(Guadalajara) Human remains were found in pits and a crematorium in western Mexico, a missing persons search group said Monday.
A total of 25 bags containing bones and charred tissues were discovered on Sunday in El Salto, in Jalisco, the Mexican state with the most missing people (15,000 out of the nearly 100,000 officially listed).
“We immediately came across an artisanal oven,” Indira Navarro, of the Guerreros Buscadores collective, explained to AFP. “As we searched a little, we began to locate bones and pieces of skin, burnt human flesh, a foul smell.” The oven was still smoking, she assured.
The public prosecutor’s office, responsible for verifying these complaints, has not yet ruled.
In the same state of Jalisco five bodies – four men and a woman – were discovered on a road between the municipalities of Encarnación and Lagos de Moreno.
Research groups say drug cartels and other organized crime groups use ovens to cremate their victims and erase the traces.
In October, another collective – often mothers looking for their children – found human remains in an oven located on a vacant lot, in the same state of Jalisco.
Mexico has almost 100,000 missing people, according to the latest government figures dated March 19.
Most of the disappearances were recorded after 2006, when the then government declared war on the cartels with the participation of the army.
The country has more than 52,000 unidentified corpses, according to the NGO Movimiento por Nuestros (Movement for our missing).
Jalisco is the stronghold of the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación, one of the most violent criminal organizations in the country, along with the Sinaloa Cartel.
In the state of Sinaloa (northwest) which borders the Pacific, eight people are still missing after the kidnapping of 66 and the release of 54.