Mexico City, September 22 (RHC)-- At least 19 more bags of human remains have been found on the same site where at least 44 bodies were found in recent days in the Mexican state of Jalisco.
Experts from the Jalisco Institute of Forensic Sciences removed the bags from the pit after resuming a search of the property located in the municipality of Zapopan, according to a statement by the state attorney general’s office.
On September 3rd, authorities uncovered a well more than 10 meters deep on the land, from which they extracted 119 bags of human remains belonging to at least 40 people.
“During the work carried out at La Primavera by the prosecutor’s office staff who specialize in missing persons, a hole was located, inside which lay plastic bags, apparently with evidence of human remains and clothing,” the institute said.
The 19 bags were sent to the Jalisco Institute of Forensic Sciences, where their contents will be analyzed, the attorney general’s office said.
In the clandestine grave discovered on September 3, experts worked for eight days to extract the 119 bags before ending the search. The new grave is located about 300 meters away from the initial one.
The Jalisco attorney general’s office said that trained dogs were used in the search the area and the staff did “a quadrant sweep, in addition to using georadar equipment to determine if there are more human remains at the site.”
The 119 bags found earlier contained the remains of at least 44 people, out of which 29 have been classified; 13 bodies have been found whole and 16 in parts. Two of the victims are women and the rest men.
So far this year, 27 mass graves have been found in Jalisco State alone, containing 123 bodies, of which only some have been identified. Jalisco is one of the areas where the Jalisco New Generation Cartel led by Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera Cervantes is most active.
The CJNG is considered the largest criminal group in the country ahead of its rival Sinaloa cartel, according to the Mexican authorities.
Murders in Mexico jumped to the highest on record in the first half of 2019, putting the cartel-ravaged country on track to surpass its previous 29,111 record from last year.
