1985. Authorities and groups linked to Mexico’s then-ruling party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (known as PRI in Spanish), repressed and persecuted with systematic violence those they considered “disruptors” or insurgents.

The software gathers information — where was the missing person last seen, did someone who survived government detention share a cell with someone with the same name, etc. — and makes links and provides clues as to the person’s whereabouts.

Behind the program there is a multidisciplinary team: historians, archivists, computer scientists, biologists, lawyers.

Yankelevich said they have already been contacted by a unit of a state prosecutor’s office, asking whether the program could help find information relevant to their ongoing criminal cases.

Angelus could even lay the foundation for similar tools to be used in Guatemala, Colombia and Chile — countries where regimes, dictatorships or paramilitaries also perpetrated disappearances and crimes in a massive and systematic way.

“The central question in the search for people is ‘where,'” said Yankelevich. He noted that when it comes to cases of missing persons as part of government repression, it’s never about just one person missing. “If we don’t manage to generate a methodological level that transcends one individual, we will never solve it.”

Angelus is also designed to create graphic charts that show all the connecting lines between missing persons, perpetrators and places. This allows researchers to spot relationships and coincidences, listing for example the names of people who ended up in the same clandestine site but did not seem linked otherwise.

Citing one case, Yankelevich said Angelus made possible to get enough information to contact survivors of one of the largest clandestine counterinsurgency centers, Campo Militar No. 1.

Then, last September, they were asked to visit that military site, which covers thousands of square miles and today operates as a military court venue, to see what they could recognize, such as confirming sketches and identifying specific spaces where the violence took place so that the forensic analysis could be more accurate.

Angelus’ reach is widening now that prosecutors are beginning to show interest in it to help them solve their cases, Yankelevich said, visibly frustrated for the delay. “It’s been very difficult — although I can’t understand why they wouldn’t want to” use the information. That aspect of his job is like “swimming against the current,” he said.

“To the extent that you find the victims of forced disappearance, you will find information that can be used to do justice. And to the extent that you do justice, you will find useful information to find the victims,” ​​the historian said. To date, only one agent has been prosecuted and convicted for the disappearances during the Mexican counterinsurgency.

Impact of Technology

It is not the first time technology has been used to address the issue of missing people in Mexico.

In recent years, for example, the nongovernmental organization Data Cívica group compiled a database with the locations of clandestine graves and another one matching file numbers of recent disappearances with a person’s identity, giving a name to a numbered file.

In other countries, technological programs have also been used to solve cases. In the United States, for example, there are hackers who study information from open sources to help authorities, especially in cases of missing children. 

They look to see if someone with features like the missing person can be seen in the background of a photo someone shared on Instagram with geolocation. Agencies like the FBI have forensic data — fingerprints or facial identification.

Worldwide, the Forensic Anthropology group uses social media posts and videos to reconstruct events. One of the group’s investigations, done in collaboration with Mexican NGOs, looked into the disappearance of 43 students from Ayotzinapa in September 2014.