Rehydrating the Desert’s Dead 

Dr. Alejandro Cardenas was a forensic pathologist in Cuidad Juarez when I met him in 2015. I wanted to talk to him because he had developed a chemical solution for rehydrating corpses. Dead bodies, presumably murdered, turn up often in the desert outside Juarez. But after a few days in the heat they were so dehydrated that, even if the desert sun and critters hadn’t devoured the corpse, there was no way to identify the person from things like tattoos, scars, etc. Those were lost to dehydration. But a corpse rehydrated overnight in Cardenas’s solution revealed those marks, allowing for easier identification, and, potentially, a resolution to its case. I did the story as part of a larger piece for National Geographic.