Volunteer searchers say they have found a clandestine crematorium on the edge of Mexico City.
It is the first time in recent memory that someone claims to have found that type of mortuary in the capital. In northern Mexico, drug cartels often use barrels filled with diesel or caustic substances to incinerate or dissolve human remains, but so far there has been little evidence of this in Mexico City.
Ceci Flores, the leader of one of the collectives of search mothers in northern Mexico, announced on social media on Tuesday that her team found bones around a charred well on the outskirts of the city.
He added that skeletal remains, clandestine graves and identity cards were found in a rural area in the south of the capital.
Mexico City prosecutors issued a statement saying they are investigating the nature of the remains found, and whether they are human remains. They added that they are reviewing security camera images and looking for possible witnesses.
The discovery, if confirmed, would be a political embarrassment for Mexico City’s ruling party, which claims the capital has escaped much of the drug cartel violence that afflicts other parts of the country.
This is due in large part to the city’s dense concentration, its notoriously slow traffic, its extensive network of security cameras and its bloated police force, which arguably makes it difficult for criminals to act in the same way they do in the provinces. .
But while the city has 9 million inhabitants and the metropolitan area 20 million, much of the southern sector remains a combination of farms, forests and mountains. In these areas, it is not unheard of for criminals to dump the bodies of kidnapped people in the streets, but they rarely burn or bury them.
Volunteer searchers like Flores often conduct their own investigations, sometimes based on tips from former criminals, because the government has been unable to help. Searchers have been angered by a government campaign to find missing people by checking their most recent known address to see if they may have returned without telling authorities.
Activists maintain that this is nothing more than an attempt to reduce the number of missing people, which is politically embarrassing.
The searchers, mostly mothers of the missing, generally do not try to bring anyone to justice. They say they just want to find the remains of their loved ones.
The Mexican government has invested little in finding the missing. The volunteers play the role of the non-existent official teams, searching for clandestine graves where the cartels have hidden their victims. The government has not funded or implemented a genetic database that could help identify the remains found.
Relatives of victims often rely on anonymous tips, sometimes from former hitmen, to find possible mass graves. They usually insert long metal rods into the ground to detect the smell of decomposing bodies.
If they find something, the most the authorities do is send police and a forensic team to extract the remains, which in most cases are never identified. But systematic searches have been unusual in Mexico City.
At least seven activists searching for some of the more than 100,000 missing people in Mexico have been murdered since 2021.
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