Mexico City — Mexican authorities have discovered 12 bodies buried in underground graves in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua, officials said Thursday.
Authorities discovered 11 graves containing 12 skeletons in the municipality of Ascension near the U.S. border, the state attorney's office said in a statement.
“The discovery was made in the course of excavation works, which were carried out on December 18, 19 and 20,” the report says.
“Unidentified skeletons and evidence have been submitted to the Forensic Medicine Laboratory” in Ciudad Juarez for possible identification and possible cause of death, the report said.
Drug cartels and kidnapping gangs in Mexico often use such underground landfills to dispose of the corpses of their victims or rivals. This horrific practice has contributed to Mexico's massive missing persons problem, which now numbers around 120,000.
Relatives of most of the missing are forced to search for their loved ones themselves, and they often form volunteer search parties that go into the desert in search of underground graves. It was not known if any of these volunteer groups helped authorities find the graves in Ascension.
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Chihuahua has been plagued by organized crime-related violence for years as a route for drug trafficking and migrant smuggling into the United States.
According to official data, since 1952, 3,927 people have been registered in it as missing. Jalisco and Tamaulipas, the states hardest hit by the violence, recorded more than 13,000 missing each during the same period.
More than 450,000 people died in drug-related violence in Mexico in 2006, according to official figures.