Mexico City — Mexican authorities have discovered 12 bodies buried in clandestine graves in Mexico’s northern Chihuahua state, officials said Thursday.
Authorities discovered 11 graves containing 12 skeletons in Ascension municipality near the U.S. border, the state prosecutor’s office said in a statement.
“The discovery was made during tracking operations that took place on December 18, 19 and 20,” it said.
“The unidentified skeletons and evidence were transferred to the laboratories of the Forensic Medical Service” to the city of Ciudad Juarez for possible identification and to determine possible causes of death , it said.
Drug cartels and kidnapping gangs in Mexico often use such clandestine body dumping grounds to get rid of the corpses of their victims or rivals. The grisly practice has contributed to the enormous problem of missing people in Mexico, who now number about 120,000.
The relatives of most of those missing people are largely left to look for their loved ones by themselves, and they frequently form volunteer search groups that go out into the desert looking for clandestine graves. It wasn’t known if any of those volunteer groups had helped authorities in locating the graves in Ascencion.
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Chihuahua has been hit for years by violence linked to organized crime as a route for drug trafficking and the smuggling of migrants to the United States.
It has recorded 3,927 missing persons since 1952, according to official figures. Jalisco and Tamaulipas, the states hit hardest by violence, have recorded more than 13,000 missing persons each in the same period.
Mexico has seen more than 450,000 people killed in drug-related violence since the government deployed the army to combat trafficking in 2006, according to official figures.