EL PASO, Texas (Border Report) – More than 3,700 people were missing in the Mexican border state of Chihuahua as of last summer, most of them adult males.
That’s the database local authorities will be using over the next few weeks to determine the identities of 73 bodies and sets of skeletal remains found in the past 30 days in clandestine graves in four communities west of Juarez. Forensic analysis also will be used to establish cause of death – although chopped up limbs and spent bullet casings found at some of the sites clearly point to a violent demise.
Two drug cartels have been fighting for control of smuggling routes to the United States in the region for several years, and also have been known to purge people within their ranks for perceived theft, treason and personal disputes.
“There are thousands of unaccounted people in Mexico right now. It’s not surprising at all to find these kinds of burial places where they just disappear people,” said Scott Stewart, vice president of intelligence for TorchStone, an international security consultant. “I’m certain there are many more of them, not only along the U.S.-Mexico border but almost any place in Mexico where there is cartel conflict.”
The digging stopped Friday at site known as “El Willy” south of Casas Grandes, which is about a two-hour drive south of Columbus, New Mexico. Chihuahua state authorities pulled 56 sets of human remains there and another four from a site east known as Mesa de Avena. A month ago, state forensic experts found 12 bodies in Ascencion to the north and one more in nearby Janos.
According to a series of statements from the Chihuahua Attorney General’s Office in the past few days, some of the bodies were still whole, some had been dismembered. Some of the 50 graves at the sites held complete sets of skeletal remains, others a few bones and some a grotesque collection of severed legs and arms – with no torsos or heads to be found.
Chihuahua Public Safety Director Gilberto Loya on Monday said the bodies, limbs and bones likely belong to the disappeared.
“One of the situations that led to federal (and state) forces taking over public safety in the Casas Grandes region a year and a half ago were the reports of abuses and municipal police ties to organized crime and the phenomenon of disappearances,” Loya said. “That is why we took over security and addressed that immediately. Since then, the number of disappearances has decreased. It is probably the disappeared that are in those graves.”
He was referring to the May 2023 disarming and later firing of the Nuevo Casas Grandes police force after a string of missing persons reports and a shocking episode of “cartel justice” in which local drug traffickers castrated, killed and hanged an alleged rapist from the town’s entrance arch.
Loya said the state Attorney General’s Office would investigate the deaths of the people just found in clandestine graves. He did not address if authorities suspect additional mass graves could exist in the state.
Stewart said that’s likely to be the case.
“That is true especially with the ongoing cartel conflicts and even intra-cartel stuff like the divisions you have right now across Sinaloa and Chihuahua,” the intelligence expert said. “We are going to see more bodies.”
In Sinaloa, a conflict between the son of jailed drug lord Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada and the children of his former business partner Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman has left more than 1,000 people dead and cost the state’s business community millions of dollars in damages and lost revenue from tourism and the movement of goods.
According to a Mexican government graphic, most of Mexico’s clandestine graves found in between 2018 and 2023 were located in Sinaloa, Veracruz, Chihuahua, Sonora, Nuevo Leon, Jalisco, Michoacan, Guerrero and Guanajuato.
All of those states have a heavy drug cartel presence.
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