80 Pct of bodies found in Mexico illegal graves since ’06 still unidentified

Roughly 80 percent of the 601 bodies found in 174 clandestine graves in Mexico between Dec. 1, 2006, and Feb. 28, 2015, have not yet been identified, according to a report by the federal Attorney General’s Office.

The report, which Mexico City daily El Universal obtained under the country’s transparency law, states that of the 601 bodies found, 342 have been identified by their gender: 302 men and 40 women. The others have the status of “not assessable, in process and/or indeterminate.”

Not all cases are documented in the report because in some states there is a lack of coordination with the top prosecutor’s office, the AG’s office said.

A total of 207 bodies were found in 2011, during former President Felipe Calderon’s Dec. 1, 2006, to Nov. 30, 2012, tenure, or more than a third of the corpses found in the illegal burial sites.

The graves were found in 16 of Mexico’s 32 federal entities 31 states and the Federal District (Mexico City); 93 of them, containing 207 bodies, were discovered in 2013 and 2014, the first two years of current President Enrique Peña Nieto’s sixyear term.

Guerrero, in southwestern Mexico, was the state with the largest number of clandestine graves and bodies found 79 and 199, respectively. It accounted for 45.5 percent of all the illegal burial sites and 33.1 percent of all of the bodies discovered.

Those numbers include 38 clandestine graves containing 87 bodies that were found in the municipality of Iguala, Guerrero, between October 2014 and January of this year.

Iguala is the city where 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Normal School, a teacher’s college, went missing on Sept. 26, 2014.

Corrupt municipal cops acting on the orders of a corrupt mayor who had connections with the Guerreros Unidos drug cartel handed over the students to the cartel’s gunmen, who killed the young people and burned their bodies at a dump, according to the official account.

The students’ families reject that version of events and are demanding to know why soldiers of the Mexican army’s Igualabased 27th Infantry Battalion who witnessed the police attack did not intervene.

A total of 75 bodies were found in the western state of Jalisco, which ranked second on the list with 37 clandestine graves.

Authorities discovered 15 clandestine graves and 125 bodies in the northeastern state of Tamaulipas dating back to 2007, although the vast majority (120) were located in 2011 in the municipality of San Fernando, the scene of a massacre of migrants attributed to the Los Zetas drug cartel.

A total of 53 bodies were found in seven illegal graves in the northwestern state of Durango, while the same number of corpses were found in two clandestine graves in the northern state of Chihuahua.

More than 22,000 people have gone missing over the past eight years in Mexico, with nearly 50 percent of the cases being registered between 2012 and 2014.

Mexico has been racked by turf battles among powerful drug gangs during that period, while Human Rights Watch said in its World Report 2015 that “Mexico’s security forces have participated in widespread enforced disappearances since former President Calderon (20062012) launched a ‘war on drugs’” shortly after taking office.

“Members of all security forces continue to carry out disappearances during the Peña Nieto administration, in some cases, collaborating directly with criminal groups,” the New Yorkbased rights watchdog said in the report, released in late January.