(Guadalajara) Several corpses were discovered inside clandestine graves in the Mexican state of Jalisco located by a group of mothers of missing persons, one of them told AFP.
“So far, around 20 (bodies) have been discovered,” Índira Navarro, coordinator of the Madres Buscadoras (mothers-seekers) organization in Jalisco state, told AFP on Tuesday.
Asked by AFP, the authorities did not immediately comment.
The clandestine cemetery is located in a suburb of Guadalajara, the second largest city in the country and capital of the state of Jalisco. It covers about one hectare, added Mme Navaro.
The discovery of the site came after an anonymous call she received on Tuesday morning.
“I received an anonymous call in which I was given the coordinates of a place reporting that it housed more than 50 bodies,” she continued. Upon arriving, “we immediately found clues”.
The state of Jalisco is the one with the most missing people in Mexico, with nearly 15,000 out of a total of 111,203 registered since 1962 across the country, according to official figures.
According to security experts, the phenomenon of disappearances is mainly linked to wars between drug traffickers, but not all victims are involved in crimes.
In the absence of results in the official investigations, the families of the disappeared conduct their own research and often discover mass graves.
In this suburb of Guadalajara, named Tlajomulco de Zúñiga, similar tombs have already been found. On June 14, a group of mothers of the missing reported the discovery of 27 bags with human remains.
At the end of May, the bodies of eight employees of a call center in the state of Jalisco were found a few days after their disappearance among around fifty bags discovered by the scientific police and rescuers in a ravine in Zapopan, another suburb. from Guadalajara.
According to the federal government, according to the first elements of the investigation the call center was involved in real estate fraud and extortion by telephone.
The first disappearances in Mexico date back to the 1960s and 1980s. But the cases skyrocketed after the war on drugs was militarized in 2006. Since that date, more than 350,000 homicides have been counted, most attributed by the authorities internal wars between drug traffickers.