Mexico City – Mexican authorities have found 12 bodies buried in hidden graves in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua, officials said Thursday.
Authorities found 11 graves containing 12 skeletons in the town of Ascension near the US border, the state attorney's office said in a statement.
“The discovery was made during tracking operations on December 18, 19 and 20,” he said.
“The unidentified skeletons and the evidence were transferred to the laboratories of the Forensic Medical Service” in the city of Ciudad Juarez for identification and to determine the causes of death, he said.
Drug cartels and kidnapping gangs in Mexico often use such hidden body dumping grounds to dispose of the bodies of their victims or opponents. The heinous practice has contributed to the huge problem of missing persons in Mexico, which now numbers around 120,000.
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Relatives of most missing persons are left to search for their loved ones largely alone, and often form volunteer search groups that go out into the desert looking for hidden graves. It was not known if any of these volunteer groups had helped authorities find the graves in Ascencion.
Chihuahua has been plagued for years by violence linked to organized crime as a route for drug trafficking and migrant smuggling to the United States.
It has registered 3,927 missing persons since 1952, according to official figures. Jalisco and Tamaulipas, the states hardest hit by violence, have registered more than 13,000 deaths in the same period.
Mexico has seen more than 450,000 people killed in drug-related violence since the government deployed the army to fight human trafficking in 2006, according to official figures.
