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 said Sunday.
Six of them — a woman and five men — have been identified. They were reported missing between 2021 and 2023, the office of the state prosecutor of Jalisco state said in a statement.
“The families of these victims have already been notified and are being provided with full psychosocial support by the Deputy Prosecutor’s Office for Missing Persons,” the state prosecutor said.
The remaining 18 have yet to be positively identified, and a search is under way for the culprits.
Officials said the grave was located using drones with thermal cameras and ground-penetrating radars as well as canine teams.
More than 450,000 people have been murdered countrywide since Mexico launched a major offensive against drug cartels in 2006.
The deaths, as well as the disappearance of tens of thousands of others, has been blamed largely on organized crime. Some of the recent violence has coincided with the Jalisco New Generation Cartel incursion into areas that were once strongholds of the Sinaloa Cartel, one of Mexico’s biggest drug trafficking organizations.
Jalisco is the Mexican state with the highest number of missing persons — 15,382 by the end of last year, according to the authorities.
Collectives searching for missing persons say that drug trafficking cartels and other organized crime gangs sometimes use ovens to incinerate their victims and leave no trace.
The country’s forensic system is overwhelmed, and tens of thousands of unidentified bodies lie unclaimed in morgues or mass graves.
Just last month, Mexican authorities said they recovered a total of 31 bodies from pits in Chiapas, a state plagued by cartel violence.
Chiapas State Governor Eduardo Ramirez
Just days before that,, Mexican authorities discovered 12 bodies buried in clandestine graves in the northern Chihuahua state.
