Mexico — 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 tracing operations which took place on December 18, 19 and 20,” the press release said.
“The unidentified skeletons and evidence were transferred to the laboratories of the forensic service” of the city of Ciudad Juarez for possible identification and determination of the possible causes of death, the statement said.
Drug cartels and the kidnapping gangs in Mexico often use these clandestine dumps to dispose of the corpses of their victims or their rivals, underlines the Associated Press. This has contributed to Mexico’s enormous missing persons problem – around 120,000 at present.
The relatives of most of the missing are largely left to their own devices and often form groups of volunteers who go into the desert in search of clandestine graves. It is unclear whether volunteer groups helped find Ascension’s tombs.
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Chihuahua has been hit for years by violence linked to organized crime as a vector of drug trafficking and the smuggling of migrants to the United States.
It has recorded 3,927 people missing since 1952, according to official figures. Jalisco and Tamaulipas, the states hardest hit by violence, each recorded more than 13,000 missing people during the same period.
Mexico has seen more than 450,000 deaths drug related violence since the government deployed the army to combat trafficking in 2006, according to official figures.