Human remains were found at a garbage dump outside Cocula, near Iguala, Nov. 8, 2014. Bone and teeth fragments have been sent to a team of experts in Austria to be analyzed. Henry Romero / Reuters

“We are redoubling efforts to find the students and will spare no human or technological resources,” said Mexico’s security chief, Interior Minister Miguel Ángel Osorio Chong, during a recent visit with the families in Guerrero.

Just a few days earlier though, Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam showed a chilling video confession, in which suspects from the brutal drug cartel Guerreros Unidos re-enacted how they allegedly killed the students and incinerated their remains at a dump in Cocula, about 15 miles from Iguala. According to the confession, they let the grisly bonfire rage for 14 hours, then put the ashes in plastic bags and dumped them in a river.

For the upstart Citizen-Led Forensics, the stakes of the challenge couldn’t be higher. More than 120,000 people have been killed or gone missing in Mexico since 2006 in what is now the biggest humanitarian crisis in Latin America.

Schwartz has no doubt his country is in a state of warlike emergency.

“In eight years of drug war,” he said, “the number of the disappeared and dead in Mexico is already half that of those killed or missing in Colombia’s 50-year war.”

Cruz and Schwartz have an initial budget to gather 1,500 DNA samples from the families of missing people. They will use these samples to examine a first round of 450 missing-person cases. Eventually, as they secure more funding, they hope to track all reported killings or disappearances in Mexico, including those of foreigners.

A test case is underway.

On Sept. 12, Citizen-Led Forensics initiated the first known independent exhumation ever done in Mexico. They worked with experts from Peru to exhume the alleged remains of Brenda Damaris, a young woman who disappeared in northern Mexico in 2011. The remains originally returned to her family allegedly included two skulls and clothes they didn’t recognize. Because of discrepancies, the family had been asking authorities for DNA testing for two years. They’re now waiting for the independent results.

Families of the disappeared across the country want forensic investigations to be used first of all to find their loved ones alive, not just in a grave — a feeling the parents of the 43 missing students from the Ayotzinapa Normal School share.

For many families, the term “forensic” is itself traumatic.

“For people like us, who went through such a tragedy, when we hear the word ‘DNA,’ we think death. This word for us is like a wall. It takes us a lot of work to deal with it,” said Lucia Baca, a member of Citizen-Led Forensics. Her son, a 33-year-old engineer, disappeared on a highway near the northern city of Monterrey while he was heading to Texas for a trip in 2011.

But the citizen-led project, in Schwartz’s and Cruz’s vision, aims at redefining what “forensic” means.

“We are called forensic not so much because we’re doing forensic DNA tests in a lab but because we are a forum, in the old sense of the Latin word. Like the ancient Romans, we are a group of citizens getting together to share information and disputing it in an open, public space,” said Cruz, as she sat at a round table with some of the 16 families from Citizen-Led Forensics who gathered from different states to define their strategy in support of the Guerrero families.

By the end of the meeting, the group decided to offer 500 DNA tests to analyze the remains of bodies unearthed while searching for the missing students.

“The government is very interested in finding those 43 now because the world’s attention is on it,” said Schwartz, when he and some of the group were taking part in a Nov. 8 flash mob protest in the Zócalo, Mexico City’s main square. “But there are hundreds of other bodies there. What’s going to happen to all these? Are they going to go back to the mass grave without an identity?”

“Inequality somehow filters down even to the dead,” he said.

He and Cruz want families of the missing, who have the most at stake, at the center of the searches so they can drive the investigations and be “the owners of their own data,” he said.

“The state doesn’t have a monopoly on truth,” Schwartz said. “What we need is transparency.”