Authorities in Mexico said that a mass grave found last December with dozens of bags of body parts dismembered contained the remains of 24 people.
Six of them, a woman and five men, have been identified. The office of the state prosecutor for Jalisco said that they were reported missing from 2021 to 2023.
The state prosecutor stated, “The families of these missing persons have been notified, and they are receiving full psychosocial support from the Deputy Prosecutor’s Office for Missing Persons.”
The 18 remaining suspects have not been positively identified. A search for their perpetrators is underway.
Officials claimed that the grave was found using drones equipped with thermal cameras, ground-penetrating radios, and canine teams.
Since 2006, when Mexico launched its major offensive against the drug cartels, more than 450,000 people across the country have been killed.
Organized crime has been blamed for the deaths and disappearances of tens of thousands. The recent violence coincided with an incursion by the Jalisco New Generation Cartel into areas that used to be strongholds for the Sinaloa Cartel. This was one of Mexico’s largest drug trafficking groups.
Jalisco is the Mexican state with the highest number of missing persons — 15,382 by the end of last year, according to the authorities.
Searching for missing person groups say that organized crime gangs, drug cartels, and others use ovens to burn their victims and leave them with no trace.
The country’s forensic systems are overwhelmed. Tens of thousands of unidentified corpses lie in mass graves or morgues.
Last month, Mexican authorities reported that they had recovered 31 bodies in total from pits located in Chiapas, an area plagued by violence caused by cartels.
Only a few days earlier, Mexican authorities found 12 bodies in secret graves in northern Chihuahua.
