GUADALAJARA, Mexico – As many as 48 bags containing human remains were discovered and recovered from a clandestine grave near Guadalajara, Mexican authorities said Thursday (Friday Manila time).
Guadalajara is the capital of Jalisco state, where one of Mexico’s most violent and powerful drug cartels operates and where thousands of people have been reported missing.
The bags with the remains were located four weeks ago by a search group on a vacant lot in Zapopan, a vast outlying municipality in the Guadalajara metropolitan area, the state prosecutor’s office said.
Officials said they were still trying to pin down an exact number for victims whose remains were found in the bags. They declined to give an estimate, but said they were carrying on with a search to see if more remains were around.
“We need to make progress on the forensic issue so that we can tell you how many victims this number of bags represents,” Blanca Trujillo, deputy state prosecutor for missing persons, told a press conference. AFP
In the meantime, the remains in the 48 bags that were recovered would need to be analyzed, officials said.
Since the grisly discovery, authorities have been working to recover the remains with the support of members of the Guerreros Buscadores collective.
In presenting an official report on the search efforts, Trujillo said her office had the support of the National Commission for the Search for Persons. Because of the vastness of the land, the search has required the use of heavy machinery, she said.
The discovery of the grave site adds to dozens of similar cases in Jalisco, the state hardest hit by the crisis of missing persons affecting Mexico, where more than 127,000 victims have vanished nationwide. AFP
