More than 50 bodies discovered in mass graves in Mexico

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Salvatierra community in Guanajuato state: remains of 59 people found

Photo: STR / EPA-EFE / Shutterstock

Mass graves with numerous bodies have again been found in Mexico.

With the help of the police and the military, the authorities in the municipality of Salvatierra in Guanajuato state recovered the remains of 59 people, according to Karla Quintana, who was responsible for the search for disappeared people.

In the "numerous mass graves" discovered there are likely to be more corpses, she said.

In Mexico, violent crimes by criminal organizations such as drug cartels, where people go missing, are repeated.

The victims of the cartels often end up in mass graves or are dissolved in acid.

The number of people who have disappeared is currently more than 73,000 nationwide.

Guanajuato is one of the Mexican states with the most violence.

There the powerful Jalisco Nueva Generación cartel and the regional Santa Rosa de Lima cartel compete for supremacy in drug trafficking, fuel theft, extortion and kidnapping.

Often the gangsters have connections with local security forces.

Crimes in Mexico are often never cleared up and thus not punished.

It is still unclear how long the bodies have been in the graves in Salvatierra, about 265 kilometers northwest of the capital, Mexico City.

According to initial analyzes, ten to 15 of the corpses are women, and there are also presumably young people among the dead, it said.

Only in January, authorities in the western Mexican state of Jalisco found the bodies and body parts of an estimated 30 people.

Two more mass graves with a total of 81 bodies had already been found there since November 2019.

Most of those missing today went missing after 2006, when then Mexican President Felipe Calderón declared war on drug gangs.

The violence increased with it.

In 2019 there were about 36,000 murders in the country of 130 million people.

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wit / dpa