Mexico City – Mexican authorities have discovered 12 bodies buried in clandestine graves in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua, officials said Thursday.
Authorities discovered 11 graves containing 12 skeletons in Ascension Township, near the U.S. border, the state attorney’s office said in a statement.
“The discovery was made during follow-up operations that took place on December 18, 19 and 20,” he said.
“The unidentified skeletons and evidence were transferred to the laboratories of the Forensic Medicine Service” in the city of Ciudad Juárez for possible identification and to determine possible causes of death, he said.
Drug cartels and kidnapping gangs in Mexico often use these clandestine corpse dumps to dispose of the corpses of their victims or rivals. The gruesome practice has contributed to Mexico’s huge missing persons problem, which now numbers around 120,000.
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The relatives of most of these missing people are largely left to search for their loved ones alone, often forming volunteer search parties that go out into the desert in search of clandestine graves. It was not known if any of these volunteer groups had helped authorities locate the graves in Ascencion.
Chihuahua has been plagued for years by violence linked to organized crime as a route for drug and migrant smuggling into the United States.
It has registered 3,927 missing persons since 1952, according to official data. Jalisco and Tamaulipas, the states most affected by the violence, have each registered more than 13,000 people missing in the same period.
Mexico has seen more than 450,000 people killed in drug-related violence since the government deployed the military to fight the trade in 2006, according to official figures.