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Taiwan‘s President Tsai Ing-wen has quit as leader of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) after it suffered major defeats in key local polls, a significant blow to her prospects for re-election in 2020.

The resignation on Saturday came as the opposition Kuomintang (KMT) party, seen as being close to China, made gains by winning two of the island’s most important city posts in mayoral elections.

The local elections were seen as a referendum on the administration of the island’s independence-leaning president amid growing economic and political pressure from Beijing.

Tsai will remain president and her resignation from the party leadership will have no direct effect on the business of the government.

“Today, democracy taught us a lesson,” Tsai said. “We must study and accept the higher expectations of the people.”

Setback ahead of 2020 election

The DPP lost the mayoral election to KMT in the southern port city of Kaohsiung, where it held power for 20 years.

KMT also defeated the ruling party in the central city of Taichung, while Ko Wen-je, the independent mayor of the capital, Taipei, appeared on track to win a second term.

The DPP is left in control of only six of Taiwan’s 22 cities and counties, compared with at least 15 for the Kuomintang.

Analysts said the defeat ruled Tsai out as a candidate for the presidency in the 2020 election. But others said she may still run, in the absence of an obvious successor.

Observers put the results down to anger over pension cuts and labour reforms, including slashing the number of public holidays, as well as concern that tensions with Beijing are damaging local businesses.

“The defeat certainly harms Tsai’s chances in 2020,” said Shih Cheng-feng, a political analyst at Taiwan’s National Dong Hwa University.

‘One China’

The DPP is traditionally pro-independence and Tsai has refused to acknowledge Beijing’s stance that Taiwan is part of “one China”.

“What really upsets them [Beijing] is her refusal to back the ‘one China’ policy,” Al Jazeera’s Adrian Brown, reporting from Taipei, said.

Tsai and her DPP won a landslide victory in 2016, but China swiftly responded by cutting all links with her government.

Beijing has been ratcheting up pressure on the island it claims as its own territory by poaching away its diplomatic partners, cutting official contacts and staging threatening military exercises.

But J Bruce Jacobs, professor emeritus of Asian languages and studies at Monash University, said the election had little to do with China.

The election was the result of “young people and older people voting to improve the economy”, Jacobs said on Al Jazeera. 

“It was also a report card on the central government” which tended to be “rather cautious”, he said. “To some extent, it led to a paralysis,” Jacobs said.

Taiwanese officials had warned that Beijing was seeking to sway voters through the spread of fake news, similar to how Russia was accused of interfering in the 2016 US presidential elections.

There was no immediate reaction from Beijing to the poll results, with state media simply noting Tsai’s resignation “to take responsibility for the party’s performance in Taiwan’s local elections”.

Editor’s note: This article contains graphic images.  

San Salvador, Salvador – When Israel Ticas isn’t in the field, he is doing most of his work in a cold, dimly-lit office with images of often disfigured homicide victims plastered on the wall.

In one image, the skeleton of a woman’s body that has been unearthed lies on her grave. Another shows the body of a man who had his mouth sewed shut before being suffocated.

It is here, where Ticas conducts most of his research.

Ticas says that as the country’s forensic archaeologist, he has solved more than 500 homicide and missing persons cases.

In his office, he works with his assistant, trying to piece together the cases he has worked on, and keeps in touch with the families of victims that have been either assassinated or have disappeared. 

“I have all I need,” he says.

Masks, caps, metric tapes, machetes, big and small brushes, cleaning instruments and lamps line the walls.

Ticas’s second office is wherever a crime took place or a body has been found. There, he wears a special blue and white suit that protects him from polluting the bodies and is suitable for digging up decomposing corpses.

“My work is not to only take the victims out, I process the scene, I find more information, I understand how was the victim buried, what took place, I’m also a criminologist,” he says.

It’s a dangerous and daunting task in a country with one of the highest homicide rates in the world. An estimated 10,800 people have disappeared in El Salvador since 2010, according to police reports. Homicide rates peaked in 2016, with nearly 5,300 killed.

“Many of the cases in my country go unpunished, and the families of those victims are secondary victims,” Ticas says.

“They are unable to close the cycle of suffering and they will stay in that cycle forever.”

Unusual route to forensics

The 55-year-old got his start in forensic archaeology in 1989 after entering the police force during the Salvadoran war.

After the signing of the peace accord in 1992, Ticas became part of the Division of Scientific Technical Police and the National Civil Police. He also acquired some of his skills in the United States and South Africa.

“I might not have a certification or a degree, specialising in criminology, but I have 20 years of experience,” Ticas says.

In 2006, Ticas returned to El Salvador from South Africa with victim identification techniques that were unknown in the country.

Ticas dug his first grave the same year. 

The difference between his method, and others, is that he makes an effort to rebuild the scene.

“The other experts, just dedicate their time to find the bodies, and when they find the corpse, they grab it, and pull it out so that Forensic Medicine can identify it,” he explains.

“This can be done in 25 minutes, but you lose the body language, you don’t understand what happened to it.”

Everything Ticas does is captured in photographs, diaries and agendas.

“If you open one of those books you will find the photograph of corpses, describing the methods I used,” he says, pointing to a table of stacked books, all of them tell the stories of hundreds of victims.

In recent years, he has developed a technique to preserve both the crime scene and the corpses.

He digs in parallel so that its structure remains untouched.

“When I started working on this, I observed how the cases were processed. They stepped on the corpses, and there wasn’t scientific proof of anything,” Ticas says.

“So, I started to develop an alternative. I have fused criminology, archaeology and anthropology,” he adds.

“As an anthropologist I knew I couldn’t step on the corpses, as an archaeologist, I developed a technique to be able to work on the site without touching the crime scene, and as a criminologist I knew, I needed to preserve and recover evidence and micro-evidence to identify the victims as well as the perpetrators.”

Some experts in the forensic anthropology field in El Salvador say that Ticas damages the crime scenes because he carries out “aggressive” excavations in which he prioritises the way things look in the tombs and not the conservation of the remains.

According to Legal Medicine, a medical institution supported by the government, the techniques used by Ticas prolong the excavations for too long, and are not practical.

They calculate that it would take a day to recover the remains that the criminologist extracts in three, according to local reports.

But in 2017, Jose Luis Perez Castro, the director of the Latin American Forensic Research Institute, praised Ticas and his work calling him “the maximum exponent in El Salvador and in Latin America when it comes to corpse exhumation”.

The Institute of Legal Medicine in El Salvador did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.

“For many, I am a farce. I am a madman, a person who alters and ruins everything. But, in other countries, I am Professor Ticas, the scientist, the engineer who has managed to merge techniques,” Ticas says. 

‘No humanity’

Having done the job for more than a decade, Ticas has seen how murder has transformed in the country.

He says in 2006 bodies weren’t mutilated and dismembered as they are now.

“One of the new methods is removing the skin from the victim. I think that comes from the movie Hannibal. It’s the way the gangs try to show their power by cutting all the pieces and the parts of the bodies,” he says.

The bodies he finds are victims of gang violence, robberies and other crimes. Often they are women who were subjected to the most severe forms of torture.

Ticas tries to separate the science of what he does from the emotional toll it can take.

“I do not get into feelings, this is science, this is matter, and this is the shield I use not to break down emotionally,” he says.

“I see a body of a child, and while cleaning it, start thinking about how much he probably suffered, my heart begins to feel, and my human side comes in. That’s why I’m forced to use my shield,” he explains.

But when he does find a body that he wasn’t necessarily looking for, he publishes his findings, including a description of the person and a photo, on his three Facebook pages, hoping that a relative will see it.

“This is my human side, my other self, the person looking for missing people,” he says.

Reporting for this story was supported by the International Women’s Media Foundation as part of the Adelante Latin America Reporting Initiative.

Image: Dyson