(Mexico City) Human remains found inside 45 bags abandoned at the bottom of a ravine in the Mexican state of Jalisco match eight young call center workers who have been missing since late May, authorities said local on Tuesday.
Last week in Zapopan, a suburb of Guadalajara (west), investigators launched in search of these eight employees of the same call center had found human remains in a ravine 40 meters deep.
” The evidence […] confirm that they correspond to the young people who worked in a call center in Zapopan and were reported missing,” the state government of Jalisco informed in a statement, based on the report of forensic experts.
The victims, two women and six men in their 30s, were last seen between May 20 and May 22, according to family alerts.
Their remains were discovered in the same area as their workplace.
The federal government, based on initial investigative elements, indicated that the call center was involved in various illegal activities, such as real estate fraud and telephone scams.
15,000 missing
The state of Jalisco is the state with the most missing people in Mexico, with more than 15,000 since 1962.
As of 2021, some 70 bags containing the human remains belonging to 11 people had been discovered in Tonala, near Guadalajara, the state capital.
On Tuesday, the state prosecutor’s office announced that 27 bodies were discovered on May 25 in the municipality of Tlajomulco de Zuniga, also in the suburbs of Guadalajara. Eight bodies have been identified.
From December 2018 to April 2023, 136 clandestine graves were spotted in the state of Jalisco alone, with 1,573 bodies.
These serial disappearances “result from the decision of the Cartel de Jalisco-Nouvelle Génération (CJNG) in 2015 to extend its borders. They invaded Michoacán, Jalisco, and moved to Zacatecas and other parts of the country,” triggering bloody battles, security specialist David Saucedo told AFP.
The CJNG is led by Nemesio Oseguera “El Mencho”, wanted by the United States, which offers 10 million dollars to whoever will allow his capture. According to Mr. Saucedco, this cartel is trying to monopolize the drug trade and control more routes to the United States, a strategy that includes the forced recruitment of young people and the extermination of local gangs.
Such news items are daily occurrences in Mexico. On Monday, a “research collective” claimed to have found six corpses in Salamanca, in the state of Guanajuato (center).
And on Tuesday, the prosecutor’s office in Colima, a state in the west of the country, reported the discovery of “92 human remains and bones”, without specifying the number of victims.
Mexico has recorded more than 340,000 murders and some 100,000 disappearances, mainly attributed to criminal organizations, since the launch in December 2006 of a vast and controversial military operation aimed at combating drug trafficking.