MEXICO CITY — Authorities in the northern state of Sonora reported the discovery of 11 bodies in clandestine graves a few miles from the US border.
In a statement issued on Monday night, the state prosecutor’s office indicated that the remains correspond to nine men and two women and that they were located during the search for missing persons carried out by a group of relatives with the support of the authorities in the town of San Luis Río Colorado, bordering Yuma, Arizona.
Eight of the bodies were “in an advanced state of decomposition” so they will be subjected to genetic tests for their identification, explained the prosecutor’s office, which also asked all those people in the area who have missing relatives to come in for DNA tests.
The civil collective “Buscando” took the authorities to a desert area located on a dirt road on the outskirts of San Luis Río Colorado and near the municipal garbage dump – where they worked with heavy machinery – the bodies were found.
The relatives of the disappeared have to carry out their own searches in many parts of Mexico because the authorities often do not want to or do not have sufficient means to carry out these tasks.
Mexico has more than 98,356 disappeared, according to data from the federal government, the vast majority of them since 2006 when the frontal war against the cartels began and the violence multiplied. In addition, there are more than 52,000 unidentified deceased people who accumulate in morgues or mass graves of cemeteries.
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