CIUDAD JUAREZ – The man cuts a striking profile. He’s been dead for two years—a nameless hit-and-run victim, I’m told, left to bleed out on the side of some dusty road in this Mexico-US border town of 1.5 million people. The accident punched a hole in his forehead. From where I’m standing, hunched over an autopsy stretcher on which his body is strewn akimbo, I can see through to his pickled brain.
If I didn’t know any better, there’s still life in this man.
It’s been 120 hours since Dr. Alejandro Hernández Cárdenas got to work. That’s when Hernández Cárdenas, an unassuming local dentist who splits his time practicing, teaching graduate forensic odontology courses at the Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez, and identifying the unidentified at the Juarez Forensic Science Lab, submerged this man’s gnarled, sun-scorched body into what Hernández Cárdenas affectionately calls the “Jacuzzi.”
The translucent bathtub-sized tank holds about 60 gallons’ worth of an unknown chemical
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