A mass grave discovered last December in a suburb of Guadalajara with dozens of bags of dismembered body parts contained the remains of 24 people, Mexican authorities announced on Sunday.
Six of them, one woman and five men, were identified. They were reported missing between 2021 and 2023, the Jalisco state prosecutor’s office said in a statement. statement.
“The families of these victims have already been warned and are benefiting from comprehensive psychosocial support from the deputy public prosecutor in charge of missing persons,” indicated the public prosecutor.
The other 18 have not yet been identified with certainty and the culprits are being sought.
Authorities said the grave was located using drones equipped with thermal cameras and ground-penetrating radar, as well as canine teams.
More than 450,000 people have been murdered nationwide since Mexico launched a major offensive against drug cartels in 2006.
These deaths, as well as the disappearances of tens of thousands of others, have been largely blamed on organized crime. Some of the recent violence has coincided with the Jalisco Next Generation Cartel incursion into areas that were once strongholds of the Sinaloa Cartelone of Mexico’s largest drug trafficking organizations.
Jalisco is the Mexican state with the highest number of missing people: 15,382 at the end of last year, according to authorities.
Collectives searching for missing people say drug trafficking cartels and other organized crime gangs sometimes use ovens to cremate their victims without leaving a trace.
The country’s forensic system is overwhelmed and tens of thousands of unidentified bodies go unclaimed from morgues or mass graves.
Last month, Mexican authorities said they had recovered a total of 31 bodies pits of Chiapas, a state plagued by cartel violence.
Eduardo Ramírez, governor of the state of Chiapas
A few days earlier, Mexican authorities discovered 12 bodies buried in clandestine graves in the state of Chihuahua, in the north of the country.